ABSTRACT
The good-natured crowd, suggesting that we 'make tea not war' that wandered down the Embankment were 'warmly inclusive and endlessly upbeat', proceeding with typically English reasonableness and self-restraint, in orderly fashion up the Mall, to Hyde Park. The millions who were so impressively mobilised (under the exegesis of the Stop the War Coalition) were coming together against war on an oppressive, authoritarian, and quasi-fascist regime that was also responsible for well-documented and evidenced acts of genocide against sectors of its own population. The demand for rights and equalities against the old bastions of power and privilege, and the assertion of feeling authenticity against 'cold reason', were expressed, despite the government's queasiness on this issue, not in terms of citizenship or social solidarity, but through the prism of consumer empowerment and economic individualism. Traditional expertise and knowledge associated with the old professions tended to be denigrated at worst, or discounted at best.
