A Sketch of Local Resistance: Three anti-war activities in Birmingham, Saturday 21st March 2026.
A new chapter in US foreign policy recently unfolded in the form of operation Epstein Epic Fury, an Israeli-inspired attempt at effecting regime change in Iran using that time-honoured approach of bombing it to bits.
Though there was a larger march in London which received more attention, I think it’s important to highlight more local actions; resistance does not begin and end in the South-East of England. Birmingham was one such site of action.
Billed as a demonstration, activists from the Birmingham arm of the Stop the War Coalition ran a stall, engaging in leafleting and discussion with the public. The demonstration proceeded untouched by the police who turned up for the best part of two minutes and then left again. That may have been because of its small scale.
Speaking with participants I noticed a few things:
- A dissatisfaction with mainstream media coverage of the situation in the Middle East, with most participants preferring to consult sources such as podcasts and Substack accounts.
- A suspicion of the motives of mainstream journalists and their putative alignment with government organisations was cited as one reason for this dissatisfaction. I was welcomed for being part of the independent media.
- Even though those I talked with were almost all on the left, be that in the form of: supporting leftist parties, involvement in trade union activities or being openly Communist, some comment was made that labels of right and left were somewhat outdated and viewing politics along an axis of those who wish to dominate and subjugate and those who do not, is more useful.
- Concern was expressed that right-wing populism appears to be in the ascendancy, e.g. in the shape of Trump and Farage.
Stop the War were also joined by representatives from the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and interactions between the two camps seemed convivial. Their short-term goal was very clear: get as many people as possible to petition their MPs to sign EDM 2739, an Early Day Motion calling on the UK Government to oppose an executive order “signed on 29 January 2026 by US President Donald Trump, which unjustifiably declares Cuba as an ‘extraordinary threat’ to the national security of the United States and authorises new sanctions against any country supplying oil to Cuba.”
The biggest consequence of this executive order, coupled with the blockade of Venezuelan oil, is an overall undersupply of oil into Cuba, leading to blackouts, the inability to power vehicles and disruption of public services. Regardless of what you might think of the Cuban government, that’s rather a lot for their population to suffer at the whim of a foreign power bent on regime change.
This action amounts to collective punishment of a population, which under international law is illegal in armed conflict, yet inconsistently appears to be acceptable when applying sanctions as a weapon of war.
A few yards down from High Street, was another stall that I had happened on entirely by chance –that of the Revolutionary Communists. While my interactions with them were brief, I was keen to find out why their stall was separate from the Stop the War stall up the road. It seems that a lack of co-ordination between the two bodies was the primary reason.
Interestingly, they did not take the view that incursions into the Middle East or elsewhere ought to be viewed as a series of isolated humanitarian crises, but as components of an international class struggle between the oppressed and the exploiter; that is to say a form of primitive accumulation. This is certainly a view I am sympathetic to and even if I wasn’t, I commend the approach of taking a systemic view of the events we experiencei.
Finally, I couldn’t help noticing that the general public seemed to be intent on avoiding the activists. This was viewed by a few demonstrators as a “Birmingham” problem – there are so many stalls and daily leafleting activities that people are suffering from activism fatigue. Regional deprivation, with its attendant sense of learned helplessness or “everything being shit” as one activist put it, was also cited as a potential reason for apathy. The daily struggle of keeping one’s head above water does not leave much spare mental bandwidth for engaging with foreign affairs.
Maybe so, but events in Iran, and the associated shock to oil prices and supply chains will be sure to make faraway problems very local.
iIt should be noted that previous writings from the Revolutionary Communist Group show a blind spot in their analysis. Their understanding of the COVID event as a policy failure in which lockdown and other “mitigation” policies were not strict enough is something we view as problematic.
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