Twenty years ago, Louise Barter took a coach up to London to attend her first demonstration. As she took her place in the ocean of protesters stretching from Embankment to Hyde Park on that cold Saturday, she was participating in the biggest political protest in UK history. It changed her life.
Now a trade union organiser, Barter, 48, credits her politicisation to the historic 2003 Stop the War demo, when an estimated 1.5 million people took to London’s streets. She remembers joining the rally with a woman she met on the coach from Hampshire who had not protested since the Vietnam war. “She said: ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this again!’ I was really quite green to all of this,” Barter says. “There was a sea of people, and lots of different groups with slightly different reasons for being there. Though there were far-left groups, it felt like there were lots of normal people – not just really political people.”
The London rally on Saturday 15 February was part of a global protest, with people marching through hundreds of cities around the world including Rome, Madrid, Melbourne, New York, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and São Paolo. A poll from the protest weekend found 52% of Britons opposed the war, with just 29% in favour.
After the London demo, Barter kept going to marches every couple of weeks, though she pulled back from the movement when she became pregnant in April 2003. She “took to the streets again” in 2011 to protest against the closure of local Sure Start centres. “Through that journey, I ended up in my union. I wouldn’t have done it without the [Iraq war] march. That wave of protesting – it changed my life,” she says.
But for countless others, the march’s lasting effect was one of disillusionment. Dr Musa Sami, now 40 and a consultant psychiatrist in Nottingham, recalls feeling hopeful on the day that the protest could not be ignored. “It was jam-packed, people pressed chest to chest,” he says. “I remember it crossing my mind – this has got to change something. This is democracy in action.”
Sami was 20 at the time, and like Barter it was his first march. “I was surprised at the strength of feeling,” he says. “In the Pakistani Muslim community there had been anger about western foreign policy and I had grown up with that – particularly about what was happening to Iraq. There is a view among Muslims that there’s a worldwide Muslim community – when one is oppressed, everybody is. We had felt there was [indifference] from the British public at large about our problems and our plight. So I remember being very surprised at just how packed it was – I was a bit exhilarated.”
His sense of hope was short-lived. The invasion of Iraq began the next month. “I remember [at that moment] thinking that it was always going to happen,” he recalls. “This was a critical stage in my political development. You end up disaffected.
“What happened in 2003 is still very vivid, because we felt really badly let down. I was a young British man, born and raised in this country, told about rights and democracy. For a brief moment I believed in that story, that we can change things.”
It was a protest marked by its breadth, with Euan Ferguson writing in the Observer: “There were nuns. Toddlers. Women barristers. The Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War …” There were also London football fans. Dave Boyle, now 48, was working for a supporters’ trust at the time and attended the march with a group of 15 AFC Wimbledon supporters.
“Whilst all politically active on the left, we often didn’t get to demos because they took place on Saturday, when we would be on the way to football matches,” he says. “It was so obvious that this was going to be big – this was something you couldn’t miss if you were at all politically active and wanted to say to yourself in years gone by: ‘I tried.’”
“There’s a general negative opinion of football fans, and a few of us went wearing AFC Wimbledon shirts.” The group tried, unsuccessfully, to get an anti-Tony Blair chant going to the tune of My Old Man’s a Dustman. “It struck us that the quality of demonstration songwriting could benefit from the well-known creativity of football fans,” he says.
Now a community finance consultant in Brighton, Boyle attended the protest “in hope rather than expectation”. He was a Labour party member at the time. “I was politically active for a few more years but there was a sense that something died that day. My political engagement has been much more locally focused since.”
For some of the younger protesters such as Amy Eastham, who was 13 at the time, the march was particularly formative. It was meant to be an ordinary day at her secondary school in south London, but Eastham and four of her friends had other ideas. “Our teachers knew some of us planned on heading to the protest so they were guarding all the doors,” she says. “We came up with a plan where one of our friends distracted the teacher and the rest of us ran out the door.”
Still in their school uniforms, Eastham and her friends attracted the attention of the media and were interviewed about their escapade, much to their school’s chagrin. “The next day, we were pulled aside and given a month’s detention. It was a bit of a badge of honour,” says Eastham, now 33 and a civil engineer in Oxfordshire.
“Even if our school wasn’t impressed, our parents were so proud of us and my dad had [a] photo from the BBC’s website by his desk.”
Though by far the biggest, the London rally was not the only one taking place that day in the UK. Andrew McPake was an 18-year-old student when he joined tens of thousands in Glasgow, marching to the building where Labour was holding its party conference.
McPake, who is now a teacher in Edinburgh, had been involved in leafleting before the protest but was still unprepared for its size. “It was striking how many of the banners were from parts of Scotland that typically don’t make it to demos,” he says, noting demonstrators from Ullapool and Lewis among others. “There were people who had given up their entire weekend.”
The presence of the party conference gave the Glasgow rally another dimension, McPake says. “It definitely made it feel purposeful. We knew the people actually taking decisions were in that building.”
Despite the march failing to stop the war, Barter says it taught her the need for collective organising. “Good things aren’t won without fighting for them. It made me realise you can’t leave it to other people if you want to make change. It made me appreciate the collective a lot more as well. It’s easy to ignore one voice.”
