Stop The War Coalition

[FreeLandofAIM]

Here in the UK, there are currently two big anti war and anti Bush and Blair organisations that have come to prominence:

This is The Stop The War Coalition.

www.stopwar.org.uk/

You can find within the site a letter by Rose Gentle, mother of a British soldier killed in Iraq, to Blair.

She famously stormed out of a meeting with Deputy PM Prescott at No 10 Downing Street (a disgusting sell out bastard) saying he was talking rubbush, and she recently took part in the laying of a wreath at No 10 Downing Street's doorstep in memory of those killed in Iraq.

[zigtag]

Isn't Stop The War run by hardline authoritarian leftists in the UK ?

[claptonpond]

Yeah, it's essentially a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party. CND and the Muslim Association of Britain are pretty heavily involved too, so there's a weird mix of Trotskyism and liberalism, plus a toleration of misogyny and homophobia as long as it's in an Islamic context.

[Anarchic Tribes]

it's essentially a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party.

Their site seems to be about 'stopping the war' (albeit ineffectively). In what way are the SWP involved?
I recently asked if there were any people from Stop The War at a meeting I was at. Someone said that they were and immediately distanced their group from the one linked above (they didn't say why, but explained that they were a seperate local group that organised independantly of other groups. That all the local groups were like that and not representatives of the main coalition.)
Without the STWC, who would have organised the pitifully few demonstrations that there have been?
The local STW people I spoke to organise local protests and transport to the larger ones in London. And the larger one organises the bigger protests? Or what?

[FreeLandofAIM]

The general theme of the organisation appears to be to stop the war, and does not appear to have other policies other than how to stop the war.

There are those probably not normally leftist in the group, like relatives of those killed in the war.

[claptonpond]

A lot of the people on the STWC steering committee also happen to be high up in the SWP hierarchy, from what I've heard. They also organise in much the same way as the SWP, and the SWP uses STW marches as recruiting and paper-selling opportunities.

It's true that the coalition is based purely on opposition to the war. Unfortunately that means they end up tolerating some pretty reactionary shit within their organisation, as long as the people espousing it are 'anti-war'.

Another problem is that, in typical liberal fashion, they do their best to stifle any direct action because they're afraid it might reflect badly on them. So their tactics are essentially limited to pointless A-to-B marches followed by speeches from demagogues like Galloway.

Fortunately, as AT mentioned, many of the local STW groups have managed to avoid being SWP-dominated and are independent, and some of them organise in much more democratic ways.