Johnnie Kerr

In the middle of the march

Walking through Parliament Square this afternoon, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether some kind of bomb threat had been made on Westminster Palace. The fleets of police vans and hoards of fluorescent-jacketed officers seemed absurdly disproportionate to the motley pickets of public sector strikers gathered serenely outside parliament’s gates. ‘Actually, I shouldn’t be working today,’ one officer told me, chuckling. ‘It’s my day off. That’s ironic, isn’t it?’

As Pete remarked this morning, there wasn’t a huge amount to see along the Westminster picket lines, apart from the policemen. ‘There’d be more of us, but we’re only allowed to gather in groups of five or six,’ a woman from the Met’s security department sighed. The real action, I learned, would be taking place along the embankment opposite The Eye, where 22,000 protestors were due to convene at 14:00, at the end of their march from Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  

Shortly after the appointed hour, a forest of signs and banners bore down on a specially erected stage beside Westminster Central Hall. The rain had done little to erode their numbers, and it was an impressive sight. The crowd, when it finally came to a halt, seemed to stretch back as far as Waterloo Bridge, and an appeal was quickly made over the speaker system for everyone to stop, to avoid a ‘crushing situation’.  

Two kinds of sign seemed especially prominent in the crowd. The first was distributed by Socialist Worker, and showed a picture of David Cameron’s face beneath the words, ‘HE’S GOT TO GO’. Another, I thought, had a phrase with rather more impact: ‘Pay more, work longer, get less? No way!’ This was the argument repeated continuously throughout the afternoon by various teachers, nurses, pensioners and unionists, all of who spoke with some vim about exactly who, in their opinion, was to blame for the strike.

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