To all those shocked by revelations that quotas are being used to limit certain types of tenants from accessing new social housing in London’s Kings Cross Central development, I’ve got some bad news for you – this is what the future of social housing looks like in the Big Society.

Since coming to power in May 2010, the Coalition has gone to war on social housing and social tenants, especially in England and Wales, where the Localism Act 2011 mainly applies. Localism was sold to us by the Minister for Decentralisation, Greg Clark, as a new contract between people and the state to enable “a huge shift in power – from central Whitehall, to local public servants, and from bureaucrats to communities and individuals”

Sounds great, but as the Kings Cross scandal reveals, Localism in practice means something more sinister – the freedom for councils to abandon their social duty to house those in greatest need on the diktats of private developers who, like the Chief Whip, don’t want too many ‘plebs’ mixing with the new urban gentry.

The Localism Act is a charter for transforming social housing from the most secure and affordable form of shelter to a highly conditionalised and temporary tenure whose inhabitants need to express daily gratitude for the taxpayer’s generous hand. Social landlords can now restrict access to housing waiting lists on grounds of “need”, give priority on moral grounds to particular groups of “deserving”citizens, like service personnel and their families, on grounds of their sacrifice to the nation, and draw on greater powers to evict their anti-social tenants including convictions for the sort of criminality seen in the recent rioting.

Most significant of all is how the massive cuts in subsidies for new social house building – which has decimated supply when 1.8m households are languishing on council waiting lists, nearly 70% more than a decade ago – have been used to attack security of tenure and controls on rents in England and Wales. To get a grant, social landlords are being forced to build a more expensive, less secure form of housing called “Affordable Rent” with rents reaching 80% of local market levels and ‘flexible’ tenancies only legally guaranteed for two years instead of for life as before. The abolition of statutory lifetime tenancies has since been extended to all new social tenants from April 2012.

Less well known is that local councils and housing associations can also convert a proportion of their existing stock to Affordable Rent when they re-let homes, meaning that secure, low-rent social homes will be gradually replaced by far more expensive, insecure properties with dire implications for low-income tenants in London particularly.
Orwellian

If this sounds bad, wait until the ‘bedroom tax’ bites: from April 2013, welfare reform measures that have already cut housing benefit in the private rental sector will see “under-occupying” social tenants of working age across the UK lose 14% of their housing benefit for having one surplus bedroom and 25% for two or more. The government’s own figures – which almost always under-state the real impact – suggest that 660,000 households will lose on average £14 a week with 120,000 households losing more than £20 per week. Ministers, well-versed in Orwellian double-speak, say it’s all about fairness – to the taxpayers’ subsidising the ‘spare rooms’ and to those forced to live in overcrowded conditions or on waiting lists by the under-occupiers. But this is just nonsense. For families affected, what the state defines as a spare room will typically be a child’s bedroom; for many single tenants, this will have either been their home for decades or the only available home they were offered at the time due to the chronic shortages of social housing that resulted from earlier waves of privatisation and cuts.

Tenants will be forced to choose between greater poverty or moving home – but where will they go? Perhaps in the Coalition’s fantasy world, under-occupiers will magically swap with over-occupiers but in the real world this can’t happen for two simple reasons.

First, there is a general shortage of single occupancy social housing so people can’t downsize; and secondly, most of the over-crowding is in the South and most of the under-occupancy is in the North.

The Department for Work and Pensions’ own impact assessment spells out the consequences: “individuals may have to look further a field for appropriately sized accommodation or move to the private rented sector, otherwise they shall need to meet the shortfall through other means such as employment, using savings or by taking in a lodger or sub-tenant”.
Tears

When I spoke recently to a tenant in Leeds already suffering from depression and unable to work and now faced with this appalling choice, she broke down in tears and said she was thinking about killing herself , such was her anguish at the thought of being forced to either share her home with a total stranger or be moved out of her home and away from her friends and survival networks.

Deliberately misrepresenting social housing as the only subsidised tenure underpins the idea that under-occupancy is a social housing problem when official statistics show the phenomenon is far more acute in both the private rental and owner occupier sectors. It also underpins the Coalition’s tactic of associating social tenants as scroungers and social housing tenure as a cause of social disadvantage, when a key aim of Thatcherism was to ensure only households with the most acute social disadvantage could acquire a social housing tenancy.

Despite the obvious under-supply of social housing across the country, and most acutely in London, the Coalition wants us to believe that the real problem for this shortage lies within the social rented sector itself. How different it all looks now from David Cameron’s promise, just a week before the May 2010 General Election, that a Conservative Prime Minister would “support social housing… protect it, and…respect social tenants’ rights”. Not to mention his manifesto vow not to “allow the poorest people in Britain to pay an unfair price for the mistakes of some of the richest”

The post-election truth is that this was all pre-election subterfuge – a carefully planned PR operation by the Conservatives who dominate this Coalition to hide their real intentions of aggressively continuing and deepening the long-term assault on social housing and the welfare state that in many ways defined the Thatcherite project of neoliberalism.  Privatising public housing and eroding the hard-won rights of tenants has been central to this neo-liberal project precisely because of what social housing has historically represented – the most secure and affordable form of shelter that simultaneously curtails profit-making opportunities while rendering people less prone to flexible exploitation as workers. And this is exactly why the government of millionaires wants to destroy what’s left of it.

This article was originally published here in The Independent online, Monday 1 October

Today (27 March), the House of Lords is debating for the final time a proposed new law to criminalise squatting in unoccupied residential buildings in England and Wales.

It’s a curious move during the worst housing crisis in modern memory, to turn homeless people who shelter in empty homes into criminals looking at a year in prison or a £5000 fine. This from the government whose leader promised that austerity would not hurt “the vulnerable, the poorest in our society”.

