‘A beautiful outpouring of rage’: did Britain’s biggest ever protest change the world?
Adozen years ago, in the offices of his Institute for Global Change, I interviewed Tony Blair. On the subject of his fateful decisions over the war in Iraq, he had a series of trusted platitudes to hand. One phrase he used, perhaps one of the lines that he still turns over in his head when he looks in the mirror in the mornings, was this: “People always used to say to me: listen to the people,” he said. “That was a fine idea, of course, but unfortunately the people were all saying different things.”
If ever there seemed a day when that was not the case, it was probably Saturday 15 February 2003, 20 years ago this week. That was the day when an estimated 1.5 million people took to the streets of London to march against the threatened attack on Iraq.
Knowing what we know now, those who gathered that day in the capital were on the right side of history. The marchers at the time did not agree on everything, but they shared a commitment to try to silence the drumbeat to war – or to at least to give the UN weapons inspectors more time to find the fabled weapons of mass destruction on which the rhetoric of Blair and President George W Bush depended (the previous day, Hans Blix, leader of those inspectors, had again informed the UN that no such weapons had yet been found).
The unprecedented diversity of the protesters was memorably captured in the front-page Observer report from the march by my late, lamented colleague Euan Ferguson.
“There were, of course,” Ferguson wrote, “the usual suspects – CND, Socialist Workers’ Party, the anarchists.
But even they looked shocked at the number of their fellow marchers … There were nuns. Toddlers. Women barristers. The Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women’s Choir and Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice). They won 2-0, by the way … There were country folk and lecturers, dentists and poulterers, a hairdresser from Cardiff and a poet from Cheltenham …”
Jeremy Corbyn, who was among those to address the ocean of marchers from the stage in Hyde Park, noted at the time that even the Daily Mail was offering free route maps for attendees up from middle England. “For a moment, we’d become the mainstream,” he later said.
The London march had equivalents that day in more than 600 cities across the planet, perhaps the single biggest mobilisation of people in human history. Protests had followed the rising sun – beginning in Auckland and then Sydney, moving through Tokyo, Manila, Moscow; an estimated 3 million people in Rome; 5 million in Spanish cities.
“The outpouring of rage from people was so beautiful,” observed the actor Mark Rylance, who was taking an afternoon off from a pointed series of bloody history plays at the Globe theatre. Lord Falconer, Blair’s former flatmate, and future Lord Chancellor, recalled how, in the thick of all the debate,
the sheer human scale of it all, for an afternoon, “just shut you up”.
Ghada Razuki was in the engine room of the march that day, running the office of the Stop the War coalition, the event’s organisers, with a team of four people. An Iraqi exile and critic of Saddam Hussein, she had worked as a firefighter and union rep in London for 15 years before taking on that role.
Speaking to me last week, she recalled never-ending 20-hour working days leading up to the event – now flying to Washington to persuade Jesse Jackson to speak (crucial, it was believed, in encouraging black communities to march), now trying to co-ordinate with other networks across the world. She’d been on demonstrations all her adult life, she said, mostly with the same old familiar faces, but from the start this one was different.
“I’d say by mid-January we knew we’d have at least half a million people,” she recalls. “We were getting calls from all sorts.” Two of those calls stick in her mind.
“I remember an 80-odd-year-old woman phoning up from the West Country, in tears, saying that she couldn’t make the demonstration,” she says. “I was actually on the 149 bus at the time, heading back down to London Bridge. I said, ‘Well, look, don’t worry. I’ll send you a leaflet – maybe you can put that in your front window.’” But the woman said no; what she planned to do instead was lie down in protest on the M4, which ran close to her. “I remember pleading with her on the bus: ‘Please, please don’t do that!’” Razuki says.
The other memorable call, from out of the blue, was from Tim Robbins, star of the film The Shawshank Redemption. Razuki thought it might be a wind-up, but Robbins duly appeared to do his bit alongside Tony Benn, Bianca Jagger and the rest on the Hyde Park stage.
