Protest report. posted by Richard Seymour

Dead Men Left is a fucking genius:

Predictions
Very high turnout. Around 100-200,000, giving a police estimate of 20-50,000.

Derisory media coverage.

Here is the BBC :

Police say about 45,000 people joined a demonstration in London, while organisers put the figure at 100,000.

I have no idea how to count these things, although I will say that I nipped into Pizza Hut at Picadilly for some lunch and watched the demo go by. I was there for a full hour and the chain of people didn't stop until I was outside belching in the fresh London air. Westminster City Council had vans, rubbish collectors and street cleaners hovering behind the tail end of the demo.

What can I say? It looked enormous, and even if you accept the police figure for some obscure reason, 45,000 is hardly an insignificant number. I remember the days when I would have licked that many bumholes just to get half the number out on a demo. Aye lad, you don't you know you're born. I have also camcordered the event and the footage is notable for a number of things. First of all, my hands can't hold shit steady. The picture shakes like a Parkinson's victim. Second, it was young, mixed and vibrant. There were young Muslim girls wearing the hijab - those oppressed, submissive souls - jumping around, laughing and yelling "Fuck Bush". They even got a chant going on precisely that theme. Third, there were a large number of Respect placards in the crowd, with Leon Kuhn's excellent art-work on them.

Started off in Hyde Park, with a temperature in the early 20s celsius, bright sun and a mild breeze. It was already extremely noisy when I arrived, and the cops were standing about with that "Overtime, overtime" expression on their faces. Always nice to have their sympathy. Ranks of vans were situated about the place, especially up near the Marble Arch. The march stretched back to some distant end of Hyde Park that I didn't care to amble down to. The drummers were there - ba-dah dah dah dah dah, ba-dah dah dah dah dah etc - as were an inordinate number of whistleblowers. The wrong kind of whistleblowers.

Eventually, the police let us bugger off on our way and the march proceeded down to Park Lane before taking a detour up some bloody road that I had never been down before. Turned out we were going to hi-jack the American embassy and issue demands: "We want some helicopters and pizza, you capitalista fucks!" That didn't work out, the embasssy being surrounded by metal fences and policemen, but there was apparently some ceremony with a coffin and a letter. All I saw was a horde of co-demonstrators charging and dancing around the perimeter of Berkeley Square, where once a nightingale sang [correction: it's Grosvenor Square. Bollocks.]. A vast bronze eagle graced the top of the embassy, and a lonely American flag flapped gently in the breeze. My camcorder zoomed in for dramatic effect. Back out to Park Lane (it was actually an hour-long circuit through Mayfair, so I'm editing), and onto Picadilly. Picadilly ascends in front of you in a great hump, so the vast sprawl of protesters makes for dramatic pictures - not on my mobile phone, however, which is a myopic little bastard and can only clearly discern details from five yards away. The Royal Academy of Arts was advertising a Matisse exhibition, which at least sorts tomorrow out.

Like I say, I detoured into Pizza Hut, knackered and starving, and was apostrophised by an Italian family who didn't like the pizzas we have here. I don't blame them. Fed and watered, I scurried off to Trafalgar Square to hear Lindsey German's voice cutting the air like a sledgehammer hitting concrete. It's very distinctive. She's lovely in person, but her speeches are a bit boring if you ask me. Some geezer who sounded Carribean to me made a terrific speech about US imperialism in Venezuela. "The US are intervening in Venezuela because they say they want a democratic leader. Hugo Chavez has been elected nine times in six years! What more do they want?" Well, my guess is they want him to die in a plane crash, but we'll come back to that. I loitered, filmed some people while muttering "I'm a police spy and I'm gonna get you loony lefty bastards". No one stirred.

This demo showed two things in my view: first, the momentum has not dissipated; second, it just isn't enough. Brian MacWilliams, head of the ILWU, was able to address the anti-capitalist rally in Seattle in 1999 and say "There will be no business as usual today". Well, there was business as usual today. The antiwar movement has been far too staid and conservative, partly because the main bodies in it need to maintain a broad coalition, which means being inoffensive to mainstream opinion. The enterprising vigour of the anticapitalist movement would be a welcome addition to the antiwar movement here. I'm not talking about trashing McDonalds windows (and surreptitiously stealing the McMuffins), but a bit of ingenuity and militancy would not go amiss.

Anyway, I have some pictures which I'd like to post, but Bloggerbot is fucking me up right now.