The Conservatives who dominate this Coalition of millionaires present their war on squatting as a moral crusade to “protect the rights of regular hard-working homeowners” against a transient underclass hooked on drugs and alcohol bent on destroying their homes.

But this is all smoke and mirrors. While people who return from holiday to find a group of strangers occupying their home deserve our sympathy, it rarely happens if ever. When it does, the Law Society makes clear “the current law is sufficient to protect homeowners”, a point endorsed by the Metropolitan Police and 160 leading legal experts in an open letter to the Government.

Squatting is not a social crime – it tends to be a last resort response of homeless people to a systemic failure of housing provision made worse by more than 30 years of neoliberal policies intent on removing the hard won welfare gains of the post-war era. Probably no more than 2% of England’s scandalous 720,000 empty properties are affected.

The real purpose of criminalisation is the same motive that underpins the vicious class war policies that define this government: to defend and enhance private property rights over the human right to shelter.

Since coming to power in May 2010, the Coalition has set about rapidly dismantling what remains of the post-war housing safety net while boosting the property sector. Alongside the massive cuts to housing benefit, public funding for social housing has been slashed amid a new push to privatise what’s left of our precious public housing stock under a revived Right to Buy. Local authorities’ powers to bring empty homes back into use have also been watered down, protecting the companies who own most of them.

When combined with the wider austerity and welfare reform programme, these policies will inevitably create a new generation of mass homelessness and rough sleeping. It is no accident that official homeless numbers have jumped up 14% in the last year.

The costs of denying people the option of using homes abandoned by their owners will fall on housing authorities and homelessness services – and ultimately the taxpayer. A recent study by the squatters’ group, SQUASH, endorsed by legal practitioners and academics including myself found these costs could be as much as £790m in the first five years, over 30 times greater than the government’s estimate which failed to adequately quantify the squatting population or include the enormous housing and welfare costs of making squatters homeless.

No wonder the proposed legislation has moved through Parliament at lightning speed, slipped it in at a late stage in the Commons with concerned Lords struggling to have it heard properly as they drown in the historic legislative onslaught of recent weeks.

“It is quite wrong that something that has been introduced so recently, and where a substantial number of people in a consultation—90% of them—were opposed to it, is being put through in this way,” noted MP Kate Hoey. “We are abrogating our duty and our responsibilities as Members of Parliament if we allow this measure to go through…”

Yet this is how our laws are made today by a government that promised to get out of people’s lives but in reality is extending punitive state control over the most vulnerable in unprecedented ways.

To their credit, a number of Lords are attempting to have the issue considered diligently. Several reasonable amendments are on the table, including one to exclude buildings left empty for 12 months or more. This amendment has received support from Labour’s Shadow Justice Lord Bach, who in debate called the legal instrument being used to criminalise squatting a “ridiculous, silly clause”.

Criminalising squatting is not about moral duty – if anything it’s a pre-emptive strike against the legions of dispossessed and repossessed heading our way. If this law, founded on almost total misinformation, is passed, it will mean more people on the streets and in prison while encouraging 100,000s of empty properties to remain empty. Now that’s criminal.

Stuart can be contacted at: s.n.hodkinson@leeds.ac.uk

Six days later, in the shadow of the 7 July bombs that ripped through central London, the Gleneagles summit ended to a chorus of rock star cheers. ‘This has been the most important summit there ever has been for Africa,’ Bob Geldof confidently stated at the post-summit press conference. ‘There are no equivocations. Africa and the poor of that continent have got more from the last three days than they have ever got at any previous summit … On aid, ten out of ten. On debt, eight out of ten. On trade … it is quite clear that this summit, uniquely, decided that enforced liberalisation must no longer take place,” he said, before finishing with a flourish. ‘That is a serious, excellent result on trade.’ Bono, voice cracking with emotion, concurred: ‘We are talking about $25 billion of new money … The world spoke and the politicians listened.’

Assembled journalists and campaigners broke into spontaneous applause; the next day’s media coverage led with Geldof’s ‘mission accomplished’ verdict. But as the millions who signed up to Make Poverty History and Live 8 no doubt rejoiced, inside the upper echelons of MPH all hell was breaking loose. ‘They’ve shafted us,’ a press officer from a UK development NGO screamed down the phone. Indeed they had. Moments earlier, Kumi Naidoo, the veteran South African anti-apartheid campaigner and current chair of MPH’s international umbrella, the Global Call to Action against Poverty (G-CAP), had delivered the coalition’s official response: ‘The people have roared but the G8 has whispered. The promise to deliver [more aid] by 2010 is like waiting five years before responding to the tsunami.’

Having pored over leaked drafts of the G8 communiqué into the early hours, MPH officials knew that the G8′s announcements on aid, trade and debt were not only grossly inadequate to help poor countries reach the UN’s millennium development goals by 2015. They were also completely bogus – and they had briefed the rock stars to that effect. More than half of the promised $50 billion in aid – which wouldn’t kick in until 2010 – wasn’t really new money at all, but a dishonest amalgam of old pledges, future aid budgets and debt relief. And despite agreeing that ‘poor countries should be free to determine their own economic policies’, only Britain had announced it would no longer tie overseas aid to free market reforms – a promise it would instantly break in the G8 debt deal. The US, in contrast, had made it immediately clear at Gleneagles that aid increases would require ‘reciprocal liberalisation’ by developing countries. Worse, as Yifat Susskind, associate director of the US-based women’s human rights organisation, Madre, explains, Bush’s ‘millennium challenge account’, specifically praised by Bono and Geldof, ‘explicitly ties aid to cooperation in the US’s “war on terror”‘.

