Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set of his articles from his time writing for New Society but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my longstanding admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background, and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.
A hard rain falls on the peace march: anti-war movement's march against the war in the Falkland Islands by Ian Walker
This uncensored despatch is brought to you from the front-line of the anti-war movement, marching through the rain this deadly Protestant Sunday, fired up by the torturous logic of McDonald, ace MOD, who told us before the Cup Final we had sent in the boys to show that armed aggression would not (could not!) pay, and marching then to become a one-minute blot of opposition on the evening news, I met the photographer, Jurgen—a Kraut, I ask you, on an assignment such as this—outside the Marble Arch McDonalds. The Odeon a few doors down was re-running Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.
“Do you agree it is madness, the war?” Jurgen said, walking towards Speaker’s Corner. 1 said I agreed, which meant he could tell me that the way his liberal English friends had become defensive nationalists overnight reminded him of his time in South Africa, where the whites always froze when he tried to bring up apartheid. Out on the park, beyond the green canvas of the empty deckchairs flapping in the wind and rain, the first thousand or so had gathered by two o’clock.
The newspaper sellers hustled their sheets through the crowd. I paid 20p for the newsletter of the Committee for Human Rights in Argentina. Its front page showed a sad-faced mother at a recent demonstration in Buenos Aires, holding a placard which said: “The Malvinas are Argentinian, but so are the disappeared people.”
A gaggle of reporters had surrounded a man who was explaining forcibly why he was opposed to the march. “If someone nicks your pint from the bar,” he said, “you ask for it back. If you don’t get it, you have to give him some of that.” His fist hit his palm. An American steelworker who said he was in London on holiday and in the park for peace took up the story. But say the other guy claimed it was his pint, he said. Rather than fight it out, wouldn’t it be better to talk it over with the barman?
The argument deadlocked, the American strolled off, laughing at a protester who’d constructed a hat from hate-Argy headlines which have decorated recent numbers of the Sun. It was falling apart in the rain.
I stood talking to a 28 year old secretary from Birmingham and her friend, who was embarrassed that she worked for a chartered accountant. “I’m as upset when it’s an Argentinian as I am when it’s a British soldier gets killed,” said the Brummie. “It’s just totally crazy.”
Speeches were being delivered from a lorry. No one took much notice, apart from a lone and fat loyalist barking out old favourites, like “get back to Russia,” until a speech-maker made the blood rush to his head by asking who, exactly, our boys were fighting and dying for? “They are fighting for you. For you,” screamed the barracker. “Traitors.”
He battered his skull in desperation at these people, who resisted the embrace of the nation, who felt no pride, only guilt at their connivance in the English way, saying please and thank you, queueing at bus stops and dreaming of a win on the pools, leaving Hyde Park in an orderly procession at 2.30 pm, church groups at the head of the march.
Two guitarists wanted to get the people singing in the rain. “Ain’t gonna study war no more,” they tried, their heads turning and asking for voices. But people were too self-conscious, too wet, or too aware that the currency of the old peace anthem has got devalued through the years.
I walked for a while behind the banner of the West Middlesex branch of the Communist Party, talking to a middle aged school teacher who said she was sickened by the hypocrisy of it all: a government that had always supported fascists now claiming to fight fascists? “I was rising nine when the first world war broke out,” cut in her friend, still at 77 marching upright on blue sensible shoes. “Mrs Thatcher wants to get the whole country thinking she’s Joan of Arc.”
‘Too young to die’
Rainstorms were followed by brief spates of sun. One of those days, people concluded. The weather may explain the English stoicism, but not the jingoism, nor the politesse, I was thinking, trailing along behind a home-made placard which said, “Mrs Thatcher. Are your victims really necessary?” Quite so.
Some heads were turned by the boom of a massive stereo-cassette, playing a jazz-funk tape at top volume, and humped along by Clinton Friend, a 20 year old white from Ladbroke Grove. “Nah. Don’t usually come on marches. But I’m too young to die,” he said, turning down the volume control so we could talk all right. He stood at about five foot five, had tattoos on both arms, wore black leggings over his jeans. He had worked as a car park attendant, till he was laid off last April, he said, transferring the boom-box from one hand to the other.
Isn’t it a drag, I said, shlepping that thing all around London? “Yeah,” he said. “But I brought it along to help me unwind. And it annoys the police. They keep telling me to turn it down.”
Clinton lives in a Cyrenian hostel off the Ladbroke Road. “Better than home. You can do what you like,” he said, flicking his head in recognition of the two friends, both black, who had started walking alongside.
“Stop the navy, pay the nurses,” said one of them, Henderson, whose mother is a nurse in a hospital, St Mary’s at Paddington, scheduled for closure. Winston said through a stutter that his mother was a nurse too. Going down Grosvenor Place, it started raining again. Clinton wrapped up the boom-box in black plastic.
“No to the chauvinism of all the bourgeois parties,” chanted the small contingent from the Communist Party of Great Britain : (Marxist-Leninist), down by Victoria failure-is-unthinkable Station. It is not in truth the kind of chant you can really wind into. The ' problem is in the show-vin-is-m.
A leafletter proffered one of his A5 sheets to two women sheltering in the porch of the Esso Petroleum office block. “Fuck off,” they said, in unison, waving him away with frantic gestures. He didn’t stay to protest.
I got into conversation with a computer programmer called Jimmy, who said that the experience of the last six or seven weeks, or however bleeding long it was since the ships set sail, had been like watching a car crash in slow motion.
