Here is the remarkable story of the global Stop the War march in 2003, composed of archive clips and contemporary interviews with the organisers and sympathisers, including Peter Oborne, John le Carré, Ken Loach and the late Tony Benn – and also a slightly conceited Richard Branson talking about his behind-the-scenes plans to persuade Saddam to stand down, which sounds like nothing so much as a Jeffrey Archer novel. The same grim story is told: how after 9/11, Britain’s timid political masters and pro-war liberals were panicked into supporting America’s retaliatory war against Iraq, and brazened it out by helping to create the “weapons of mass destruction” untruth. It is such a gigantic scandal that we have, paradoxically, almost forgotten about it. So this film does a necessary job. It’s a piece of history that must grapple with both the success of the Stop the War march and its manifest failure: a staggeringly huge demonstration of public opinion that nevertheless did not stop the war. But Amir Amirani makes a bold case for understanding the march in a larger context: that over the next decade it re-energised people power, sowed the seed for Egypt’s Arab spring and laid the foundations for Labour’s sober, courageous refusal to countenance the attack on Syria. Meanwhile, we wait for the Chilcot report. A very valuable film.
