‘Biggest Protest in Leicester Since The Poll Tax’

About two and a half thousand people marched in Leicester on November 10th against the war on Afghanistan, behind a dayglo banner reading ‘Stop the war’. They chanted “Stop the bombing, stop the war”, and held aloft banners with slogans including ‘Why should more innocents die?’, ‘No war but the class war’, and ‘Afghan rescue workers are heroes too’.

Atheists, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians were all represented on the march, although about three-quarters of those on it were Muslims. Many local mosques had brought prayers forward so that their members could attend, which they did en masse. The rally afterwards in Town Hall Square heard speakers from all 57 varieties of political group, plus local Muslims and poets.

The run-up to the march was characterised by attempts by part of the authorities to derail it. The organisers - a broad-based umbrella group called ‘Leicester Campaign to Stop the War’ - originally wanted to march on Nov 3rd, through the Highfields residential area near the city. The police objected to both date and route: the organisers were willing to move it back a week, and to shorten the route, but the police claimed that the passing through Highfields would be a ‘provocation’ despite the fact that hundreds of people on the march live there. They served an order under the 1986 Public Order Act on the organisers, imposing a route down London Road, and threatening them with arrest if the march deviated, or if it stopped, or slowed down from the speed imposed by the senior police officer. In practice, the police were taken aback by the numbers too, and it was the campaigners who set the pace of the march - dead slow.

At the same time, the City Council demanded that the organisers buy liability insurance for the march. The campaign was quite willing to do this, but all approaches to insurance companies and brokers produced the same response: after September 11th, no UK insurance company is willing to touch any anti-war demonstration. Apparently national CND spent four days before the last big national demo trying to get insurance, to no avail. They, too, got away with it by turning up on the day with thousands of people. Leicester City Council’s last line of defence was to claim that Town Hall Square had already been booked, when in fact they had merely issued a license to the Poppy Appeal to collect throughout the city. But when contacted, the Poppy Appeal said that they did not mind LCSW using the Square for an hour. Although the council bosses were obviously trying to stop the march, workers on the ground were co-operative, as usual.

These developments seem part of a complex pattern. Some are to do with authoritarianism, some are driven by the (evil) litigation culture and its (evil) friend the nanny state, and others are about the general de-legitimation of any use of public space other than for shopping, entertainment, or use by state-licensed ‘community’ organisations. Taken together, they provide a growing series of obstacles in the way of public protest. Leicester is not as bad in this respect as the West Midlands, whose police force seem to have been trying for years to make most demonstrations illegal.

There’s more antiwar support in Leicester to be mobilised, notably Muslim women, who were under-represented on the march. We also need to get more support from organised Christian groups, and from student organisations. The next demo should be even larger. The main aim of the organisers was to get a headline in the Leicester Mercury saying: ‘2,000 march against war’. They failed - the headline said ‘2,500’ march.

GrassRoots staff.