‘THIS is a tremendous demonstration of the anger of the British people against what Blair has done in Iraq and is threatening to do in Iran,’ prospective Labour Party leadership candidate John McDonnell told a packed Trafalgar Square at the end of the over 100,000-strong march through London on Saturday, to demand the withdrawal of all British troops from Iraq and the scrapping of the planned £76 billion replacement programme for Trident nuclear missiles.
The determination of the masses of workers and youth who participated was evident.
Some 30 speakers addressed Saturday’s demonstration, which attracted another massive crowd without great publicity. Yet, although many of them said Blair should be tried for war crimes in the Hague, none of the trade union leaders or leaders of the Stop The War Coalition called for action by the working class and its trade unions to stop the slaughter of the Iraqi people, which continues to this day, or the bloody conflict in Afghanistan, or the suffering of the besieged Palestinian people.
Billy Hayes, the leader of the CWU postal workers’ union, even told the crowd that there was ‘some doubt’ that he would speak at all, and that he had been thinking of just sending a message. But being a good postman, he decided to deliver the message in person! Tony Woodley, notorious for his refusal to fight for his members’ jobs at Gate Gourmet and for ignoring the 96 per cent vote for strike action at British Airways, decided it was better just to get the march organisers to read out his message for him!
Paul Mackney said the government was ‘xenophobic’ and his members would not be ‘spies’ for the capitalist state against Muslim students. But as to what concrete action the trade union movement should take to end the war in Iraq there was not a word.
Keith Sonnet of UNISON came the closest for calling for action to stop the war.
He told the rally his union represented 1.4 million public sector workers and added: ‘We should never underestimate the power we have as trade unionists and people through collective action.’ But Sonnet stopped short of issuing any concrete call for his members – or the rest of the trade union movement – to use that power to come to the assistance of their brothers and sisters in Iraq, or even to defend their own jobs in the NHS and local government.
The answer of Lindsay German, of the Stop The War Coalition, to a threatened invasion of Iran, was to threaten to ‘be on the streets in even bigger numbers’.
George Galloway called on everyone to hold up their mobile phones and pledge to use their texts to get the latest anti-war record to the top of the charts. The rest of the rally was drowned out by a wave of pacifism and religion.
No amount of text messages or passive resistance is going to embarrass the imperialists into not being imperialists any more.
The only way to stop the war and stop more imperialist wars from taking place – and stop Britain from being an aircraft carrier for US nuclear weapons – is to mobilise the great army of the working class, as Sonnet hinted, for a general strike to bring down Blair now, and bring in a workers government that will withdraw all British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately, make peace with the peoples of the Middle East and inspire the American working class to rise up and put an end to capitalism in the United States itself.
As a speaker from the American anti-war movement indicated on Saturday, that great revolutionary movement is already on the way, with Bush becoming more isolated by the day and American workers preparing for ‘the most difficult push, just before the birth’.
However, to just keep marching is not enough, either in Britain or the USA. The imperialists are driven to war out of the objective logic of their historic economic crisis and the decay of the capitalist system, which is deepening by the day.
That is why the British trade unions and the masses of youth and students must organise a general strike and force the leaders to call it, or resign. To get rid of war, we must get rid of capitalism and go forward to socialism.
