Perhaps it was too much to expect given the immediacy of the Oscars, the state of Britney’s mental health and Margaret Beckett’s back-stabbing of her cabinet colleagues, but more than a hundred thousand people from across the UK and Europe marched in London on Saturday against Trident, the war in Iraq and the potential war in Iran and the media coverage was practically zilch.

Does it matter? I think it does because the marchers – all ages, colours, creeds and backgrounds – represent a constituency rarely permitted on the public platform, stuffed as it is to overflowing with politicians, “experts” and analysts who too often talk about events in Baghdad, Basra and Tehran like dispassionate accountants.

“Bush, Blair and the CIA, how many kids did you kill today?” may lack subtlety, but yelled by several thousand people, as one, it expresses the visceral rage and frustration that is too often absent from Westminster and the radio and television studios where passion in politics is thoroughly doused.

The lack of coverage of the march is also, in effect, smothering the voice of dissent. It is a conscious concealment of the power of the people – not all of the people but some of the people; surely as valid a group as the thousand voices polled by YouGov who are asked questions tailored to construct a “truth” then given acres of print in the media.

We found ourselves marching behind Rhythms of Resistance, an international “network of percussive resistance” that play the same drum rhythms in “baterias”, dressed in pink and silver, at anti-capitalist demonstrations and forms of direct action, adopting the face of street carnival. The drummers were terrific.

Rhythms of Resistance began in 2000 as part of the UK Earth First action against the IMF/World Bank in Prague in 2000. A 55-piece band playing drums and instruments that have their origins in Afro and Brazilian samba bands, helped to shut down the IMF meeting.

As they march, the mestres – or conductors – who constantly democratically swap around, direct changes of tempos and compositions, with a series of highly energetic hand signals. At one point on the march, the mestre, facing exotically plumed and decorated musicians, looked bizarrely like Prince William, in a maroon pullover and horn-rimmed glasses, energetically directing drummers who included: a man aged 78; expensively dressed Italian hippies; Crusties; teenagers; mothers with children; and a twelve-year-old girl – samba subversives all.

As the march illustrated so clearly, Blair’s delusions have made political friends of the most unlikely people.

Later I looked up the group’s website. It read, in part, “The feeling we get from being a part of a cohesive group that might not necessarily agree on everything but is united and can show its solidarity generates a real feeling of community … an expression of resistance itself.”

Saturday’s march, exhilarating and empowering, was just such an expression of resistance. Yet, because of the lack of media coverage, in the UK, we might as well have been an army of ghosts.