I want to start with the speech that Tony Blair made a week ago tonight in the Sedgefield constituency, because I think it was an important speech for two reasons.

First of all, it was an important speech because it granted a victory to the anti-war movement. After months of saying that the government wanted to move on from the Iraq issue; that people were bored with the Iraq issue; that it was time to get back to the domestic agenda - although quite why a government with such an appalling domestic agenda to get back to would be in such a hurry I don't know! Anyway, that's what they've been saying for months now. Most of all what they've been saying, on practically every news bulletin that you can see a government spokesman on, is that they want to draw a line under Iraq.

Well, in his speech a week ago, the prime minister said that that wasn't possible. It simply wasn't possible to draw a line under Iraq, he understood that lots of people in the country were still disturbed and agitated and disagreed with the government on this question, so it was no longer possible to draw a line under the Iraq question. Now these kind of things get said and passed by in 24 hours, but it's important that we realise when our opponents have just granted us a victory - and Tony Blair granted us a victory in that speech. Because it's not true that governments haven't, in the past, and not inconceivable that they could, in the present, commit absolutely monstrous crimes, tell absolutely unbelievable lies, and get away with it. Plenty of governments have done that in the past, but this government, on this issue, can't do that, has failed to do that. And it's failed to do that because the conditions under which it is impossible for a government to get away with those kind of things are the conditions where a huge mass movement of organised, politicised, mobilised working people decide not to let them. And that's what we've done. We haven't allowed them to draw a line under the Iraq war. We haven't allowed them to move on. We haven't forgotten, and we won't forgive, what the government did in Iraq. And that admission by the prime minister is something that should encourage every person who has participated in demonstrations, everyone who has turned out in the literally tens of thousands of meetings that we've held since we launched the Stop the War Coalition, everybody who's been engaged in activity, because we have changed the political landscape. And one of the ways, most recently, that we've done that, is that we've stopped the government simply forgetting about this and moving on to other business. And that's also of course what the demonstration on 20th March is about.

But there was also, in that speech in Sedgefield, a threat. A threat not just to those of us in the anti-war movement, but a threat to the vast majority of ordinary people in this country and internationally. And the threat was this: it was that the British government has now adopted, in that speech, the foreign policy of the Bush administration: the foreign policy of the pre-emptive strike. Tony Blair's case was that terrorism is such a threat, that we live in a new world completely different from the old order, and the pre-emptive action has to be a doctrine which is at the heart of British, and by implication, other nations' defence strategy. And this is a hugely dangerous change in the government's stance, because the whole idea, the whole notion, of - what was the first term that the Americans used for it? - "pre-emptive retaliation," now that is of course an oxymoron: you can only retaliate after something's been done to you, you can't pre-emptively retaliate, but that illogicality is now at the heart of British government. And we're supposed to accept this from a prime minister whose defence of his past actions, his defence of his actions in Iraq, is that although we might not have agreed with him, we have to agree that he didn't lie to us. It wasn't a lack of trust - this is what he said in his speech - that was at the heart of this. If we disagree with him, then we can't disagree with him on this basis (this is in my view a curious way to debate, when you tell your opponents what they are and aren't allowed to disagree with you about, but this is the Labour spin machine after all!) but we are allowed to disagree with him on questions of judgement. It wasn't lack of trust, he's not a liar, but we are allowed to disagree with him on his judgements.

Well OK, it's a slightly circumscribed field of debate, but let's just take it at face value. It was his judgement that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was a completely false judgement on the part of the British government and the British prime minister. It was his judgement that there was a link between Al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. That judgement has been proved completely and utterly false. It was his judgement that the British and American troops sent to fight the war in Iraq would be greeted as liberators, not as conquerors. That judgement was completely and utterly wrong. It was his judgement that in short order, the Iraqi people would rule themselves; that there would be free elections in Iraq. It is now clear, not just that that judgement was wrong, but that those of us who said that this would not be the outcome of the war, have been proved absolutely right. And moreover, the leading Sunni cleric in Iraq, the leading Shia cleric in Iraq, even Ahmed Chalabi, the hand-picked head of the puppet government in Iraq, now says there could be free elections in June if the Americans had the political willpower to do it. But there aren't going to be free elections in Iraq, there's going to be a second hand-picked American-backed [government]. American troops, British troops still on the ground - that's going to be the situation in June and, as the foreign secretary Jack Straw has let slip, for at least 5 years to come. So that too was a massive error of judgement.

