We are many

Today I was at a course in Oxford Brookes University’s fabulous new building. So many visual delights. I went exploring during our half-hour lunch break and when it was time to go back I discovered that the two halves of the building connect at only a few points and you have to know where they are. Up to the first floor – it was only a lecture theatre. Down to the ground floor and to a different staircase and up to the second floor where I followed my sense of direction into a library cupboard. Down to the basement and I was surrounded by alarmed fire exits. Up to the first floor – another  library cupboard. I can’t have been the only one; when I finally reached our training room seven minutes late they hadn’t started because they were still waiting for three others.
 
This evening I took my family to the première of ‘We Are Many’, a moving and powerful film about the anti-war marches around the world on 15 February 2003. My daughter and I, who marched together that day, held hands and cried. Sadness, impotence, rage and a renewed determination to make a noise about policies that hurt the vulnerable.
 
It is an important film that makes connections between those global demonstrations and the Egyptian revolution as well as with the first ever defeat of a British Prime Minister on a war vote, in August 2013, when the Commons voted against going to war in Syria. 1.5 million people may have been ignored in 2003 but the ramifications were greater than we imagined.