The anti-war demonstration in London today 13th October was one of the biggest demonstrations seen there for years - maybe the biggest since the Reclaim the Streets/Liverpool dockers demo of April 1997, maybe even bigger. We are talking about one of those crowds of scores of thousands of people which nobody can count reliably. It took over an hour to move into Trafalgar Square at the end. The most striking thing was the enormous range of groups and people taking part. I tagged along with an old friend who was with about 10 people mainly from the same street in East London, carrying their home-made banner which said `Stop the War’ in English and Bengali. Just behind us there were four women from something called the Gill St. Health Centre - just a workplace group, not even indicating a trade union. There was Reclaim the Streets, the Green Party, the Campaign against Criminalising Communities (a group against the anti-terrorist legislation), war resisters, student groups, several groups of Muslim women wearing headscarves, a lesbian group, Palestine Solidarity, etc. , etc. A large group of Asian and Middle Eastern men, mainly wearing traditional gear, climbed onto the base of Nelson’s column, held up `Long live Afghanistan’ and shouted slogans about Palestine. And there were loads of red flags and leaflets and papers from just about every socialist group. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had called the demo in alliance with the Socialist Workers and Globalise Resistance. But these three elements were outnumbered many times over by small groups with trade union branch banners, people with home-made banners and placards which said so many different anti-war messages, and groups of friends without any banners or placards at all. I talked to a friend in one of those, and I said, `who are all these that you’ve come with ?’ She replied, `we’re not part of any group, we’re just...people’. And that about sums it up - this demo was reaching to a range of people who rarely come on demos, showing a real popular anger and sorrow about what our so-called democratic government is doing against several million starving people, most of whom probably hate the Taliban anyway.

So we said to each other, what shall we do to say `stop the war’ if we don’t want to wear a Socialist Worker sticker ? And we came up with the idea of a black and white ribbon - like some people are starting to wear green ribbons as a sign of commitment to anti-racism. We need symbols like this so that we can talk to like-minded people in trains and buses, at work and in the streets. The only question is where do we go from here.