Manchester Iraq Demo. 15th February 2003
couldn’t get to London on 15th February 2003 because of health reasons. But I did attend a local demo in Manchester in Piccadilly Gardens. Before I set off, I watched the huge London demo on TV news. There were shots of the march from a helicopter hovering over Parliament.
The news man in the chopper was obviously gob-smacked at the sheer size and scale of the demo. I recall him saying excitedly: “I’ve never seen anything quite like this!” The footage from the chopper showed the streets along the route from Hyde Park to Parliament completely full of demonstrators–wall to wall all the way. And this was only part of one of two separate legs that set off from opposite sides of London.
And then the camera panned to the left showing the march extending onwards away from Parliament to the point where the two legs of the march converged and then onwards into the distance-wall to wall all the way. My family was watching and they were expressing amazement at what they were seeing. That footage has never been shown on TV since to my knowledge and probably never will for many years to come. I wonder if anyone recorded it?
Several members of my family–including my twenty something daughter who is not normally interested in politics–attended the Manchester march which was tiny in comparison to the London demo, but still inspiring.
The gathering in Manchester built up to around a thousand people. We marched down to the Peace Gardens in St Peter’s Square and held a spirited rally. I filmed the whole thing. This clip shows some of it. I phoned up the local TV offices–BBC and Granada–and offered the footage to them. The BBC man said he wasn’t interested and I got the same brush off from Granada. I even phoned up the national BBC–it was a sort of wind up to rub their bloody noses in it–but they were not interested in hearing about even more people marching in the “provinces”.
I later saw on the web that there were local demos in various other British cities in addition to London and Manchester. 700 marched in Lerwick in the Shetland Islands.
Does anyone know of any other local demos on the Glorious 15th?
March 28, 2008
