by Ben Chacko
at Conway Hall, London

THE Stop the War movement politicised a generation who continue to fight for peace to this day, Jeremy Corbyn told the coalition’s 20th anniversary conference on Saturday.

“Just as a generation was forged in solidarity in this very room during the Spanish civil war,” Mr Corbyn said at the Conway Hall, London, event — referring to the foundation of the Labour Spain committee in 1937 — “those who marched against the Iraq war and against the ‘war on terror’ have never forgotten it.”

The former Labour leader had the audience in stitches as he recounted his own experiences of the largest demo in British history, against invading Iraq on February 15 2003; he had agreed to speak at an anti-war demo in San Francisco 24 hours later and spent an evening shivering in the New York snow as his late friend Mike Marqusee, in whose flat he was meant to spend the night, was partying too loud with comrades fresh from that city’s demo to hear that he had arrived.