13.10.2004

Democratic deficit: Whose ESF is it anyway?

Stich ups, backroom dealings and bureaucratic shennanigans - a small selection of some of our favourites during the last 12 months

Right from the start, London mayor Ken Livingstone has exercised increasingly tight control over the preparations for this week’s forum - mostly via the Socialist Action group (see ‘Guide to the British left’) and their allies in the Socialist Workers Party.

To understand what has been going on, one must be aware of the sorry state of the small British left. Divided into many sects along various ideological fault lines, its influence in trade unions, local authorities or the working class is much less than it ought to be. With around 1,200 members, the SWP is usually thought of as the largest leftwing group in Britain - though the Scottish Socialist Party boasts some 3,000 members on paper. Obviously, the SWP is tiny, compared with, for example, Italy’s Rifondazione Comunista or the Communist Party of France - parties which are themselves inadequate, of course.

Money (or rather the lack of it) was always the crucial sore point, as our trade unions and local councils were not likely to come up with more than token amounts. For example, donations from a number British trade unions have taken the form of paying for members to attend the event.

At the first two ESFs, the organisers received millions of euros from local councils, which did not ask for much in return. This year, however, the £500,000 donation from Livingstone’s Greater London Authority has bought London’s mayor political and organisational control over the ESF itself. The SWP comrades have disgracefully gone along with Livingstone and his supporters in Socialist Action - no doubt in order to get a taste of the ‘big time’ and to present themselves as serious players on the European left.

All other organisations and individuals have been pushed aside - and most of them regrouped into the ‘democratic opposition’. While we were not able to change the fundamental character of this year’s ESF, we were able to expose the undemocratic shenanigans and stitch-ups.

These are just some of the problems of this year’s ESF:

- Secret budget: The budget of the ESF has been controlled in its entirety by the GLA and leading Socialist Action member Redmond O’Neill (who is Livingstone’s appointed adviser for transport, earning a whopping £111,000 or €160,000 a year). For months, the democratic opposition was denied any access to the figures, let alone allowed to discuss or change them. Only a few weeks ago were we actually shown budgetary overheads - by which time, of course, it was too late to challenge any of the expenditure.

- No finance working group: Although an ESF organising committee meeting made the decision many months ago to establish a ‘finance working group’ (FWG), this was never implemented. The reason? The job of drawing up a list of potential FWG members was handed over to Kate Hudson, chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a member of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain. For weeks, she was on holiday, then at a conference, then ill, then she had forgotten the list … in short: it never happened. All financial and organisational decisions were taken by Redmond O’Neill and his comrades in the GLA and ESF offices.

- Expensive ESF website: The inadequate and boring ESF website has cost a staggering £40,000 (€60,000) to set up and run - but the decision to hand over the contract to GreenNet was not once discussed in an ESF meeting, let alone authorised by ESF activists. As a comparison: last year’s website cost around €1,000 and was run by volunteers alone. True, there were problems with its functioning, but surely we have enough website-savvy people amongst us who could have done a good job for a fraction of the money. In fact, various semi-professional web designers offered their services for free - and were turned down. Spending so much money on one item means, of course, that there is less or no money for other things: up to 10 organisations had to be merged into a single seminar, because there was no cash to hire more meeting spaces.

- Exclusions and censorship: Not only were ESF activists not allowed to make any decisions on how the GLA’s ‘donation’ was to be spent - they were also not allowed to know any details. SA-SWP demanded that there should be a ban on reporting any financial details (and many other things that had nothing to do with finance). Even when the Conservative Party had already published details of the GLA’s contribution, those in control of the ESF still demanded that the Weekly Worker should be prevented from publishing the information.

The democratic opposition fought tooth and nail against this kind of censorship, but we were excluded twice from the coordinating committee when financial details were discussed. Of course, this hardly stopped me finding out about those details, as there were plenty of others who wanted to make sure ESF activists were kept in the know via the Weekly Worker. Reporting on such details was of course not aimed at “disrupting” or “damaging” the ESF, as the SWP’s Chris Nineham has repeatedly claimed. On the contrary: the left must clearly reject all such bureaucratic attempts to hide important information. Openness and accountable decision-making must be at the basis of all of our structures.

- Total control: GLA employee Deborah Dickey was appointed ‘ESF office manager’ - by the GLA itself, of course. Not once did she attend any ESF meeting, but this did not stop her taking it upon herself to make crucial day-to-day decisions. A number of times she single-handedly overruled decisions of the ESF coordinating committee: for example. when it came to paying a comrade who was organising an ESF intervention at Notting Hill carnival. She thought it was an “unnecessary expense” and refused to write out a cheque. When the next coordinating committee censured her action, the time was too short to organise the action properly and it had to be cancelled.

- The demo: The last ESF preparatory assembly before the ESF decided that the theme of Sunday’s demonstration should be ‘For another Europe in another world’ and ‘No to privatisations, no to war: for a social Europe’. Comrades from the SWP tried in vain to convince the assembly that the theme should focus on the war on Iraq and November‘s US elections (ever since the Stop the War Coalition called the demonstration on February 15 2003, which was attended by almost two million people, it has viewed the theme of the war as some kind of ‘magic formula’). It has also made its position on the European Union and its constitution very clear: it is “boring” and a “non-issue”.

So, without informing any official ESF body, the SWP simply handed over the demo to the Stop the War Coalition. Neither the ESF website nor ESF publicity material has even mentioned our demo. Not only that: the STWC has also changed the theme, which now reads, ‘Time to go: Bush out! Troops out!’ Not even on the back of the leaflet has space been found to reproduce the ESF slogans agreed in Brussels.

Only after our European comrades had been made aware of this fact - and launched a protest - did the SWP-SA agree to produce an ESF leaflet that actually advertises the demo … three days before the event .