23.5 MILLION...

...people around the world

including a few from Poplar

were involved in the

Stand Up Against Poverty

& got into the

Guinness Book of World Records

Spot the Poplar Umpa Lumpas!

Introducing Geoffrey & Timmy

(thats the sign & banana in case u didn't know)

Pretend Not to Notice...go on try!

A spot of protesting outside Downing Street

...as u do!

...and all the way home on the No. 15 Bus.

WHY?

As Michael Albert says: To Raise the Social Cost

• The answer is that we protest and organize to raise the social cost to elites of maintaining the policies we want changed and to thereby force immediate gains benefiting those now suffering most. And the answer is that we organize to empower and enlighten diverse constituencies and to create lasting beachheads of organization and commitment in an on-going process of movement building aiming at fundamental – and yes, revolutionary -- change.

Michael Alberts full article

Past Successful Protests/Demonstrations:

The Civil Rights Movement

Martin Luther King, at the 250,000 strong march on Washington, in August 1963, said:

• I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Why? [T]o promote Civil Rights and economic equality for African Americans.

African Online tells more about why demonstrations/protests work

The Women's Suffrage Movement

In 19o3 the American women got the right to vote and 15 years later, according to the Guardian: British women had the suffrage for which they had shouted and sung and starved and marched.

The Syntax of Protest by Geoffrey Nunberg gives a short but interesting take on the protest

Some recent successful campaigns/protests/demonstrations:

• One man protest against Tescoes : One person can instigate change, small or big (Rosa Parks did)
• People and Planet students got Pepsi to disinvest in Burma, increased the number of universities using green electricity from 1 to 52, got Oxford Brookes recognised as the first accreditated Fairtrade University in the Uk and got Esso to cancel its milkround recruitment.
• Make Poverty History: Changes in UK & International Policy, Millenium Goals, Debt Cancellation, Trade Justice, More & better Aid, HIV & AIDS & TB & Malaria Treatment & other changes...but still a long way to go.

What the above will be called in the future, we don't know, they could be part of the Environmental Movement or the Anti-Corporation Movement...they are all incremental steps in movements like the recent years Anti-Poverty Movement...which is broken into single actions from giving money to demonstrating to writing a letter or email to working in a disadvantaged area or educating people or providing equipment or skills or even just a conversation which opens another person's eyes...it all starts with individual single actions...and they come together to form a movement, a larger mass of still individaul actions, to create change...and when 23.5 Million people want a change...and do something about it...other's notice...and thats the point...the turning point, I hope.