A new movement rising?

Neil Faulkner reports on the Women’s March on London.

It was vast. You knew as you approached it. You saw people on the tube and the pavements with placards and banners. As you got closer, you found the street was rammed.

I walked with my daughter from Grosvenor Square to Trafalgar Square, marching towards the front of the demonstration. We had a snack and then walked back to see the full extent of it. Before we reached the end of the demonstration – near Hyde Park – the whole thing had been moving for more than two hours. We met my sister-in-law along the way. It was clear that we had been drinking tea in Trafalgar Square before she had left Grosvenor Square. It was that big.

Facebook said around 35,000 were going and another 35,000 were thinking of going. The Mirror (which backed the demo) was reporting 100,000. Let me tell you: it was way more than 100,000. It was somewhere in the next ballpark up. It was beyond counting, beyond easy estimate.

More than half the marchers were young women. Many carried homemade placards. The messages were angry, funny, clever, imaginative, often all at once. The march was loud, buoyant, confident. The white tapes were snapped and the crowd surged across to fill the street. This was not some dreadful dirge on the passing of an era. It looked and sounded like it might be the dawning of a new mass movement.

The political parties that officially sponsored the demonstration – and turned up with national banners – were the Greens, the Women’s Equality Party and Left Unity. The Left Unity placards and broadsheets linking Brexit and Trump went down a bomb. Everyone knows: first was Brexit; then Trump; next maybe Le Pen … The crowds were receptive to a clear anti-Brexit message.

Although Yvette Cooper spoke at the rally and London Mayor Sadiq Khan joined the march the Labour Party more widely was almost entirely absent from it.  I walked virtually the whole length of the demo twice and I did not see a single Labour Party banner or Momentum placard. One had the sense that the huge movement around Corbyn had vanished into thin air. As far as this demonstration was concerned, it might as well never have existed. Yes it was a national day of action for the NHS and that is a key struggle but still it was disappointing that the huge movement that swept Corbyn into office could not find a place on this important march.

There was some presence from the unions but they were not yet out in force. I counted just a few union banners – to their credit Unite sponsored the demonstration, providing flags and stewards, as did other organisations. But it would be great to see huge contingents of women workers – proud to be in the union – bearing the banners of their branches. As this movement develops, this can be at its heart.

These enormous marches both here and in the United States and across the world were the first mass actions against the turn to the right in world politics and represented a hugely important development.

Fascism is a clear and present danger. We need big, broad, bold initiatives to unite the largest possible number of people in mass struggle on every front – against sexism, racism, Islamophobia, nationalism, militarism, environmental destruction. I think we need millions organised and mobilised to stop fascism.

The women of the world have moved into action to protest the farce to which American democracy has been reduced when a bragging misogynist, a racist bigot, a bullying narcissist is elected to the Presidency. It now seems clear that millions have taken part in demonstrations in almost 700 cities across the United States and the wider world. Estimates suggest that 3 million marched in the United States alone.

Reports from Washington suggest that the number there was more than half a million. The pictures show the size of our side’s mobilisation on the Saturday dwarfing that of Trump’s supporters the day before at the inauguration. The new regime in the White House, stung by the comparison, has taken the trouble to issue a long press statement disputing what is blindingly obvious from the photos. We would expect nothing else. This is, after all, a ‘post-fact/fake news’ regime.

It was noticeable on the London march, that there was no hostility on the pavements. And there were marches across Britain too – 1,400 took to the streets against Trump in Shipley, West Yorkshire. One has the sense that we were politically hegemonic; that the Far Right is not yet able to get its supporters onto the streets in sufficient numbers to confront the left, to confront progressive public mobilisation. Which means there is everything to play for.

Perhaps this is the birth of a new women’s movement. Perhaps women will lead the rest of us into action. Or perhaps new fronts will open on their own account. What seems likely either way is that 21 January 2017 will come to be seen as inaugurating a new wave of mass protest.

We must hope so. Because fascism is advancing on state power, and the historical stakes have rarely been higher.

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, of Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right, forthcoming from Public