Matthew Tempest

It’s time to look east January 2004
The contrast could hardly have been more stark. Tony Blair began his 'big conversation' at the end of November with a 40-minute lecture accompanied by a team of Guardian journalists, a smattering of rolling TV news cameras and what appeared to be an audience consisting of Labour councillors and party members. Two weeks earlier 60,000 young Europeans had been engaged in their own big conversation at the European Social Forum (ESF) in Paris.