Guinness Book of Politics

Red Pepper, July 2005

Book Review
Stop the War: The Story of Britain’s Biggest Mass Movement by Andrew Murray and Lindsey German (Bookmarks)

The strengths of this publication are Noel Douglas’s vibrant design and its generous helpings of fiery, stylish anti-war visuals – including montages by Peter Kennard and Leon Kuhn, photos by Jess Hurd and posters by David Gentlemen.

The weakness is the text, in which the chair and convenor of the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) present an unreal account of a movement blessed with a wise and far-sighted leadership whose every action has already been proved correct by history.

The book’s subtitle reflects a Guinness Book of Records approach and a failure to grasp that mass movements are measured by their depth of social penetration and their impact on popular consciousness. They are also plural and protean by nature, never reducible to a single organisation. Sadly, the authors treat the broader movement and the STWC as co-terminus. ‘The British army has been forced to publicly acknowledge that the Stop the War Coalition has had an impact on levels of recruitment,’ they claim – but the footnoted source for this assertion, an article in the Observer, quotes a senior military source saying, ‘the anti-war movement is exacerbating our recruitment problems’ and makes no mention of STWC.

The authors side-step many of the thorny arguments that beset STWC and sometimes play fast and lose with facts. Referring to the atrocity of 9/11 they declare: ‘The STWC, like most people, condemned it.’ But initially the SWP (praised in the book as the backbone of STWC) was vehemently opposed to issuing a condemnation and only retreated from this stance under pressure. The claim that gender segregation at some early anti-war meetings sprang from ‘cultural norms from the rural parts of the Indian sub-continent’ is eyebrow-raising, and the account of the STWC’s efforts to address the allegation of anti-semitism is at best incomplete. The authors say nothing at all regarding the democratic deficit that became a sore point for many independent activists, who will also chafe at the claim that ‘civil disobedience led by the coalition was in fact vast’.

Finally, in keeping with the STWC house style, the authors engage in a triumphalism unwarranted by current realities: ‘The argument is over … “humanitarian” imperialism and liberal elitism have been ideologically routed.’ If only it were so.