by Ben Chacko
at Conway Hall, London

THE Stop the War movement politicised a generation who continue to fight for peace to this day, Jeremy Corbyn told the coalition’s 20th anniversary conference on Saturday.

“Just as a generation was forged in solidarity in this very room during the Spanish civil war,” Mr Corbyn said at the Conway Hall, London, event — referring to the foundation of the Labour Spain committee in 1937 — “those who marched against the Iraq war and against the ‘war on terror’ have never forgotten it.”

The former Labour leader had the audience in stitches as he recounted his own experiences of the largest demo in British history, against invading Iraq on February 15 2003; he had agreed to speak at an anti-war demo in San Francisco 24 hours later and spent an evening shivering in the New York snow as his late friend Mike Marqusee, in whose flat he was meant to spend the night, was partying too loud with comrades fresh from that city’s demo to hear that he had arrived.

But Mr Corbyn struck a more serious note as he warned that the new British pact with Australia and the United States to militarise the Pacific would be a bonanza for arms companies and risked provoking nuclear war with China.

The crowd heard from members of the younger generation politicised by Tony Blair’s wars, including Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana and author Kate Connelly, who played a leading role in School Students Against the War.

Ms Connelly noted that politicians spoke of the young generation’s “apathy” when she was at school — but as the mass walkouts and protests over Iraq showed, “what they took for apathy was in fact our contempt for a corrupt, ‘there is no alternative,’ politics.”

Ms Sultana, who was just seven when the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre took place, recalled growing up as a British Muslim in the shadow of that atrocity as her community was treated by the British establishment “as a security threat in need of discipline and subordination.”

She slammed a parliamentary elite who would not even learn from the US’s chaotic retreat from Afghanistan, “demanding more military intervention as if the answer to a catastrophic war is more catastrophic war.”

Campaigner John Rees called for an intensified campaign to free Julian Assange, who will soon have spent two years in Belmarsh prison without having been convicted or even charged for the “crime” of exposing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and rapper Lowkey detailed the number of British politicians with ties to the arms trade.

Stop the War convener Lindsey German was among those emphasising that the need for the peace movement in the era of the new cold war against China was greater than ever.