In February 2003, 1.5 million people protested in London against the looming Iraq war. They didn’t stop the conflict… but their legacy still looms large
A dozen years ago, in the offices of his Institute for Global Change, I interviewed Tony Blair. On the subject of his fateful decisions over the war in Iraq, he had a series of trusted platitudes to hand. One phrase he used, perhaps one of the lines that he still turns over in his head when he looks in the mirror in the mornings, was this: “People always used to say to me: listen to the people,” he said. “That was a fine idea, of course, but unfortunately the people were all saying different things.”
If ever there seemed a day when that was not the case, it was probably Saturday 15 February 2003, 20 years ago this week. That was the day when an estimated 1.5 million people took to the streets of London to march against the threatened attack on Iraq.
