This was more than a protest against war
By JOYCE McMILLAN
The Scotsman
Tue 18 Feb 2003
news.scotsman.com
IT’S NOT often that descriptions of the weather make their way into history books. But all the same, I think very few of the 100,000 or so who gathered at Glasgow Green on Saturday morning will ever forget the almost uncanny perfection of the day; the cloudless blue sky, the hazy but brilliant winter sunlight bathing the whole of central Scotland, the hint of spring warmth in the sunshine taking the chill off the bitter temperatures.
It somehow seemed to confirm the status of the event as something more than a demonstration; as a big day out, an explosion of pent-up feeling, a massive festival of protest against the current political order of things. All the usual suspects were there, of course. There were the hardcore pacifists and the veteran anti-war campaigners, the Pilgerist Left with their conviction that George Bush’ s United States is an evil empire to be opposed at all costs, the trade unions with their fluttering banners and their traditional mistrust of warmongers, the opposition political parties - SNP and Green - cashing in on New Labour’s divisions and discomfiture.
But there were other, less familiar forces too, marching as individuals or in little informal groups. There were affronted patriots obsessed with Blair’s apparent status as George Bush’s "poodle" - "Don’t be a Puppet to a Muppet", read one home-made placard. There was a generation of students and young people finding a strong political voice for the first time; you haven’t really lived in modern Scotland until you’ve seen a group of demure-looking female Muslim students from Dundee marching up St Vincent Street yelling: "1-2-3-4, we don’t want your f...ing war!"
And there was a sudden, surprising contingent of what can only be called the seriously trendy; the arbiters of cool who wouldn’t have been caught dead on any Scottish demonstration in the past 15 years, but who suddenly decided, in that strange zeitgeisty way of theirs, that Glasgow Green was the only place to be last Saturday morning.
And what did all this amount to? Well clearly, not the beginning of a great new peace movement, or of some new anti-capitalist consensus. The groups and individuals involved were far too disparate for that; and I doubt whether that same alliance will ever emerge again in the form or numbers it briefly achieved last Saturday. But the crowd did have one notable feature, in that it was a tremendously upmarket gathering, professional and well-educated to a fault. By sheer chance, for instance, I noticed as we waited to march off that my tiny corner of Glasgow Green contained three leading Scottish novelists, one major poet, one of the UK’s top museum directors, one well-known theatre director and designer, and a famous rock singer turned intellectual.
And as I looked around at the home-made placards and banners - many of which carried slogans such as "No more lies" and "No more spin" - I began to realise that what was going on was not only an understandable protest against the prospect of war, but also an unprecedented outburst on the part of Britain’s concerned, broadsheet-reading middle classes against the miserable quality of the politics of the last decade, against its cynicism, its control-freakery, and its relentless and patronising manipulation of opinion.
If you want to lead and to be followed, this crowd seemed to be saying to the Prime Minister, then you are going to have to raise your game, and change the tone of the debate. No more reduction of serious policy matters to dumbed-down soundbites, no more shameful cut-and-paste attempts at Downing Street propaganda, no more casual assumption that the people are idiots whose consent can be bought with a display of political smoke and mirrors.
The march felt, in other words, less like the beginning of something new than like a single, deafening warning shot across Tony Blair’s bows. Bring to an end this dismal decade of lies, spin and cynical news management, ran the subtext of the demo, and start talking to us like adults; or risk seeing the gap between government and some of its most active and intelligent citizens grow ever wider, and more dangerous to democracy.
And the irony is that up to a point, that was exactly what Tony Blair seemed to be beginning to do, in his address at the SECC on Saturday. It was certainly feeble of him to change the time of his speech in order to avoid any encounter with the protesters; if leading politicians got out more, and were not so surrounded by security-obsessed goons, they would realise just how bad this kind of move makes them look. But whether one agreed with it or not, his speech was a far more impressive effort - more realistic, more statesmanlike, more responsive to the continuing public debate, and more clearly argued through - than the typical jumble of verbless slogans that makes up a Tony Blair speech on domestic policy. By all accounts, it wrung unwilling applause even from some of the most sceptical of Labour delegates; and it represented an example of the kind of respectful leadership, including a willingness to engage in serious argument on the issues, that Tony Blair will have to show again and again if he is to vindicate his decisions on Iraq.
But finally, even if he is proved right - even if the war is short and successful, even if the West keeps its promise to rebuild a democratic Iraq, even if the threat of terrorism against Western cities proves containable - Tony Blair would do well to remember the many causes of the anger that brought hundreds of thousands on to the streets at the weekend, and to consider how those forces are likely to play themselves out in domestic politics.
For the truth about Tony Blair’s premiership is that if he had tackled some of Britain’s domestic problems with one-tenth of the vision, certainty and willingness to face down opposition that he brings to his international agenda, then Britain in 2003 could have been a country transformed, with a healthy new transport infrastructure, a workable plan for a 21st-century health service, and a public education system on the way to becoming one of the best in the world.
Instead, we have a transport system in crisis, a health service struggling with some vague programme of "reform" that only the most dedicated policy wonks can understand, and an English school system still in thrall to a discredited notion of "parent choice" that has in fact, in many areas, become a parental nightmare for all but the richest and brightest.
And if people do not like the ethos of propaganda and spin which surrounds the Blair foreign policy - where he at least shows signs of knowing what he is doing and why - he should perhaps give some thought to how much they will like it when he starts trying to apply positive spin to his recent domestic record.
I don’t know whether Tony Blair thinks of himself as a Churchillian figure, or just as the genial Bill Clinton of British politics. But it strikes me that he should be increasingly concerned about the possibility of becoming a British version of George Bush, sen - a leader who fights successful wars abroad, but finds in the end that the folks back home are more interested in the pay-cheques, schools, hospitals and transport systems that are the everyday stuff of democratic politics; and on which most leaders, in free societies, ultimately win or lose. |
