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| Still waiting for our history |
Andrew Murray and Lindsey German , Stop the War: The story of Britain's biggest mass movement (Bookmarks, 2005; ISBN 1 905192 00 2; 276pp; £15.99)
Reviewed by: MILAN RAI
Despite the subtitle, this is not "The story of Britain's biggest mass movement". There are brief inspiring accounts scattered throughout and some wonderful poems and posters, but these are in the margins, drowned in a sea of analysis and national politicking.
The first forty-plus pages are taken up with Murray and German's geopolitical analysis. The chapter on "Mobilising the Movement" is actually about the largely self-selected steering committee of the Stop The War Coalition, and its relations with various national bodies, not about mobilising the movement. We have to wait until page 96 for the first account of grassroots organising (one of many disconnected snippets of 200-300 words which parallel the main text). Interestingly, explicit "credit" is given to the Socialist Workers' Party for its central role in the Coalition: "only the SWP possessed the national infrastructure and the local network to sustain a campaign of the dimensions of the Stop the War Coalition" (page 54). This will be especially amusing to activists in Wales and Scotland, who know of the central role of CND Cymru and Scottish CND in pulling together and sustaining the national networks in those countries. Murray and German spend two pages (200-201) considering the failure of the movement to prevent the 2003 war. They write that "the movement can only grow stronger through an analysis of its own shortcomings", and then fail to identify a single "shortcoming" of the Coalition itself.
However, I will confine myself here to looking at one strategic issue: direct action. The Coalition decided to call for walk-outs and nonviolent civil disobedience on the first day of war. Murray and German dismiss the idea of "more" direct action as being "beyond the movement". The painful question however, is why the Coalition only called for direct action after the war started. Murray and German do not consider this issue, or engage with the breadth of civil disobedience across the country.
Finally, there is something odd about publishing a book about the British anti-war movement in 2005 which has virtually nothing about the movement after March 2003. The chapter on "opposing the occupation" is almost entirely devoted to discussing the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. Important, but hardly the story of how the movement has "opposed the occupation": Jo Wilding might have got a mention, for example, or Jubilee Iraq, or Voices in the Wilderness.
In summary: somewhat chaotic (no index), largely dull, occasionally inspiring (hey, this sounds like being an activist!), Stop the War has loads of fantastic photos, and some interesting inside information about the Stop The War Coalition, but frankly it's not worth #16.
We're still waiting for a history of our movement.