The much lauded June G7 (G8 minus Russia) finance ministers’ ‘$55 billion’ debt deal, in which 18 countries – 14 of them African – would receive ’100 per cent multilateral debt cancellation’, with 20 more countries soon to follow, was a similar pop star-veiled deception. In reality, the G7 had only agreed to take over the debt repayments of those countries to just three of world’s 19 multilateral creditors – the IMF, World Bank and the African Development Bank (ADB) – meaning they would continue to be saddled with crippling debts owed to the other 16.

What’s more, the $55 billion figure would in reality be worth little more than $1billion a year – the amount paid out in annual interest payments to the World Bank, IMF and ADB by the 18 countries as a whole. To put this in context, African countries alone have a staggering $295 billion official debt stock, having already paid back $550 billion in interest on a total of $540 billion in loans between 1970 and 2002. In 2003, developing countries paid out a crippling $23.6 billion in debt servicing.

Despite the G8′s promise that debt relief would be ‘unconditional’, the 18 countries selected had just completed nine years of neoliberal structural adjustment under the IMF/World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) scheme, which has typically increased poverty and inequality at the same time as privatising and liberalising large swathes of their economies. The 20 countries additionally earmarked for debt cancellation must now also submit to the HIPC process. Incredibly, for every dollar received in debt relief, poor countries will receive an equivalent dollar reduction in aid.

As Eric Toussaint, of the Belgium-based Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt (CADTM), argues: ‘This precious funding will only be returned if countries meet “specific policy criteria” – more long years of privatisation and liberalisation that increases school fees, health-care costs and VAT, removes subsidies for basic products and creates unfair competition between local producers and transnational corporations, all of which hurts the poor. For Geldof to stand there and say that conditionality is over was a complete lie.’

The same is true of trade. Contrary to Geldof, the G8 did not decide that from now on rich countries would no longer force through neoliberal trade policies in developing countries ahead of 6 December’s World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Hong Kong. According to Martin Khor, of Third World Network, the influential international research and advocacy body based in Malaysia: ‘The G8 summit did not indicate any change of heart from the aggressive campaign their negotiators are pursuing in talks to rapidly open up the developing countries’ agricultural, industrial and services sectors.’

All in all, despite nearly a year of intense lobbying and campaigning for G8 countries to change course in order to meet the UN’s millenium development goals, Gleneagles, in the words of Christian Aid’s Claire Melamed, was a ‘grave disappointment’. Senegalese economist Demba Moussa Dembele, of the African Forum on Alternatives, puts it more forcefully: ‘People must not be fooled by the celebrities: Africa got nothing.’

Given this assessment, Geldof and Bono’s misrepresentation of the G8 deal at the post-summit press conference came as a severe blow to many within MPH. Helped by four British Muslim suicide bombers in London, the rock stars ensured that the issues of Africa, poverty and development disappeared from the media spotlight within days of the summit’s end. Four months on, and despite the disaster of the G8 for worldwide efforts to eradicate poverty, the silence of MPH is deafening.

Contrary to appearances, however, the coalition has not disbanded. In fact, it has decided to carry on as a campaigning movement after the Hong Kong WTO ministerial meeting in December. Inside the coalition, moreover, there is anything but silence. In the depressing aftermath of Gleneagles, the political disagreements that gripped MPH during the spring and summer months (revealed in July’s Red Pepper) between the powerful grouping of government-friendly aid agencies and charities effectively running MPH, led by Oxfam and including CAFOD, Save the Children Fund and Comic Relief, and the more progressive yet smaller NGOs like War on Want and the World Development Movement, have escalated. But this time, the unhappiness at how MPH has been manoeuvred so closely to New Labour by leading charities and celebrities stretches way beyond the coalition’s radical fringe.

‘The campaign has been too superficial,’ argues Christian Aid’s head of policy, Charles Abugre. ‘Numbers have been more important than politics and we have placed too much emphasis on celebrities with strong connections to those in power. Consequently, a serious occasion was turned into a celebration of celebrities.’

In July, Red Pepper reported how critical policy positions and stances agreed within the coalition were being lost in the ‘public messaging’ thanks to the efforts of Oxfam and film-maker Richard Curtis. Instead of criticising Blair and Brown, MPH spin doctors and their cast of celebrities were going out of their way to praise them. The news that MPH was organising a massive demonstration in Edinburgh on the eve of the G8 was quickly corrected by MPH spin doctors as a ‘walk … to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland … The emphasis is on fun in the sun.’

Since then, Red Pepper has learned that right up until the early hours of 8 July, members of MPH’s coordinating team were having to face down a desperate last-ditch effort from within to secure a positive civil society reaction to the G8 communiqué. According to one insider, this came after weeks of internal pressure on some NGOs to ‘clear delicate stories with the Treasury’, and attempts by Justin Forsyth, Oxfam’s former policy chief turned Downing St special advisor, to pressure leading NGO officials ‘to refrain from criticising the government’ as it became increasingly obvious that the Gleneagles outcome would not be ‘historic’. Following Forsyth’s anger at Kumi Naidoo’s negative assessment of the G8 at the post-summit press conference, the pair had to be ‘physically separated’ backstage.

The debate is most intense over the organisation of Live 8, which to many has come to symbolise the damaging behaviour of Geldof, Bono and Richard Curtis. ‘There were millions of people watching the concerts, but what was the analysis? What was the message?’ asks Charles Abugre, who believes Make Poverty History’s methodology set the tone for the Live 8 whitewash. ‘It was one of handouts and charity, not one of liberation defined by Africans themselves or the reality that we are actually resisting neo-colonialism and neoliberalism ourselves.’