It was the sudden inclusiveness of the march that was its great strength. It is easy to forget, in the rush to paint history in black and white, just how complex the divides were, post 9/11, over Blair’s insistence that Britain had to stand shoulder to shoulder with its US ally.
Those divisions were being played out in the editorial offices and columns of this newspaper. The Observer was split down the middle over whether to support the government in its desperate efforts to get a UN mandate for war – debates dramatised in the 2019 film Official Secrets, about the brave GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun who leaked intelligence about the background to war to the paper.
Although the news section of that day’s Observer was solidly in awe of the peace march, elsewhere the leader column suggested that, “as the least worst option” it reluctantly went along “with a majority in Britain who would accept military action if backed by the UN security council”.
Space was also given to Blair, with the text of a speech he gave that day to the Scottish Labour party. “If there are 1 million people on that march,” the prime minister said, to stony silence, “that is less than the number of people that died in the wars that Saddam started.” Blair suggested the marchers risked “paying in blood” if their actions led to Saddam Hussein staying in power.
Other papers picked up that sentence and recast it to say that the prime minister believed that the protesters would have “blood on their hands”. It is a phrase that Blair would not hear the last of.
Some of those marching had internal struggles of their own. Nadje Al-Ali, of Iraqi-German heritage, who is now professor of international studies at Brown University, was among those. She was a leading member of a group of women, many of them Iraqi, called “Act Together: Women Against Sanctions and War on Iraq”.
Although they were clear in their aims, she says, “We were always very uncomfortable with some of the British anti-sanctions and anti-war activism because we thought it was too often glossing over the atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s regime. In its focus on the imperialist west, it was often quite apologetic or turning a blind eye to Saddam. There was a lot of: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Professor Al-Ali, who taught at SOAS in London at that time, was closely in touch with sentiment in Iraq. “People there had totally mixed feelings, too, even in my family,” she recalls. “Everyone was against sanctions, partly because they allowed Saddam’s regime to control the population more. But in terms of the invasion, my family was divided.
“Some people felt ‘no way’, because we don’t trust the west – they’re never going to bring democracy and human rights. And others would say, ‘Well, what else in this situation, being caught between sanctions and the horrible dictator? What other options do we have?’”
Although she was never of the belief that war was any kind of answer – and has seen all her worst fears come true – she celebrated the downfall of Saddam along with other Iraqis. How did she feel about it all that day in February, before it all began?
“I didn’t feel conflicted. We were against the war. I felt that the march was really a broad umbrella. I was marching with my daughter, who was just a year old. I remember being so moved by the quantity and also the range of different people. And for a moment there was a feeling of actually doing something collectively, and maybe they are going to pay attention and stop this.”
Also there with his young children that day was Philippe Sands KC, the human rights lawyer who was to play such a key role in subsequently settling the evidence of the illegality of the war.
The march was a kind of watershed moment for him, he told me last week. Prior to that, he said, with a laugh, “I’d rather have been boiled in oil than be on a march.” He had grown up thinking that the real stuff of international politics was done in parliaments and courtrooms.
“The march changed my life. I was there with my wife and our three kids, then 7, 5 and 2. And I was struck by how the children asked a lot of questions. In particular, I remember, we were walking alongside a man in a tweed coat from Wiltshire or somewhere, who had a handmade poster which said ‘Jaw jaw, not war war’. Our five-year-old daughter – now 25 – whispered: ‘Dad, is that man for the war or against the war?’”
It was the presence of those handmade signs, with their “slogans about Article 2(4) of the UN Charter” that provided Sands with a revelation. “All of a sudden, I saw on that march with a million-plus people that ordinary folk really cared about international law,” he says.
“Here was I, an international lawyer spending my time in a ghetto with other international lawyers talking to each other, having zero effect. And at that moment, I took a decision to try to reach a bigger audience.”
