Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

People's Assembly for Peace School students and unions point way forward

by Terry Conway  |  Socialist Resistance no5  |  page 6

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.

THE POWERFUL contributions from school students from a number of different parts of the country were undoubtedly the highlight of the day when the People's Assembly convened on March 12, attended by around 1500 delegates. I was there on behalf of Socialist Resistance. It was a positive day, and the attendance for a midweek meeting at very short notice was very good. However it was frustrating that the Socialist Alliance had no profile in terms of speakers. The meeting agreed a declaration against the war, and then a series of distinct resolutions (see www.stopwar.org.uk). The declaration did not attempt to be a comprehensive statement on all the issues raised by the war (for example, it did not talk about the war against Iraq in the context of the war against terrorism, does not deal with environmental devastation or the asytum onsis the war is causing However it was a clear statement which called for opposition to war under all circumstances, and for Fairford protestors: challenging the bombing Blair's resignation.

Resistance supporters did however put one amendment, which was agreed by the organisers, to remove a formula which could have implied support for the tactics of Chirac, Putin and Schroeder. It was frustrating that a resolution calling for the creation of local assemblies was said to be defeated, and a count refused.

There were powerful speeches from Bob Crow of the RMT, Billy Hayes of CWU. Paul Mackney of NATFHE and The Deputy General Secretary of ASLEF.

Crow called for civil disobedience and Chris Bambery, speaking for the SWP, against direct action - especially around bases such as Fairford - from where the B52s have been flying to bomb Baghdad. movement to have concentrated on mobilising national mass action directed at government itself. But within that overall framework, we need diverse tactics and points of focus. There is room for - and strength in -diversity, in a movement that has already achieved a good deal but which has many tasks ahead of it. also said that trade unions should

March, 2003 ensure there were anti-war candidates in the forthcoming local elections. Mackney pointed out the irony that Blair was claiming legality for war against Iraq, but that strikes against it would be illegal. There was a strange polemic from

Money Of course it is correct for the anti-war

manage to grit the roads.