While much has been written in the mainstream press about how Live 8 came to happen, there has been little coverage of how bitterly most MPH members still feel about the concerts, which were secretly organised behind their backs by Geldof and Curtis with the full knowledge of Oxfam, Comic Relief and the Treasury. This is not just because they completely overshadowed MPH’s own rally in Edinburgh on 2 July. Campaigners feel that Live 8 and Geldof hijacked the MPH campaign for a very different cause. Their focus was not on global poverty, but Africa. And their demands were not those of MPH, but of the Commission for Africa, a government-sponsored think-tank whose members, hand-picked by Blair and Brown, were described by Professor Paul Cammack, writing in these pages, as a ‘web of bankers, industrialists and political leaders with connections to the IMF and the World Bank, all committed to spreading the gospel of free market capitalism’.

The coalition’s anger at the Live 8 organisers has intensified over revelations about their paternalistic treatment of African campaigners and their relationship to corporations operating in Africa. Firoze Manji, the co-director of Fahamu, an African social justice network and member of G-CAP, recounts how the African coalition had already planned a concert in Johannesburg in early July to be held in one of the townships to encourage maximum participation of the people who suffer the greatest effects of globalisation and neoliberal policies. However, according to Manji, a private meeting in London of Oxfam GB, Curtis, Geldof and Kumi Naidoo, G-CAP chair and director of Civicus, the South African-based global alliance for citizen participation, unilaterally cancelled the original concert in favour of the Live 8 event, throwing the African coalition into disarray. The concert, which cost some $500,000 to stage, was attended by just 4,000 people.

Back in Britain, having excluded African artists from the main London concert, saying Live 8 was ‘not a cultural event’ and only musicians with more than four million record sales could play, lest people would ‘switch off’, Geldof eventually gave his blessing to ‘Africa Calling’. This was a hastily arranged, low-key Live 8 concert in Cornwall featuring African artists that was attended by just 5,000 people. Scandalously, the corporate sponsors assembled by the organisers included: Nestlé, accused of exploiting the HIV/Aids epidemic in Africa to sell more milk substitute products to infected mothers; Rio Tinto, the world’s largest mining corporation, widely condemned for its longstanding record of human rights and environmental abuses across the global South; and Britain’s biggest arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, whose export-led agenda, according Mike Lewis of the UK’s Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), is ‘fuelling conflicts across Africa, with catastrophic impacts on development, and diverting spending away from health and education’.

There is now growing pressure coming from inside the coalition to distance itself from the celebrity set. This has particularly angered Oxfam, and insiders believe that the aid agency will now lead a break away split from MPH, taking Comic Relief and Bono’s charity, Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa (DATA), with it. Given Oxfam’s avowedly free trade solutions to third world poverty, and, along with Comic Relief’s Richard Curtis, Bono and Geldof, its leadership’s uncomfortably close relationship to New Labour, this scenario could be an encouraging development for efforts to realign MPH in the direction of the global justice movement.

But it will not be enough. The failure of MPH to achieve its political demands cannot be laid at the door of Oxfam, Geldof and company alone. By being too dependent on corridor-lobbying, celebrities and the media, by failing to give voice and ownership of the campaign to Southern social movements, by watering down the radical demands agreed upon by hundreds of grassroots movements, from both the South and North, at the World Social Forum, and by politically legitimising the G8 summit, the campaign was doomed from the start.

Ten out of ten on aid, eight out of ten on debt? More like G8 – Africa nil.

The nerves were understandable. Two damning stories about MPH were about to break. The New Statesman’s cover story, ‘Why Oxfam is failing Africa’, had exposed deep anger among members of the MPH coalition at Oxfam’s ‘revolving door’ relationship with UK government officials and policies, accusing it of allowing Blair and Brown to co-opt MPH as a front for New Labour’s own questionable anti-poverty drive.

The Sunday Telegraph, meanwhile, had given notice of its exposé of how large numbers of the ubiquitous MPH white wristband had been sourced from Chinese sweatshops with Oxfam’s blessing.

But inside MPH the revelations were no surprise. For the past six months, some of the UK’s leading development and environmental NGOs have expressed their unease about a campaign high on celebrity octane but low on radical politics. One insider, active in a key MPH working group, argues there is a divergence between the democratically agreed message of the campaign and the spin that greets the outside world: ‘Our real demands on trade, aid and debt, and our criticisms of UK government policy in developing countries have been consistently swallowed up by white bands, celebrity luvvies and praise upon praise for Blair and Brown.’

This is surely not what campaigners had in mind in late 2003 when Oxfam initiated a series of meetings with charities and campaigning organisations to consider forming a coalition against poverty in 2005 to coincide with the UK presidency of both the G8 summit and EU, and the 20th anniversary of Live Aid. The outcome was launched in September 2004 as the Make Poverty History coalition, the UK mobilisation of an international grouping, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (G-CAP), led by Oxfam International, Action Aid and DATA (Debt Aids Trade Africa) – the Africa charity set up by U2 frontman Bono and multi-billionaires George Soros and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

Since then, MPH has attracted more than 460 member organisations including the largest trade unions and the TUC, development NGOs, charities, churches and several faith and diaspora groups. Its successful mix of celebrity backers and an anti-poverty message has captured the attention of both politicians and mass media, encapsulated in the hysteria following the announcement by veteran rock star and Africa campaigner Bob Geldof that concerts in London, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome and Berlin would take place under the banner ‘Live 8’ to coincide with the MPH campaign to lobby the G8 summit.

But despite the success, there is widespread unhappiness within the coalition over the campaign’s public face. Critics argue that on paper, MPH’s policy demands on the UK government are fairly radical, especially in calls for ‘trade justice, not free trade’, which would require G8 and EU countries to stop forcing through free market policies on poor countries as part of aid, trade deals or debt relief. MPH also says rich countries should immediately increase aid by $50bn per year and meet 35-year old promises to spend 0.7 per cent of national income in development aid. More and better aid, meanwhile, should be matched by cancellation of the ‘unpayable’ debts of the world’s poorest countries through a ‘fair and transparent international process’ that uses new money, not slashed aid budgets.

