IT WAS perhaps two weeks before the mass demonstration of February 15 that those of us organising began to ask: could it be a million strong? 

We had always dismissed such predictions before but now it was becoming clear that this mobilisation was going to be very, very big indeed. 

On the day it exceeded even those expectations, with an estimated 1.5 to two million in London, around 80,000 in Glasgow where Tony Blair was attending the Scottish Labour Party conference, and hundreds of smaller events around the country for those unable to make the journey to the big demonstrations. 

It was also an international day of protest against war, with demonstrations on every continent, and with Blair’s main European allies in leading the charge for war, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar, also seeing giant mobilisations across Italy and Spain. 

Any campaign relies both on hitting the right issue and mobilising on a wide basis. Although large protests are often referred to as mobilised spontaneously through overwhelming strength of feeling — and there is obviously some truth to this — they also are the result of tens of thousands of activists giving out leaflets, holding meetings, proposing resolutions, booking coaches, blocking roads, organising local demos, walking out of school. Our movement had all these and more. 

It also succeeded in combining a degree of political clarity about the “war on terror” with the ability to bring in wide layers of the movement who opposed the war. 

Stop the War Coalition was formed in the weeks following September 11 2001, when George Bush assembled his war allies, and when, given the horrific footage of the attacks in New York and Washington, it was hard to raise dissenting voices. 

Even some on the left  told us it was impossible to organise any kind of anti-war protest. But reality proved to be very different, and our initial meetings were huge. The first demonstration, against the war in Afghanistan, was in the tens of thousands.  

Stop the War was successful because it was built on a broad basis — it involved from the beginning the unions, the left, the Muslim community, sections of the traditional peace movement. 

These links were solidified as the noises about Iraq grew during 2002. Despite repeated denials at the time, it was clear that Bush and Blair were determined to go to war with Iraq, despite there being no evidence connecting that country with the September 11 attacks. 

This in turn helped build opposition to the growing war threat over Iraq. The flimsy dossier produced by Blair in early September 2002, supposedly proving the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, convinced few anti-war campaigners who believed that the government was lying — and this helped build our protests. 

There was also increasing concern over Palestine, following the Jenin massacre in 2002. Stop the War planned a big demo in September 2002 just before Labour conference — on the same day that the Muslim Association of Britain planned one on Palestine. 

The obvious response was to join together which after some hesitation on both sides happened and the result was a mass protest which provided the springboard for February 15. 

It was after this demo that CND also came on board, thus bringing in another constituency of support, and these became the three organisers of the march. 

From then to February 2003 there was mass action, including direct action, school students’ strikes, city centres were blocked, ministers and MPs picketed, debates were held everywhere, meetings and local demos attracted thousands in cities and towns across Britain, and the momentum grew, boosted from November by the decision to make this an international day. New groups sprang up round the country and set about mobilising for the day. 

Organisers found they were now running out of coaches to book, such was the demand in cities like Leeds. In Preston, taxi drivers drove down in convoys to ferry people to the demo. Mosques booked coaches, as did trade unions. 

The atmosphere on the day was tremendous: people of all ages, races and nationalities, and while there were headline speakers — US anti-racism campaigner Jesse Jackson, former Algerian president Ahmed ben Bella, trade union general secretaries and MPs — there were also school student activists and campaigners. 

The reason for such a turnout above all was the overwhelming sense that we could stop this war and that Blair would have to change his plans, so every individual counted. 

But Blair had no intention of doing so — even after US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld phoned his British counterpart and offered that Britain could sit this one out, given the level of domestic opposition. 

That was the last thing that Blair wanted to do given his addiction to war and determination to be at the forefront of the attack. 

So Labour MPs were begged, bullied and otherwise coerced to vote with him for war — despite this 140 Labour MPs refused. 

A month later the war began — an attack by major imperialist powers that destroyed a country and contributed to ongoing instability in the Middle East. 

The cost to Iraqis was over a million dead. The WMD were never found because they did not exist. 

Why did a demo this size not stop the war? There was public support, mass action including direct action. There were also strikes and walkouts by workers and school students the day the war broke out and key roads, including the port of Dover, blocked. 

But the movement had against it the Labour establishment, the Tories, the military, most of the mass media (the Mirror being an honourable exception), and the whole imperialist war machine, which was already moving into place. 

The only thing that could have stopped it, in my opinion, was for the movement to help initiate mass industrial action which would have brought war preparations to a halt. But we are only now, 20 years later, seeing the re-emergence of working-class militancy on the scale that can confront the government. 

The legacy of that day and of the wider movement remains: we didn’t stop the war but we did change public opinion and made it extremely hard for the British government to engage in the invasions and occupations which marked the “war on terror.” 

We have succeeded in naming Blair as a war criminal and, even if this message has not got through to the British establishment which awarded him a knighthood last year, he will never escape the verdict of millions of people. 

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour happened in large part because of his opposition to wars and British foreign policy, and much of the attack on him was over these questions. 

This legacy of anti-war opinion and scepticism about imperialist adventures is one which our rulers are desperate to eradicate. 

The continued attacks on Corbyn by Starmer and his acolytes speaks to this. The bipartisan support for arms spending and shipping tanks (and probably fighter planes) to Ukraine are also indications that they want to erase the memory of Iraq … and Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. 

But this is not going to happen. One role of the anti-war movement is to connect the different wars and to show the nature of imperialism which links them all. 

Lindsey German is convener of the Stop the War Coalition.