The result of that was Sands’s 2005 book, Lawless World, the second edition of which revealed the memos – between [attorney general] Lord Goldsmith and Blair – that in 2006 effectively dismantled any lingering British faith in the fundamental integrity of that government and the legal basis for its war.
There were others, inside the government, who sensed a reckoning that day. Robin Cook, still in the cabinet as leader of the House, watched the marchers shuffle past from the balcony of his state apartment near the Mall. “Large numbers of them, I suspect, had not voted for Labour until Tony Blair became leader,” he noted, “and may not now vote Labour again.”
Labour cabinet member Clare Short was watching the march on television. It was her birthday, and for a while she felt she might have reason to celebrate. “It made me so happy,” she tells me, in retrospect.
“My son was on the march with my granddaughters and his local church. I think it was the first march he’d been on. He sent me a text in the middle of it that said, ‘This is so fantastic. Blair is going to have to listen to us.’ And even then I thought: you know, maybe Blair will reconsider.’”
Was there any discussion, I wonder, in the cabinet the following week about the march?
“The cabinet was not operational at all by that time,” Short says. “It was just the little entourage, you know, sofa government. The prime minister would come in and say [foreign secretary] Jack [Straw] will tell you about a meeting he had with Colin Powell [US secretary of state]. And then Jack would say something which you had already read about in the papers, and that was that. I don’t remember any discussion of the march at all.”
Short stayed hoping, stayed in the government, longer than she thought she would, even beyond the start of war. “But that time was the moment that the party kind of fractured” she says. “It is certainly what explained the election of Jeremy Corbyn. People wanted something pure and more principled. And those scars still go deep.”
The mythology of the march, the place it holds in memories, remains potent. It’s very well worth watching, as I did last week, Amir Amirani’s documentary We Are Many, which looked back on the protests of 2003 from the vantage of 2015, before the world convulsed again. The executive producer of that film, the actor and comedian Omid Djalili, holds it – and not the march itself – as a turning point in his own activism.
It’s worth remembering, Djalili says, that for all those people who were there, very many more were not. “At the time, I thought: what a waste of time. I was very much one of those people annoyed because I’m stuck in traffic. It was an inconvenience. My wife had said, ‘We should go to the demonstrations’, but I was very anti-demonstration – ‘It never makes a difference,’ I said.”
The revelation came to Djalili a few years later. Amirani was a schoolmate of his and was crowdfunding for the film. Djalili was again a bit sceptical, but then he watched some of the footage.
“I remember thinking: I just had no idea. I remember the words global demonstrations, but I didn’t know the extent. That penny only really dropped 10 years later. I’m ashamed of that. But I also think I was representative of many people in that.”
When the film came out, John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, rang him up. “I don’t know how he got my number,” Djalili says. “He just wanted to tell me that it was an extraordinary time. He said he remembered going to Tony Blair, then, and saying ‘there’s a million people out there. We can’t just go along with what they’re saying in America. The majority of the world know this is completely wrong.’”
Since that time, Djalili has become someone who no longer thinks marching makes no difference. He has been extremely vocal in support of the women’s movement in Iran and the resistance in Ukraine. He goes on every march he can. “I find it very moving and unifying,” he says. “I’m uncomfortable shouting death to anyone, but some of the more witty chants – I’m all in.”
He has no doubt that these things do carry an impact, long after the fact. “The real importance of that day,” he suggests, “is that it has given whole generations of activists an idea of what might be possible. The TikTok generation see the film and it gives them the feeling I had: that acting and doing these things is not a waste of time.”
Short, for all her complicated regrets about that moment, is of the same opinion. In the short term, she says, “The fact we went to war weakened people’s sense that demonstrating could make any difference. But I think, conversely, it made governments very wary of ignoring them.
“The Cameron government’s defeat on the potential bombing of Syria [in 2013] was an example of that. Having enraged everybody so recently, they were frightened to do it again. So maybe that was a benefit,” she says. “At least, that’s the hope.”
My son was on the march with his local church. He texted me, saying: Blair is going to have to listen now’
Clare Short, former Labour minister