With additional calls for the regulation of multinationals and the democratisation of the IMF and World Bank, John Hilary, campaigns director of UK development NGO War on Want, believes that MPH’s policies ‘strike at the very heart of the neo-liberal agenda’.

The problem, however, is that when these policies are relayed to a public audience, they become virtually indistinguishable from those of the UK government. This was brought home back in March this year when Blair’s Commission for Africa set out its own very different proposals on Africa but under the identical headlines used by MPH – ‘trade justice’, ‘drop the debt’ and ‘more and better aid’. In return, most MPH members, led by Oxfam and the TUC, warmly welcomed the report’s recommendations. African activists and many MPH members have a different view (see ‘Africa’s second “last chance”’, page 24).

Much of the blame is placed on the leadership of Oxfam, the UK’s biggest development agency. Despite its pro-poor image around the world Oxfam has become a feeder school for government special advisers and World Bank officials and has a particularly close relationship with New Labour. For example, John Clark left Oxfam for the World Bank in 1992, where he was responsible for its ‘co-optation strategy’ with civil society. He advised Tony Blair on his African Partnership Initiative in 2000. Blair’s special adviser on international development Justin Forsyth was previously Oxfam’s campaign manager. At the heart of MPH is Oxfam’s Sarah Kline, a former World Bank official who champions the organisation’s ‘constructive dialogue’ approach with the IMF and World Bank.

Oxfam’s unrivalled financial resources and existing public profile make it by far the most powerful organisation in the MPH coalition. Last year its annual income surpassed £180m, including £40m from government and other public funds. This is three times the funding of its nearest rival, Christian Aid, and dwarfs more social movement-oriented development NGOs like World Development Movement and War on Want on just over £1m each.

But making Oxfam the scapegoat for MPH’s co-optation by New Labour misses the role played by Comic Relief and its celebrity co-founder, film director Richard Curtis. Curtis’s commitment to raising money for Africa goes back to 1985 when, at the height of the Ethiopian famine, he visited refugee camps as a guest of Oxfam. On his return to London he persuaded showbiz friends to set up Comic Relief, which has raised over £337m towards relieving poverty, famine and disease in Africa.

Despite this success Comic Relief’s televised shows are also criticised for their distinct lack of politics and inaccurate portrayal of Africa as a continent ravaged by natural disasters and warring tribes – the roles of colonialism, Western corporations and IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes don’t get a look in.

Comic Relief’s apolitical approach to Africa is central to the debate inside MPH. For while Bono and Geldof get the limelight and Oxfam dominates the policy agenda, it is Curtis who is driving MPH’s all-important publicity machine. Curtis’s power partly lies in the financial and human resources he brings to the campaign. He has personally ensured the bankrolling of MPH, convincing Scottish business tycoon Sir Tom Hunter to donate £1m, and advertising executives to donate more than £4m of free airtime. His unrivalled contacts book has ensured that MPH’s platforms, events and entire PR strategy are dripping with celebrities. In 2001, the Guardian ranked him the tenth most powerful person in the UK media industry.

While most MPH members gratefully accept that Curtis’s celebrity support has been integral to the campaign’s phenomenal success (sales of the MPH white wristband are nearly 4 million and the website gets thousands of hits a minute), some believe it has come with too heavy a price. First there’s the role of Hunter, no ordinary sharp-dressed philanthropist. Worth £678m, his Hunter Foundation charity is an evangelical force behind public-private partnerships and child entrepreneurialism in Scotland. Since 2001 it has helped fund the Scottish Executive’s Schools Enterprise Programme in which the private sector helps introduce children as young as five in the wonders of business.

Hunter recently caused a storm when he began selling special edition charity Live 8-MPH wristbands stamped with the logos of six global fashion bands, including Hilfiger Denim, whose owner Tommy Hifiger Corporation is accused by labour activists of sourcing its clothes from anti-union sweatshops in Latin America and east Asia. War on Want’s John Hilary spoke for many inside MPH when he told Red Pepper that unless Hilfiger had suddenly changed it was ‘not the sort of company we would want to be associated with’.

Then there’s Abbot Mead Vickers (AMV), the UK’s largest advertising agency, which has previously worked for Comic Relief and has been brought in to help with the campaign’s communication strategy. Among AMV’s many proposals rejected by incensed MPH members was a high-profile billboard campaign in which images of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would sit alongside Gordon Brown, with the caption ‘2005 …?’ Such insensitivity comes with the turf: AMV’s corporate clients include Pepsi, Pfizer, Sainsbury, Camelot, the Economist and Diageo, the drinks multinational which owns Gleneagles Hotel where the G8 will meet and is a major investor in Africa (see ‘Our corporate interest’, page 28).

But the most destructive aspect of Curtis’s involvement, critics argue, has been his intervention in the public communications of MPH. ‘Richard’s philosophy has become painfully obvious to everyone in MPH,’ one critic argues. ‘He believes that we should support the efforts of the UK government to bring other G8 countries into its line on aid and debt, and is adamant that Brown and Blair should not be criticised.’

The Curtis-Brown friendship is known to be particularly close. Curtis’s new BBC1 television film The Girl in the Café, which will air shortly before the G8 summit, is a love story between Gina, an idealistic young campaigner, and Lawrence, an adviser to a Gordon Brown-style chancellor, who helps his new lover get an audience with world leaders at a G8 summit in Iceland. Brown attended the Scottish premiere of the film in May at an event organised by Hunter.

Against this background, a number of NGOs in MPH have recently felt forced to try to undermine the Oxfam-Curtis-Brown axis by making their displeasure known to the press. The ensuing fallout led to MPH members agreeing to quickly distance the coalition from the government by rushing forward by several weeks a report criticising UK government policy.

