12.02.2004

'Old' as good as 'new'

European Social Forum

As the SWP had not been able to mobilise quite as many of its members to the latest meeting of the UK organising committee as previously, they lost on a rather emotive issue. With their GLA allies, the comrades attempted to immediately close down the ‘old’ ESF programme group in favour of a newly established group, which would be far better, far bigger and “far more representative”, as comrade Jonathan Neale (Globalise Resistance/SWP) argued. But why we should expect those who have shown no interest in the ESF programme one week to come on board the next remains a mystery.

The ‘old’ group had successfully been meeting since December and discussing, amongst other things, methods to decide on speakers for the ESF and how we could facilitate the staging of meetings by organisations from across the world. Between 20 and 40 people had been attending, representing a wide range of groups. According to Redmond O’Neill, though, this was “simply a small group of self-selected people. There is no way that serious organisations will get involved in this most sensitive group if it has been hijacked by one particular political outlook.” I somehow doubt he meant the GR/SWP, although it has been by far the largest group attending.

The reason for wanting the group abolished is quite clear. For some reason, the GLA had not managed to attend any of the working group meetings and therefore had had zero impact. Undoubtedly, it will send a number of representatives to all gatherings of the ‘new’ group to ensure that it does not make any decisions not to Ken’s liking.

Dave Timms from the World Development Movement, who has played a positive role in trying to maintain some democracy within the ESF process, was finally able to convince the majority of people at the organising committee that the work of the programme group should not just be thrown into the bin. Dave’s compromise, which was backed by Hannah Griffiths from Friends of the Earth and Hilary Wainwright of Red Pepper, was declared the ‘consensus’ by chair Alex Gordon (RMT), against the protests of GR/SWP and GLA. According to this, the ‘old’ programme group would meet one last time the following Sunday to “wrap up its work” in order to be able to report back to the organising committee the following week. Of course, the underlying implication was that the group would be in the position to present some authoritative recommendations on how to move forward.

About 40 people attended the last meeting of the ‘old’ programme group on February 10, which opened with Jonathan Neale giving a rather dishonest report-back from the OC. He stressed the positive attitude the majority of people in the meeting had towards the work of the programme group, conveniently forgetting that he was most certainly not amongst them.

We moved on to discuss the timetable and format of the programmatic aspect of the ESF, and reached consensus on a number of important recommendations. We agreed, for example, that we should have fewer plenary sessions with fewer speakers on the platform. In Paris and Florence, top tables were often overloaded with up to 12 speakers, sometimes making identical points. We will also recommend that our website should facilitate interactive communication between various organisations so that they would be encouraged to internationally discuss their political ideas - and then stage real debates during the ESF.

This is of extreme importance if we are really interested in facilitating the coming together of the European left. Surely, at a time where our ruling classes are moving towards the creation of a European superstate, we have no time to lose when it comes to building our own, continent-wide structures.

There was consensus (including from the SWP) that workshops should be centrally facilitated - a clear rebuttal of the proposals from Dave Holland (Livingstone’s appointed manager for European and international affairs) and Redmond O’Neill, who had claimed that workshops must be “self-organised”, implying that it would be up to organising groups - for example, those based in Spain or Poland - to find their own venues in London.

The ‘new’ programme group should be able to get off the ground efficiently on the basis of the good work already done - and will undoubtedly carry on with an identical composition to the ‘old’ one. With the addition of our friends from the GLA, of course.