We were in London on Saturday, joining the March organised by the Trades Unions Congress to protest against savage government cuts to public services. The estimates of how many people there were, have varied from a quarter to half a million. They filled the streets as we slowly edged our way from the Embankment by the River Thames through to Whitehall, past No 10 Downing Street where the architects of the cuts live – David Cameron and George Osborne – onto Trafalgar Square, through to Piccadilly, and eventually ending up on Hyde Park where speeches were listened to by a great crowd.

We found the march itself an emotional experience, a mixture of the past with old Union banners held aloft, and the new, with home –made placards showing signs of having been hastily made for the occasion, such as the one that protested against the shutting of a dinner club for elderly people who otherwise will be confined to their homes. One impressive banner represented the interests of Young Lawyers who, appropriately, joined the march after assembling outside the Law Courts.

Any attempt to define the event merely as an extreme left-wing demonstration, which no doubt the media was poised to declare, was doomed by the evidence of the quite extraordinary range of opinions represented by so many different people and organisations.

The march was brilliantly organised and despite the fact that far more people turned up than were expected, the great slow procession was well marshalled. It was very noisy, and this old man found the decibels more difficult to cope with than the journey. The crowd was good tempered, in, I suppose a typical British way, but it was united in its anger at the severity and ill -thought out consequences of the Coalition’s cuts, and the government’s obsession with deficit reduction, whatever the human and social cost.

It’s a minor thing, compared to the importance of this political statement and the activity of democratic protest, but I was particularly moved to be part of a great crowd of people of all ages and with a united disposition. One of the disadvantages of being old, is that one tends to only socialise with people of a similar age and therefore are isolated from the broader spectrum of society. It was good for a moment to be part of a great mob of all sorts of similar minded people marching for more just and equable governance.

Bryan