We Are Many Page #7

Dave climbed up after me.

Will, being a nonsmoker,

got to the top way quicker than I did.

When he got up there, he said,

"Will, I should tell you

I'm very scared of heights."

I felt sick.

This sort of overwhelming feeling

of not wanting to stuff it up.

This sort of terror that you were

going to paint "No Wa"

or that the "N" would be the wrong way around

or, you know, something like that.

To my amazement,

the font came out beautifully.

And the police finally arrived

just as we were touching it up

for the last time,

and I said to the policeman,

"Can I just finish this bit?"

And he was very polite. He said,

"No, I think you've done enough."

This afternoon, the two men

were released on bail.

We're charged with malicious damage,

which is quite ironic,

because if war isn't the ultimate

malicious damage,

I don't know what is.

But freedom for Will Saunders

was short-lived.

A scientist from Britain,

he was quickly rearrested

by immigration officers.

People say this place doesn't matter anymore,

but hours before a war,

your MP can vote for or against it.

And if that doesn't matter,

I simply don't know what does.

The more momentous the particular

decision you're dealing with,

the more you feel that obligation to do it

on the basis of your own analysis

of what's best.

And...

But isn't it better to carry

the country with you?

Of course. Of course it would be better

to carry the country with you,

but the demonstration indicated

that a great seam of the country

wasn't with us.

What do you do then?

You look to Parliament for support,

and if you can't get support

in Parliament, then you don't do it.

Now, the night before, Robin Cook resigned

and made an astounding resignation speech.

Iraq probably has no weapons

of mass destruction

in the commonly understood sense of the term.

Namely, a credible device

capable of being delivered

against a strategic city target.

It probably does still have biological toxins

and battlefield chemical munitions.

But it's had them since the 1980s,

when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents

and the then-British government approved

chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent

that we should take military action

to disarm a military capacity

that has been there for 20 years

and which we helped to create?

Hear, hear.

Mr. Speaker,

the longer I have served in this place,

the greater the respect I have

for the good sense and the collective

wisdom of the British people.

Hear, hear.

I intend to join those tomorrow night

who vote against military action now.

It is for that reason and that reason alone,

and with a heavy heart,

that I resign from the government.

Hear, hear!

It made a most profound impact.

I think for the first time in my life,

I heard people actually clapping in

the House of Commons when he sat down.

Because normally you don't do that.

You just say "Hear, hear."

But people actually applauded him

as he sat down.

And then, all through the day,

MPs that were thought to be

skeptical about the war

were being hauled in to see

Tony Blair or Gordon Brown,

and Blair was sort of straight at them

saying, "OK,

are you with me or against me?"

And there were all kinds of deals done,

no doubt.

The Noes to the left 149...

We had estimated at the start of the day

there were possibly 200 Labour MPs,

more than half the Parliamentary

Labour Party, a crucial figure,

who were opposed to the war.

By the end of the day,

that had come down to 139.

The Ayes to the right 412,

the Noes to the left 149.

The Ayes have it.

An awful day because of the consequences.

MPs knowingly voted for lies to go to war,

which has killed thousands of people.

Back! Get back! Get back! Move!

Many of them now come out and say,

"If we knew then what we know now,

we wouldn't have supported the war."

"We wouldn't have believed Tony Blair.

We were misled."

It's rubbish.

When you had two million people

telling you the truth

and giving you the strong case

for why this war would be a disaster,

you cannot say you did not know.

You just did not care.

This was when people suddenly realized

well, what is a democracy

if you can demonstrate like this

but it doesn't make any difference

to what happens?

And war suddenly happened

one night in March 2003.

At this hour, American and coalition forces

are in the early stages of

military operations to disarm Iraq,

to free its people, and to defend the world.

Tonight British servicemen and women

are engaged from air, land and sea.

Their mission, to remove Saddam Hussein

from power

and disarm Iraq of its weapons.

On my orders, coalition forces have begun

striking selected targets

of military importance

to undermine Saddam Hussein's

ability to wage war.

I hope the Iraqi people hear this message.

We are with you.

Our enemy is not you

but your barbarous rulers.

And then "shock and awe" came.

And then, and then the horror.

It was over.

I think a lot of us cried.

And a lot of us screamed in fury

that these demons had started this war.

When I'm watching these missiles or rockets

or whatever they were flying across Baghdad,

it's kind of like when you see imagery

of the World Trade Center.

To most people, it's this iconic image

of a tower burning.

To me, it's an image of my brother dying

because it's very, very real

because I know he's on the 106th floor.

There's a piece in all of us

that intuitively knows

that someone's being killed

and some family is being harmed.

I think kind of the challenge for all of us

is how much of that are we willing to let in

and how much is too much to bear

and we have to turn it off.

When the hope was dashed and the war began,

I think that depressed people,

and it led to a simplistic concept

that we had the biggest demonstration

in history

and nothing happened, so we're giving up.

The morale just dropped.

It's hard to put "George Bush"

and "brilliant" in the same sentence,

but one of his more brilliant moves

was just to see 20 million people

around the world

saying, "We want you to do something,"

and then him turn around and say,

"We're gonna do it anyway

and you have no power."

All that sense of hope and possibility

that maybe we could prevent this,

we couldn't in the end.

We were still not strong enough.

Everybody please onto the sidewalks

in an orderly fashion.

Everybody on... Keep on walking.

Once you get past a demonstration,

a big demonstration

or a couple of big demonstrations,

what do you do?

We can identify probably

in retrospect positive things,

and maybe we averted other conflicts,

and all that kind of stuff,

but we didn't stop the Iraq War.

That was something that I think,

you know, it was painful.

And it made a lot of us then reflect

on why have we failed,

and certainly for me, now running 38 Degrees,

I think I can see the roots

of some of my thinking and my ideas

which lead me to want to start

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