Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Police attack Brighton students' anti-war protest

Socialist Resistance no2  |  page 13

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Patrick Hall and Stephen Church against war Sussex University students organised a mass protest as part of the Stop the War Coalition national day of action on 31 October. Protesters on bike, skateboard and foot succeeded in shutting down a large section of the A27, in spite of police heavy handedness. The lively march, dubbed "Wheels Against the War", rode, skated and ran through the town, shouting slogans

Blair's warmongering

We met a demonstration of 500 at the Old Steine War Memorial. There was drumming and dancing. poetry and prayer

against the insanity of imperialist wars. The

demonstration then marched to the roundabout near Brighton Pier and staged a sit down. The police attacked protesters with CS spray, fists and batons, arresting 20

The demonstration received widespread sympathy, even from the normally reactionary local press. Far from being discouraged by the disgusting behaviour of the police, the Brighton anti-war movement felt re-energised and ready for a bigger, more coherent action against Bush and

This was shown several weeks later when on November 23 1200 turned out for the Don't Attack Iraq / Freedom for Palestine Rally and March - the biggest local demonstration in Brighton for many years

As the demo passed the local fire station, there was raucous cheering and chants of 'No war, no way! Give the firefighters more pay!' A message of support from the FBU was read out at the rally.

A welcome side effect of the fire strike is that it could seriously undermine Britis involvement in any war, by keeping tho sands of troops occupied putting fires o Britain rather than starting One firefighter told us: 1 army to go into Iraq - by g we're saving 19,000 lives months have shown that if Blai attack on Iraq, we can build the bi anti-war movement ever seen in Brit