Sunday 16 February 2003

The great unheard finally speak out

What a sight! The people of the world united in common cause, it shows you just how representative people like Blair and Bush are. On their heads be it if they fail to take heed!

The age of apathy stops here, between a Thomas Cook branch and the Bloomsbury Diner, where the bodies are jammed together too tightly to move. In the minutes before the march begins, anyone will tell you why protest has supplanted politics.

Some of these twenty-first century Chartists with mobile phones are veterans of the Vietnam demonstrations. Some are too young to remember the Cold War. What unites them is anger against Bush and Blair, but mainly Blair. Everyone I talk to says that he will not have their vote again.

It is odd to think that these are the sloths who could not be prised from their armchairs when elections rolled round and who hit the remote at the first flicker of any BBC political coverage that wasn't Have I Got News For You.

These people, in New Labour's analysis, were the inert of the Earth. And here they are, out in their hundreds of thousands, quoting Hans Blix verbatim and defying a Prime Minister who longed to galvanise them and must now regret becoming the Frankenstein of the protesting classes.

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