London Marches and Gatherings

Yesterday was the first time that I could go on a Peace March. I call it that because Suella Braverman, who is an extraordinarily divisive and unpleasant lawyer and disgraced politician, the architect of the plan to send refugees to Rwanda (where she has undeclared commercial interests), calls them 'Hate Marches'.

I deplore the terrorism of Hamas. I deplore violence and I deplore war. So I deplore the military response of the Israeli government to the terrorist attacks. When has action like this ever worked? 

I do not understand how there can be men who have the imagination and sophistication to develop technology to explore space and land on Mars, yet we can not as a human race develop our consciousness enough to resolve political, social and religious differences without resorting to murder. That is what taking a human life is called.

And I can't get the image of a tiny Palestinian toddler out of my head: she sits in the rubble, stunned and quaking with trauma and fear. She often appears in front of my eyes. No child should experience that, whatever 'side' they are on, whatever the justification of the person with the bomb. And to call this violence religious is the height of opprobrium.

How are any of these children on any side of the war going to grow up to be well-adjusted adults?

Like many people, I feel completely helpless. I have spent my life opposing racism and working through my career as an educator to ensure fairness and equality for everyone that I have come into contact with, absolutely to the best of my ability. 

There are too many fancy words for killing people. It's murder.

As we walked along amongst thousands of other people, we saw the Santa convention in a parallel street. Oh London, you peculiar city. Drunken Santas roared with laughter and screamed in excitement, in an entirely different representation of human gathering.

The streets got more and more crowded as we got towards Parliament Square; XR were there with their drums, and we'd seen a bunch of children with noisy yellow vuvuzelas. We saw the police form a line and slice into the crowd to extract someone to arrest, but actually everyone seemed fully aware of the gravity of the protest. Later, I read that there were only 13 arrests out of what looked like 20,000 people (at a conservative guess).

The final twist was at the top of Charing Cross Road as we walked up towards the tube station at Tottenham Court Road. There was a scrum of people and a phalanx of motorcycle police. As we walked up the road we saw probably 20 or 30 trotting carriages with horses blocking the road and queued up along the pavement. I've been completely unable to work out what on earth was going on there. Another protest? Another gathering? And all of this mixed up with Christmas shoppers, looking baffled. London is not a postcard city. We go out, rain or shine, and wear our hearts on our sleeves, whatever our hearts tell us.