When you consider the kind of society we'll be handing on to our younger generation, its a surprise that they don't get angry more often. Student loans, bankrupt pension funds, a dearth of affordable housing, the deferred debt of private finance initiatives in transport and housing, and, especially in our industries, the short contract culture - the list is endless.
Any twenty-something with the foresight to wonder where they will end up in thirty or forty years, must think that the pampered, superannuated, post-war generation has pulled up the ladder after enjoying all the benefits, yet opinion polls and electoral evidence suggest that youth has no interest in politics or protest.
Well, the polls can be wrong, as many politicians have discovered, and proof that the next generation is willing to protest was clear in the number of young faces among the million-strong march against the Iraq war in Central London last month. Leaving aside all the economic complaints they could make, our students and young workers gave up their time for the most altruistic cause of all - peace - a precious gift our parents thought they were leaving to us, but one that we probably won't be handing on to our children.
Agued veterans of peace marches - and there were plenty of us there in Hyde Park - are used to the official method of calculating turnout, which consists of counting heads, and then dividing by any number between two and ten according to the vehemence with which the establishment had accused them of ingratitude or irresponsibility.
This time we all knew something was up when at least one of the newspapers supporting the event turned out to be a tabloid, and even the police had to admit that the number of marchers was not unadjacent to a million. For the banner-waving regulars the weight of numbers came as a bit of a shock - the "usual supects" are normally able to arrange apres demo drinks while assembling, even before the first step is taken. Last month they were still struggling to find each other hours after the start, and the air was thick with people shouting "I'm on the march" into their mobile telephones - more like being on a train than a protest at times.
From a political point of view, the presence of protesters belonging to the younger generation wasn't the only interesting feature of the march. Thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, of much older marchers were doing it for the first time in their lives, and - attention Tony Blair - many of them were Labour voters, at least in the last two elections, if never before.
George Bush and Tony Blair responded to the unprecedented protests across Europe and North America by borrowing from Voltaire, in the way that any democratic leader has to - Bush respectfully disagreed with his oppoonents' views, but accepted their right to have a say. When it comes to free speech, Baltimore or Bradford beat Baghdad hands down - just one aspect of our liberal democracy that makes it worth defending.
But, apart from the million or so marchers last month, polls sugggest that many other UK citizens are uneasy about a military attack on another country which has no recent history of cross-border aggression, and after 18 months of examination by various security agencies, has still not been linked to Osama Bin Laden - which is where it all started on 9/11. "Where is the real threat",they ask.
Last month, most professional diplomats would have answered that question by warning that the immediate threat to Western democracies was not nuclear attack from a rogue state, but instead, the danger of multi-national institutions being undermined - possibly broken - by the US and UK rushing to war.
Parents of today's governing generation had to explain to us the failure of the League of Nations in the run-up to the Second World War. In turn, we may have to explain to the fresh-faced peace marchers how we allowed the United Nations, NATO, and even the European Union itself, to be pushed to the outer limits of internal division by a barely-elected US administration which has a hell-bent, 10-year old, grudge against a country that George Dubyah's predecessors once gifted with many of the weapons that are now a causus belli.
If the war happens - or has already started if the New Moon early this month was the signal - many BECTU members will find themselves at the centre of the action somewhere near Iraq, in an environment infinitely more hostile than any training course could prepare them for.
Their role is to send back news which will help to inform our debate about the war. Whatever happens, let's hope that they make it back as well
Tony Lennon
March 2003
