50501 General

Protests are well known, and popular. The trouble is, when I look back on the one-off protests I’ve joined over the years, I don’t remember a single one that changed the policy we were protesting against.

In February 2003, I joined millions of others around the world on the eve of US/British war on Iraq. The BBC estimated that a million protested on 15 February in London alone. In the US, unprecedented numbers turned out in 150 cities, according to CBS.

The New York Times said in a front page story that the protest indicated a ‘second global superpower’. I wish. Even while we were in the streets, I realised that the protest wouldn’t prevent the war, because the protest’s leadership wasn’t telling us what we would do next, and that we would escalate after that – how we would take the offensive. The leadership didn’t offer us a campaign.

George W Bush and Tony Blair had a plan to persist. We did not. The peace movement in the US never recovered in the years since, even though the majority shifted and came to agree with us while the war continued. After mounting that one-off protest, and then failing to shift strategy to focus on direct action campaigns, discouragement and inaction accompanied the growing suffering and death in Iraq.