Why I marched

I marched for about four hours yesterday, which only managed to get me from embankment to the houses of parliament. I'm not one for public protest; the only one I'd been on before was the giant Iraq protest. You might have thought that experience would put me off for good, considering the invasion still happened on schedule. In the short term it will probably be the same for the cuts.

So why bother? Most importantly, I think the march challenged the breezy assertions of the coalition that the country is behind them. The sheer size and diversity of the crowd yesterday will make it difficult for the coalition to dismiss them as the usual suspects, though they will no doubt try. This government has been forcing through radical changes to Education, the NHS, policing, the military and pretty much everywhere else, acting as if they were elected in a landslide instead of a cobbled-together majority built on the Liberal Democrats betraying their core principles.

While the hash they're making of university funding does affect me directly, it's not what worries or angers me the most about Tory policies. Osborne have just handed out £2bn worth of tax breaks and giveaways claiming that this will, at some point, lead to growth. They are still going soft on tax cheats and coddling non-doms, at the expense of not only the middle class but higher rate tax payers and small businesses who can't afford to hide their profits offshore. Meanwhile the coalition turns around and says there is no money (though they always find a stray billion or so between the seat cushions when they want to.) There is no path to national solvency includes allowing the richest in society to pay less and less in taxes even as they gain more and more of the national income.

All that doesn't look very good on a placard, but the protest was the only way of registering opposition to these policies before the next election. Some cuts are inevitable, but the speed and way the Tories are cutting reveals that their program is an ideological, not fiscal one. Governments tried to cut their way out of the great depression, and what happened then is the same as what's happening now: no growth, as cuts suck desperately-needed demand from the economy when it's needed most.

The government has already changed its mind on other policies, from the fuel duty to selling off forests. Whether this march will change anything remains to be seen. If the economy fails to recover, I hope they will reconsider the neoliberal fundamentalism driving their austerity program. If the angels of their better natures can't be heard, maybe angry voters will.