‘It changed my life’: protesters look back on 2003 Stop the War march

Iraq war demonstration ignited a campaigning passion for some, but others were left disillusioned

Twenty years ago, Louise Barter took a coach up to London to attend her first demonstration. As she took her place in the ocean of protesters stretching from Embankment to Hyde Park on that cold Saturday, she was participating in the biggest political protest in UK history. It changed her life.

Now a trade union organiser, Barter, 48, credits her politicisation to the historic 2003 Stop the War demo, when an estimated 1.5 million people took to London’s streets. She remembers joining the rally with a woman she met on the coach from Hampshire who had not protested since the Vietnam war. “She said, I can’t believe we’re doing this again! I was really quite green to all of this,” Barter says. “There was a sea of people, and lots of different groups with slightly different reasons for being there. Though there were far-left groups, it felt like there were lots of normal people – not just really political people.”