Although discontented, dissident organisations stay inside MPH for the same reason they won’t speak on the record: ‘Although we hate the message and the corporate branding, some NGOs are making thousands of pounds through the wristbands,’ one arch critic admits. ‘We have loads of new people on our database interested in our campaigns, and new funding bodies are approaching us to do projects and research. MPH is paying for my job for the next three years.’

Frustration would not perhaps be so intense if there was real pluralism and democracy in MPH’s organising practices. But as the G8 draws near, MPH organisers seem to be going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that come the 2 July rally in Edinburgh only the branded, monolithic message and speakers of MPH are seen and heard.

MPH’s website fails to even acknowledge the other protests and events that are being planned by Trident Ploughshares, CND and G8Alternatives, and through the Dissent! network. The MPH coordinating team, which includes Oxfam, Comic Relief and the TUC, has also twice unanimously vetoed the Stop the War Coalition’s (STWC) application to join MPH on the grounds that the issues of economic justice are separate from those of war, and STWC participation in Edinburgh on 2 July would confuse the message. Ironically, Oxfam is currently leading a global campaign for an international arms treaty on the basis that ‘uncontrolled arms fuels poverty and suffering’.

STWC has been banned from even having a stall at the MPH rally. A leaked email in late May to MPH from Milipedia, the ‘ethical’ events management company helping to organise the MPH rally, asks the coalition to ‘consider the desirability/ strategy for removing people from our event who are setting up unwanted stalls, ad hoc events, facilities, etc’ and to draw up a list ‘of the likely infiltrators and decide what we’re prepared to tolerate and at what point we draw the line and what action we want to take’. This followed a tip-off that the Socialist Party (formerly Militant Tendency) is planning to sell its newspaper on the Edinburgh rally and wear red MakeCapitalismHistory T-shirts.

The email contains a giveaway reference to retaining ‘our ownership of the event and our key messaging’. To preserve its monopoly MPH has bought a market trader’s licence for 2 July that empowers the coalition to move illegal traders, including political activists, off the site. Comic Relief has also registered the MakePovertyHistory slogan as a trademark with the EU and is threatening to take action against ‘any misuse or alleged misuse of the trademark’.

But concerns about MPH lie much deeper than political divisions in the UK development scene. The most obvious question, increasingly on the lips of even mainstream journalists, is: where are the voices of African and, more generally, Southern civil society in a campaign that is supposedly about them?

Kofi Maluwi Klu, a leading Ghanian Pan-African activist and international coordinator of anti-debt Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign in the late 1990s, is angered by MPH’s lack of representativeness: ‘We have a saying in the African liberation movement: “nothing about us, without us”. MPH is a massive step backwards in this regard, even from Jubilee 2000. The campaign is overwhelmingly led by Northern NGOs and its basic message is about white millionaire popstars saving Africa’s helpless. The political movements still fighting for liberation on the ground are completely erased.’

The absence of the South in the leadership of MPH inevitably translates into the coalition’s politics. For instance, Southern NGOs and movements are generally critical of making demands on the G8: ‘The G8 is a completely illegitimate and unaccountable body of global governance; its governments and corporations are historically responsible for most of the problems of developing countries, and remain so today,’ says Nicola Bullard of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, an international non-government policy research and advocacy organisation. ‘Lobbying the G8 contradicts the very clear call made by hundreds of social movements, NGOs and trade unions from the South and the North at this year’s World Social Forum to mobilise protests against the G8 summit.’

The same is true for MPH’s policy demands. While Southern movements welcome MPH’s more holistic development agenda in contrast to Jubilee 2000’s single-issue campaign for debt relief, they argue that its position on debt contradicts what grass-roots African and other Southern campaigners are demanding: ‘MPH is calling for 100 per cent cancellation of the unpayable debts of the poorest countries. So is the UK government,’ explains Jubilee South’s Brian Ashley. ‘This does not address the illegitimacy of the debt in the first place – the fact that many South countries’ debts were either a hangover from colonialism or came from the huge hike in interest rates during the 1970s and 1980s and have been paid back many times over, making the South the creditor of the North. We demand the total, unconditional and immediate cancellation of all Southern country debts.’

For Southern debt campaigners, the debate is almost identical to the one in 1999 that led to the North-South split in the Jubilee 2000 movement and the creation of the Jubilee South network, today assembling more than 80 debt campaigns, social movements and peoples’ organisations from some 40 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia/Pacific. Jubilee South’s founding principle was to create stronger South-South solidarity, to strengthen the collective voice, presence and leadership of the South in the international debt movement and to lay the basis for global social transformation from the bottom up.

Dozens of Southern-based groups, including Jubilee South and Focus on the Global South, have refused to be part of the global MPH coalition G-CAP, declining Oxfam and Action Aid’s invitation to the September 2004 Johannesburg meeting that launched the coalition because it was not built in consultation with Southern networks.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of MPH’s blending of its message with that of the government, and its intolerance of critics North and South, is that it enables the state and media to draw a sharp line in the sand between the so called ‘good protesters’ attending the 2 July Edinburgh rally, and ‘bad protesters’, those contemplating civil disobedience against an illegitimate institution and a set of governments responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people each year.

This is a crucial time for unity against the G8 and its plan to carve up Africa’s natural wealth for its own corporations. It’s not too late for Geldof, Bono, Curtis and co to use their popular power to inspire those millions of MPH members to take such action. Otherwise, the only thing they will be consigning to history is Africa itself.

Come prepared for all-weather camping. Pack a sleeping bag, tent, waterproofs, good shoes, insect repellent for the Scottish midges and above all your toothbrush – activist breath can be grim after several days of cider-soaked protesting. Familiarise yourself with a map of Scotland and our G8 Bulletin Board, essential travel companions. Travel with pals so you have a ready-made affinity group. Billy no mates? Then cling on to someone who can vouch for your whereabouts at all times. Don’t get isolated – exchange mobile numbers.