And finally, the argument was - and it's important to stress this today in the wake of the huge distruction, the massive, the horrible carnage in Madrid - it was [that] the judgement of this prime minister that the invasion of Iraq would lessen the threat of terorism in the west and internationally. And whatever else was wrong in those judgements, it is absolutely obvious today that it has made those countries - Spain, this country - targets for terrorism because they participated in, because they were a party to, because they have invaded, somebody else's country. And how else would it likely have turned out? How could it be that you would imagine that you send the most powerful armed forces in the world to destroy and invade somebody else's country, in the heart of the most unstable part of the world, and then imagine that there will not be military consequences, that there will not be an attempt by those people - even if they don't have your army, if they blatantly obviously don't have your weaponry, even if they can't launch a catapult at 45 minutes' notice - that they will find a way of striking back. And that is exactly what has now happened. And if there were nothing else to condemn this government for, that would be sufficient. And it's for all these reasons that we return to the streets on 20th March. There is only one thing that a prime minister who takes a country to war on a lie should do - that causes the death of their own soldiers, and of far more innocent people in the country you invaded - only one thing that a prime minister that does that should do, and that is to get out of office at the earliest possible opportunity. And it is pursuing that business that we do on 20th March. Because no other political force in this country will do that. This business of holding the government to account, is the business, primarily, of the anti-war movement. I don't think it will come from any other point on the political spectrum. I don't think it will come from within the Labour party , and I don't think - well y'know the development in the Tory party is quite an interesting thing isn't it? You know, Margaret Thatcher once said that her greatest achievement was New Labour. I think that those of us in the anti-war movement might equally say that our greatest achievement is the anti-war Tory party led by Michael Howard. I mean, these are the people who made the war possible. They voted for the war, if they hadn't voted for the war, if they'd voted with the rebel Labour MPs, they wouldn't have got the majority in parliament, we wouldn't be at war. And so the transmogrification of Michael Howard's party into a critic of the government on the question of the war, is solely to do with the business that the anti-war movement convinced a majority of its fellow citizens that the war was wrong - that's what that's about.

And so it lies with us now to conclude this business with the government, and it's more than just about international policy, because the threat of terrorism is being used to ramp up one of the most systematic offensives against civil liberties and democratic rights that I can remember - and I can remember back through the miners' strike, and the states of emergencies in the 1970s - but I'll tell you, in none of the cases - not in the Irish war - in none of those cases did you have a piece of legislation, like the Civil Contigencies Bill, going though parliament, which gives the government, without recourse to a vote in the House of Commons, the ability to suspend democratic rights and human liberties; to ban demonstrations; to arrest people just going to a demonstration; to seize and destroy private property. And that's only one part of it. That's not the Terrorism Bill, that's not the three asylum bills. This business is about our liberites as well as the war abroad. For all these reasons we have to sustain a movement, which in my mind is not like a normal single-issue campaign that many of us have been involved in. It's much more like the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s. Formerly, that too was a single-issue campaign. But in reality, when we look back on it, when the historians write about it, they talk about a movement which lasted so long, which mobilised on so many different fronts, whose campaigns touched on so many critical issues at the heart of society, that it became much more than that. And we too are much more than that. So if you are a trade unionist, go back to your fellow trade unionists, go back to your workmates, go back to the people in your communities, in your churches, in your mosques, and tell them that we are the people who stand between the government and future wars, between the government and the erosion of civil liberties. And 20th March is where we have the chance once again to shape our own future.