Airstrip One

How will the March go?

With this massive anti-war demonstration in London today it will be interesting to see if the anti-war left are starting to move out of the ghetto. I don't go on mass-demonstrations any more, finding them to be a waste of a good day - if the demonstration is small enough for my attendance to make a difference then it's too small in itself to make a difference. The same logic would apply to voting (a waste of quarter of an hour - but many more million participants), but I cling on to that futile method of influencing the government for nostalgic reasons. The other reason I avoid antiwar events is for the fact that I get irritated with the people. The best one's there tend to be church types or the immigrant group de jour (when it was the Balkans it was the Serbs, today it's the Muslims). The Trots are just ghastly I know that we oppose the same thing, but for entirely different reasons.

I did once almost get into a fight when talking about the First Gulf War and opining that maybe Saddam was lying about some of the civilian casualties, but since then I've kept my non-views to myself. I really couldn't care for the plight of the Palestinians and if America attacked Iraq without British involvement on either side I'd be totally unconcerned about the war. These views do not go down well among the demonstrating classes. Unfortunately they are probably the views of the people who give the peaceniks their public opinion poll majorities.

So a few daft questions for anyone on the march:

1) Were there any Union Jacks or crosses of St. George there, and did they outnumber the Palestinian or United Nations flags?

2) Where there Conservative or Tory-inclined (to the right of New Labour or the Lib Dems) speakers at the main event? Who were they? Did they get booed by the crowd?

3) Did any of the speakers say that Saddam wasn't so bad, or that if he was bad he was no worse than Israel or the US? Did these idiots get as many boos as any right of center speaker?

4) How many kaftans did you spot? Any rousing renditions of "We Shall Overcome", "Kum-ba-ya" or "Imagine"?

5) Did the rival Muslim groups have a fight? Were there any violent altercations between the different types of Trot paper sellers? Did any idiots attack the police?

We'll see. The real question will be whether they can get 408,000 out in London.