Once you’re in Scotland

Buy an A-Z and head to a convergence centre (see below). There you’ll find the essential info-point with alternative accommodation and protest news, like-minded souls and a cheap veggie bite from the activist-run kitchen. Most centres will probably close overnight but 24-hour info-points should be on hand for lost insomniacs.

Accommodation

Direct action-types should come to the rural, self-organised eco-village near Stirling shared by People & Planet and Dissent! groups. Edinburgh council will also provide camping space behind a Gleneagles-style fence (complete with security guards) for up to 15,000 people in Hunter’s Hall Park in the Niddrie estate. Places will be allocated and there could be a £10 daily charge so arrive early to avoid disappointment. Beware: official accommodation at past summits has been victim to police raids (tell-tale signs: security cameras, easy access for large people-carrying vehicles, hot showers).

Two, three, many mobilisations

There are three main mobilisations for the G8. Make Poverty History’s (MPH) reformist band of celebrities, NGOs, churches and the Treasury uses the magic power of white wristbands to make imperialist warmongers be nicer to the poor. Then there’s the Scottish-based G8Alternatives group, bringing together the Scottish Socialist Party with trade union branches, local NGOs and, of course, the irrepressible Socialist Workers Party in various guises. Finally, the leaderless Dissent! network of autonomous groups and individuals will oppose the G8 with direct action and a million websites.

The protests

There’ll be something for everyone in Scotland – literally. For those looking for safe, clean, family fun, check out the MPH stewarded march on 2 July in Edinburgh. This is not a protest; it’s a ‘welcome walk for the G8′. You’re asked to wear white T-shirts and wristbands to form a 100,000-strong human white band around Edinburgh city centre. Rumours persist that a ‘multicolour T-shirt’ bloc will seek to radicalise MPH’s message. For some light intellectual relief in between the melÈes, head to the growing number of counter-summits on 3 July (see G8 Bulletin Board).

Any unsanctioned action, no matter how fluffy it is, runs the risk of police confrontation and arrest. For those carrying wire cutters intent on penetrating the militarised ‘red zone’ of Gleneagles with its 12-foot high steel fence, police crackdown is obviously so unlikely. There’s even talk of a ten-mile radius of checkpoints. So watch out, all you autonomous hillwalkers and golfers.

For the tourist in you, G8Alternatives will try to march past the Gleneagles Hotel gates to a nearby car park where a team of crack-commando paper-sellers will descend from the Ochil Hills.

The most effective way to shut down the G8 is to blockade relevant hotels, roads, airports and train stations to stop the summit’s delegates, interpreters and workers even getting to Gleneagles. Our tip: move to Glasgow where 5,000 G8 delegates are expected to rest in the city’s finest two-star hotels.

But it’s not just the G8 summit itself that will be subject to mass civil disobedience. Take part in the non-violent blockade of Faslane nuclear submarine base on 4 July (30 miles west of Glasgow), or the solidarity demo at Dungavel’s nasty asylum detention centre on 5 July (40 miles south of Glasgow, 60 miles from Edinburgh).

Be the Indymedia

Make sure the world knows what’s really going on. Budding writers and those with bloody (good) pictures, track down an Independent Media Centre (IMC) to upload your stories, or call in reports to the telephone hotline. Volunteers are needed to form media teams and help run spaces. Edinburgh IMC is at The Forest CafÈ, 3 Bristo Place. For other media points in Glasgow and elsewhere, see www.indymedia.org.uk.

Police and the law: use protection

As Genoa veterans can vouch, anti-capitalists could face a police onslaught in Scotland – they’ve even been training on bulldozers, for Christ’s sake. Know your rights, Scottish law and police powers (check out www.g8legalsupport.info). Faslane’s legal support number is 0845 458 8369. Remember, if stopped by the cops, you have the right to remain silent, and if being searched under a law, they must tell you which one. Once you’ve given them the flick, inform the G8 Legal Support Group with every detail of what happened.

If you are at the receiving end of a pepper spray attack, the friendly Street Medics (www.actionmedics.org.uk) will be on hand to patch you up, while Activist Trauma (www.activist-trauma.net) can give guidance for your emotional needs.

Latest updates

By the time you read this, everything could be out of date. For regular updates, see www.indymedia.org.uk, www.dissent.org.uk and www.redpepper.org.uk. Happy protesting and stay safe.

Impressed by this apparent realisation of genuine internationalism, the role of language in global social transformation might even have briefly flickered across your mind before the long pauses, broken sentences and occasional loss of sound drove you mad.

But for how long did you think about the person behind the voice in your ears, hidden away in a claustrophobic booth at the back of the room? How much did you reflect on the skills, technology, resources and, above all, politics involved in enabling you to understand the myriad different languages that define and bring social forums to life?

Our guess is not a lot. Most people tend to take the indispensable role of language, and those interpreting it, for granted; many even assume interpreters to be paid professionals. The truth could not be more different. Simultaneous and consecutive interpretation and document translation are provided free in political solidarity by Babels, the growing international network of volunteer interpreters and translators at the heart of the social forum process.

Babels was born in the run-up to the Florence ESF in 2002. The dubious politics and huge cost of hiring professional interpreters for the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 and 2002 led a group of communication activists linked to the French branch of the alternative globalisation network Attac to propose that only volunteers be used for interpreting.

Scepticism about volunteer ‘quality’ gave way to pragmatism at the 11th hour when the high cost of the traditional market route began to bite the Italian organisers. An emergency call for volunteers was made. Three hundred and fifty volunteer interpreters and translators were eventually used. Cathy Arnaud, an interpreter at Florence and now a coordinator with Babels Spain, paints the scene: ‘It was complete chaos, but miraculously it worked. We had to fight the organisers just for a space to work in; eventually we took our own initiative and squatted a medieval tower. It was beautiful but freezing and we had no money, computers, phones: nothing. Coordinators hung planning sheets on washing lines; some people stayed up all night to finalise everything. As for the quality of the interpretation: well, that was definitely a mixed bag.’

