The London demonstration on October 5^th in support of the peoples of Palestine and Lebanon was massive and the estimates of hundreds of thousands seem accurate. It was a national demonstration but what you really noticed was that it was thoroughly representative of the city’s population. Fully covered Muslim women were walking a few feet away from queer activists, godless leftists were walking alongside members of Jewish sects.  

My impression was that women were in a majority among the younger participants. At the risk of seeming mawkish, it really felt like the best of London life and what makes the city so attractive. 

This movement has generated a range of interpretations. Prize for the most unhinged probably goes to Howard Jacobson who was given space in The Guardian to argue that what is motivating people is the persistence of the medieval Catholic idea of the blood libel against Jews. Knowledge of the Christian theology of that epoch is disappointingly tenuous these days, and I would bet most of the marchers would struggle to string together a sentence about Thomas Aquinas.  

What was most impressive was that this was a protest which was bringing tens of thousands of young people into radical, anti-imperialist politics for the first time. They also instinctively understood that the main enemy is at home and most of the home-made placards and banners were targeted at Starmer who continues to give unconditional support to Israel, even if electoral considerations have obliged him to make some hand wringing homoeopathically  mild criticisms of the scale of the slaughter being conducted by the IDF and flog the dead horse of a two state solution, a beast that was sent to the glue factory years ago.  

What you didn’t see at the demonstration was a single Labour Party banner. The party’s machine stopped that sort of thing happening as soon as Starmer became leader. The hundreds of thousands of people on the streets and many more beyond them have mostly been lost to Labour for the foreseeable future. The Weekly Worker argues that: 

 “Labour presents Marxists with a fertile ground on which to fight for the political independence of the working class.” 

That simply isn’t factually accurate at the moment. Labour party life is now a carousel of brain numbing routine.  It is currently absolutely impossible to make a principled argument in defence of Palestinians inside Labour and we know that if Israel starts a war with Iran that Starmer will unconditionally support the aggressor. These things may change, but anyone currently tempted to get active in Labour is only committing themselves to a lot of very dull Thursday evenings discussing lamp posts.  

So, we have a radical movement without a political expression. The people who take to the streets in support of Palestine significantly overlap with those who faced down the fascist riots in the summer. By default, some of them are drifting to the Greens. This is partly because anyone reading their materials can see that on international and economic issues, they are offering a more ecologically developed version of Corbynism, plus they have the name recognition that comes with being a national party with a bit of a history. However, it seems either unwilling to fully align itself with the movement on the streets or isn’t aware that it presents an opportunity to benefit from this multi-cultural and youthful radically internationalist movement.  

To be fair, other than small propaganda groups recruiting handfuls of members, neither is anyone else.