Maybe a thousand protesters gathered at short notice outside 10 Downing Street on 13 December to protest against Putin's and Assad's bombardment of Aleppo.

Many of the protesters may have been Syrians living in London, but visibly the majority were not: they were people of all backgrounds who had rallied to protest against the atrocities and solidarise with the civilian population of Aleppo.

There were placards that suggested UK military action in Syria, such as "No-Bomb Zone Now", but the main focus was on non-military aid for the civilian population.

I asked a film crew who were doing short interviews with protesters what answers they'd got to their question about what they expected to achieve in terms of UK government action, and the film crew replied that most people had answered: nothing.

They were protesting to show that the atrocities in Aleppo would not pass with a complaisant shrug, and so that Putin and Assad and their friends in the West could not think that their crimes go unmarked. Such protests are doubly important now, with the Putin-friendly Donald Trump about to become president of the USA.

As far as I could observe, no left-wing group was there apart from Workers' Liberty.