London Says 'War Sucks!'

After a decade of British military operations in Afghanistan, and all the siphoned taxes and Union Jack-draped coffins that those ten years have entailed, we are still no nearer to a ‘victory’ over the Taliban. Members and ex-members of the government are still getting blown up and kids are still playing with bits of suicide bomber in the street. So it’s no surprise that thousands of people marched around Central London this weekend urging David Cameron to pull 'Our Boys' out of Afghanistan immediately, even if at times it did seem like the jolliest anti-war march ever.

Needless to say, there's nothing jolly about the numbers. Since 2001, at least 382 British people have died in Afghanistan, and 1,781 more have been wounded in action. The numbers for the Afghans are far grimmer, obviously, with civilian fatalities alone running into the tens of thousands, and the Americans have lost around 1,800. But I’m focusing on the figures for British service personnel because I used to be one.

Dozens of veterans were present at the Stop The War Coalition's demo march, though I’m not sure how many of them are now taking photos for a living, like I am. One ex-paratrooper I spoke to was drinking Special Brew and lugging around an Osama bin Laden banner he’d made out of some plywood. His name was Marcus ‘Digger’ Gardner, and he told me he was now living in a homeless shelter about eight minutes from Tony Blair's house.

When I asked him what he thought about the day’s events, he said that he was “angry with Barack Obama because a nuclear state with its own death squad has gone out to assassinate an OAP in slippers”. I could see his point, though I'm struggling with the relevance of the slippers.

The first person to speak on the stage in Trafalgar Square was another veteran called Joe Glenton. He was sent to prison for refusing to fight, a crime that back in the day would have seen him shot at dawn. He’s just got out of Colchester military prison, and is now at university writing his memoirs. In his speech, he mentioned that the prison – ‘The Glass House’, as it is affectionately known – is currently full of soldiers from my old battalion, Para 3.

“I was banged up in the political cells,” Joe told me after his speech. “All the prisoners would wind up the screws by singing The Special AKA song ‘Free Nelson Mandela’. The blokes loved it!” I was glad to see that the great British military tradition of banging up paratroopers isn’t getting the lads down.

Next up were the celebrity speakers, who treated me with varying degrees of respect. Jemima Khan gave me one second and an air kiss, George Galloway gave me two seconds and a hello, and John Pilger gave me a quizzical glare and refused to take my business card. I've always been a fan of Mr Pilger's work, but he looked far more like Paul Hogan than I'd anticipated.

What really whipped the press into a frenzy was the arrival of WikiLeaks' NWO whistle-blaster Julian Assange. There was a huge, undignified scrum as photographers vied to get a picture of him talking to his brother-from-another-mother Pilger, which came after Assange had taken the opportunity to publically describe all journalists as “war criminals”. When it was time for Mr Assange to leave the press tent, the press pack followed. Marcus ‘Digger’ Gardner followed at the rear, dragging his bin Laden banner along behind him.

The crowd that marched from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street comprised the usual array of Socialist Worker newspaper sellers, people dressed up in orange overalls and ‘V’ masks, and students wearing felt-tip pen slogan t-shirts over their grey H&M hoodies. It certainly was a leftie day out, and despite rumours they’d shown up, the EDL didn’t make any noise.

I ran into a pair of young lads from Motherwell who had come down on a coach for the demo. They told me they were against the war in Afghanistan because one of their pals had joined up and got his legs blown off. “Every time we go to see him he is very much on a downer,” they said. “He has to live with his parents and they’ve had to get special ramps built for his wheelchair.”

The march was supposed to climax with Joe Glenton delivering a letter to the Prime Minister petitioning him to pull the troops out of Afghanistan. When we got to Downing Street, things got a bit tenser with the police, and the weather was starting to get shitty. I heard a woman screaming, and turned round to see a mass of people caught up in what looked like a fight.

When I got there, this Dapper Dan was being taken away by police. Apparently he’d lost the plot and started lashing out at a crowd of protesters because they'd placed a banner on the Montgomery statue.

Eventually, Joe got to deliver his letter and after that the march sort of lost its shape. The good news for all of us in Blighty (though perhaps not for Afghanistan's fledgling democracy) is that the economy's so fucked that David Cameron has said he'll have to withdraw all troops by 2014. Hooray!