anti-war

Police arse about as usual at Parliament Square peace protest.

It's the final morning of the weekend-long Parliament Square peace camp and famed protestor Brian Haw seems tired enough to swing at somebody: the police probably, but maybe a journalist if it comes to it.

'It's called sleep deprivation!' he screams, trying to get a moment to himself in his blue chair by the traffic. 'It was the bastard police, being their usual bastard selves.' The peace camp was set up for the weekend to remember the 2004 Fallujah slaughter and as a protest against the occupation of Iraq. The tents were set up in the grass on the Square. Haw says that he was up until at least 6am this morning, because the police were circling the camp, and then looking for him, as usual.

Mendolin Kay, thirty-five, roared out of her anti-war meeting at nine in the evening, electrified by a vision that she had worked up, during the meeting's final and perhaps least directional hour, of herself as the charismatic focal point of the whole anti-war exercise.

'I am Mandela!' she told herself, the crowd of Mendolin-enthusiasts in her head growing so large that she couldn't always see herself through it. 'I am Scully!’ she said. I am...' Her chin was up and her shoulders were back and her timing with the rain was tremendous as she trotted to the station with a hand inside her plastic handbag, at ease on her umbrella. The dainty evening mist conditioned her hair, rather than soaked it, and she seemed to have developed an extra sense about the placement of the grimy potholes that yawned underwater along the pavement and usually collected anybody who was wearing light cotton boots.

Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell speaks to us from Hammersmith 

It is 8pm on a grey, sticky Wednesday and John McDonnell is telling a Hammersmith Stop the War meeting a story about the sorry behaviour of some of the overpaid, moral-free assholes who run the New Labour-affiliated trade union UNISON. He's telling us the grisly true story of the fate of the union activists who walked out in protest against the Iraq War when Tony Blair was prattling through his keynote speech at the TUC conference in Brighton in September.

Publicly, UNISON supported the activists and the walkout - or agreed, at least, that Blair was probably past his best as an attraction - but behind the scenes, the union hierarchy turned on the members like the Reich. Union bosses chucked the protesting activists out of the conference and sent them home and, as McDonnell understood it, were now toying with the idea of disciplining the activists for their attitude towards Tony Blair - the union disciplinary process being a protracted procedural nightmare that could take years and ultimately lead to expulsion of the activists.