Behind the PROTEST AND SURVIVE banner, white on black, were the same group of minstrels with painted faces who had marched with CND last October, when their trumpets and tubas, trombones and flutes, had a more exuberant sound. The peace movement then seemed to have come in from the cold. There were mass protests all over western Europe, ushering in, some thought, a new phase of post-war history: Europe slowly slipping from the clutches of the United States. The banners all said NO TO CRUISE and NO TO TRIDENT and no one ever dreamed of being rocked back on their heels by a war waged with frigates and Harriers and Sea Kings?
Walking past the Army and Navy department store, I decided the path of this match was so soaked in ironic detail it wasn’t really worth writing down, especially as the ink was blotting in the rain, and the point of the report anyway was to record that at the height of this mass outbreak of atavism, : there were in London some 7,000 souls at least who thought it sinful that hundreds should die so the Kelpers could again drive on the left.
Four Buddhist monks, beating drums with curved sticks, lent to their section of the parade an urgency, the beat, which was absent from the main body, drifting through the drizzle, chanting half-heartedly at times, but mainly just embroiled in the kind of conversation millions would be having in different corners of the nation, on strolls consequent upon the roast beef.
The nation has gone to war. But perhaps it takes a while for the battles to become real while the war is still lived by the British as a parlour game played on Newsnight by retired rear admirals, air commodores and the rest. If there had been war photographs, war newsreels, war correspondence, instead of Eagle-style kerrunch graphics and PR pictures of children smiling while marines raised the union jack, then perhaps the mood everywhere would be different. Down here on the march the war can, as yet, only be described as a kind of aberration: Falklands madness, craziness, lunacy, a nightmare and a car crash.
The procession wound round Parliament Square, where tourists stared and took snapshots. Three workmen on a break leaned up against the metal barriers which lined the rest of the route. Two of the workmen, sniggering, pointed out all the people wearing funny clothes, but the third, a fortyish man in a dirty jumper, was more considered. “You know, I really don’t understand them. Because of all the people who fought the Spanish fascists in 1936, it was them, these people,” he said, addressing a finger at some faces beneath banners and placards. He shook his head, pulled out a tin of Old Holborn. Big Ben’s cracked face showed ten to four.
Past Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, at the top end of Whitehall, a mighty blast of the national anthem from speakers set up on the third and fourth floors, above the Rabb Inns Steak Bar (sirloin steak with all the trimmings, £4.80), drowned out all chants and conversations. Banners were draped up there; but from my angle 1 couldn’t read them, so I asked a policeman on the other side of the street what they said.
“I think it says traitors or something, the top one,” he said. “And then, ‘Free the Falklands’ and, hang about, ‘Ban the Benn’.” God Save the Queen was followed by Land of Hope and Glory. This counter-protest took place bang opposite the Whitehall Theatre, where Anyone for Denis was in its nth great week. “Outrageously funny,” Daily Mail. Thinking of the close-up of Denis Thatcher’s neck muscles straining through Abide With Me on Saturday, I was reminded too of the gusto with which, for once, Wembley ripped into the anthem, after Brian Clough, on ITV, had said that Ricky Villa (Ricardo could never be one of us), Tottenham’s Argentinian star, should have struck a blow for democracy by having the bottle to go out on that green and pleasant pitch, to show all those rag-tag-and-bob-tails from that God-forsaken corner of the world what liberal tolerance is all about.
Such thoughts were interrupted by a tap on the shoulder from a tall young man in a brown corduroy jacket. “Harry Phibbs,” he said, handing me his card. I don’t care what Harry does, but Harry wanted to tell me that he was one of the people who had organised (he nationalist binge over the steak bar. A Young Conservative, he was also a member of the Coalition for Peace through Security.
“New Society? Great. I can give you a good quote,” he said brightly. “We’re against all this, er, rabble, that’s a good word, and we think the Falkland Islanders have a right to be British.” Carrying a blue box of Croxley script, Harry disappeared up the back alley where ten policemen had gone in order to effect an entry, take down those banners, turn off the stereo. It was ten past four by the time the brouhaha had died down, and I walked on up, past the Souvenir Soda Fountain and the Tennessee Pancake House, into Trafalgar Square, where the speakers were huddled under umbrellas by the base of Nelson’s Column.
Proceedings were kicked off by the Catholic bishop for the diocese of Westminster, who closed his speech with a recital of the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t hear anyone else joining in. Rafael, who had served five years in an Argentinian jail, said from the platform that he was implacably opposed to the junta, but that he believed, nonetheless, that the Malvinas, taken by force by the British in 1833, belonged to Argentina. He was loudly cheered by the Revolutionary Communist Party, who are opposed to any attempt, by either military or diplomatic means, to restore the islands to British rule.
Bill Deal, president of the Fire Brigades Union, attacked the shadow cabinet for giving Thatcher licence to send the task force. He was in the middle of a call for the unity of all anti-war groups, when an explosion of thunder took his sentence apart. “Christ,” he said. “I’m not sure He’s on my side.” As the rain came down again in sheets, 1 took shelter underneath an SWP placard, Blood on Thatcher's hands, it said.
The sun came out again, while Tony Benn was saying that half a million people marched against nuclear weapons in Tokyo that morning, and that the very first time he spoke at Trafalgar Square was in 1956, when the nation was cheering off the task force Eden despatched to Suez. It was still raining slightly, so the sun should by rights have made a rainbow. I looked all round, but couldn’t see one, just more black cloud blowing in from the north.
No comments:
Post a Comment