In the middle of the march

Walking through Parliament Square this afternoon, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether some kind of bomb threat had been made on Westminster Palace. The fleets of police vans and hoards of fluorescent-jacketed officers seemed absurdly disproportionate to the motley pickets of public sector strikers gathered serenely outside parliament’s gates. ‘Actually, I shouldn’t be working today,’ one officer told me, chuckling. ‘It’s my day off. That’s ironic, isn’t it?’

As Pete remarked this morning, there wasn’t a huge amount to see along the Westminster picket lines, apart from the policemen. ‘There’d be more of us, but we’re only allowed to gather in groups of five or six,’ a woman from the Met’s security department sighed. The real action, I learned, would be taking place along the embankment opposite The Eye, where 22,000 protestors were due to convene at 14:00, at the end of their march from Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Shortly after the appointed hour, a forest of signs and banners bore down on a specially erected stage beside Westminster Central Hall. The rain had done little to erode their numbers, and it was an impressive sight. The crowd, when it finally came to a halt, seemed to stretch back as far as Waterloo Bridge, and an appeal was quickly made over the speaker system for everyone to stop, to avoid a ‘crushing situation’.

Two kinds of sign seemed especially prominent in the crowd. The first was distributed by Socialist Worker, and showed a picture of David Cameron’s face beneath the words, ‘HE’S GOT TO GO’. Another, I thought, had a phrase with rather more impact: ‘Pay more, work longer, get less? No way!’ This was the argument repeated continuously throughout the afternoon by various teachers, nurses, pensioners and unionists, all of who spoke with some vim about exactly who, in their opinion, was to blame for the strike.

There was certainly a lot of blame to go around. Michael Gove and George Osborne were widely criticised, and Andrew Lansley also took a particularly venomous pasting from health sector speakers. So too, occasionally, did Gordon Brown. But the loudest cheer of the day came after it was announced that ‘David Cameron’s own staff in Downing Street have come out and joined the strike’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the bankers who bore the brunt of the day’s invective. Scorning government policy and ‘the need for compromise,’ one speaker screamed from the stage, ‘The only people who need to compromise are the bankers!’ to great applause. Another protestor told me: ‘Bankers and the rest of the top per cent of wage earners are still awarding themselves huge bonuses to keep themselves there. Why are we the ones who need to suffer?’

In the end, the event certainly carried with it an atmosphere of intense solidarity (a word oft repeated in the course of the afternoon). Some speakers addressed real and fair concerns, while others merely took advantage of their thirty seconds to engage in a satisfying bit of Tory bashing — Frances O’ Grady, TUC Deputy General Secretary, for example, seemed far more interested in sneering at Boris Johnson than in public sector pensions.

The march itself is being called ‘the largest in a generation’. Whether it will have any real effect remains to be seen. The sheer mass of the crowd, you might have thought, would be enough to set any politician trembling. But if nothing else, it was certainly a spectacular demonstration of how many Britons really do work in the public sector.