The success of Florence led to the spontaneous emergence of new Babels coordinations in Germany, the UK and Spain alongside the original French and Italian pioneers. It also prompted more consideration of language issues by the Paris ESF organisers, who gave Babels decent office facilities, computers, a longer preparatory process and a relatively large pot of money (£200,000). The 2003 Paris ESF drew on more than 1,000 Babelitos.

Following the 2004 WSF in Mumbai and the first Social Forum of the Americas in Ecuador, the Babels database had almost doubled to more than 7,000 people by the time of the London ESF.

In October 500 volunteers from 22 countries were gathered, enabling some 20,000 participants from more than 60 countries to express themselves in 25 different languages.

Impressive number-crunching aside, however, the real story of Babels lies in its embodiment of the innovatory but difficult process of ‘pre-figurative politics’. By attempting to put into practice the principles of solidarity, pluralism, equality and horizontality, Babels is creating not only alternative systems and practices to free-market capitalist society, but also the social counter-power needed to defend and embed them permanently.

Underpinning the Babels philosophy is the organisation’s willingness to reflect upon its role in each forum and then learn and develop from practice. For example, following the unhappy experience of a two-tier workforce of voluntary and paid interpreters in Florence, Babels now makes the principle of 100 per cent volunteer interpretation and translation a precondition of its involvement.

Most important of all is Babels’ affirmation of ‘the right of everybody to express themselves in the language of their choice’. To this end, Babels is orchestrating a conscious process of ‘contamination’ in which the excellent language skills of the politically sympathetic trained interpreter interact with the deeper political knowledge of the language-fluent activist to develop a reflexive communications medium organic to the social forum movement. A good example is the Lexicon Project: an ongoing effort by volunteers from a wide range of backgrounds and countries to create a comprehensive glossary of words and phrases for interpreters and translators to best reflect different meanings according to national, cultural and historical contexts.

Unfortunately, the nice sounding rhetoric of diversity and inclusion within the WSF Charter of Principles still remains largely unrealised in many social forums, especially the ESF. Just as at Florence and Paris, the large majority of the 20,000 participants (and interpreters) in London were mainly white, able-bodied western Europeans. This failure over three years to significantly include those either living in or originating from central and eastern Europe and the global south, not to mention from the disabled and deaf communities, cannot simply be explained away by the systematic refusal of visas (witness London), problems of disability access or the gargantuan cost of international travel from outside the EU.

For both Florence and Paris, the inherent bias of the forum’s organisers led to English, French, German, Italian and Spanish being designated as the ‘official’ ESF languages. And although Babels successfully insisted on this formal language hierarchy being dropped for London, informally the same old colonial languages dominated the website, outreach materials, press releases, platforms and programme.

Curiously, ESF organisers tend to justify this status quo through the market discourse of ‘supply and demand’. While it is true that language hierarchies are an inevitable reflection of the continued dominance of western European political movements in the ESF process, their existence also act as a major outreach barrier to the social movements of ‘majority Europe’ and beyond: if people do not believe their languages will be spoken, then they will be less likely to attend.

Babels cannot shy away from its own responsibility in this regard. Because its development has been inseparable from that of the ESF, the majority of nationalities and languages of Babels interpreters, translators and coordinators belong to the same western Europe elite. And while it may dislike being treated as a service provider, it has generally followed the market model imposed on it by the ESF organisers.

Emmanuelle Rivière, an interpreter and a coordinator with Babels-UK, believes a period of self-reflection is required: ‘We must think carefully about our own role in reproducing the existing patterns of political, economic and cultural domination in the world through not challenging this language hierarchisation.’

Making the ESF and all social forums genuinely internationalist requires that trade unions, NGOs, social movements and networks work hand in hand with Babels to make connections with social movements in marginalised countries and pass on the experiences and knowledge gained so far to create new Babels coordinations. This is especially urgent for the next ESF, scheduled for Athens in 2006: there is a dearth of Greek interpreters within Babels. Without a genuine commitment to an unprecedented process of linguistic and popular outreach, and to the resources this implies, the ESF risks having the microphones turned off altogether.Stuart Hodkinson and Julie Boéri are coordinators with Babels-UK

The background to the Rwandan genocide is inseparable from the destructive legacy of first German, then Belgian and finally French colonialism on the country’s inter-ethnic politics. Rwanda gained “formal’ independence from Belgium in 1961 after decades of social engineering that promoted the Hutus as the colonial master’s preferred ruling elite. In July 1973, following a decade of anti-Tutsi violence and murder that had forced over 350,000 Tutsis into exile, the Hutu elite split and the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), led by Hutu Major-General Juvnal Habyarimana, installed itself as a one-party dictatorship in a bloodless coup. Although discrimination continued against the Tutsi community, there were no further ethnic massacres between 1973-1990.

From its inception, the Habyarimana regime was a bulwark against those states in the region that sought to protect their independence and effect progressive structural change (for example, neighbouring Tanzania under the progressive president, Julius Nyerere, one of the African leaders of the non-aligned movement). It was thus actively backed by Western powers, particularly Belgium, France and Switzerland. In 1975, France signed a military cooperation and training agreement with Rwanda and gradually replaced Belgium as the dominant imperial power.

By October 1990, however, a growing democratic opposition movement was joined by returning Tutsi refugees who had formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF’s attempted overthrow and replacement of the Habyarimana regime with a progressive non-ethnic government was brutally put down. Agreement was reached in 1992 to set up a transitional government in which the RPF would be included. Habyarimana, however, had no intention of sharing power and continued to arm and train militias and secretly import weapons with French assistance while using the regime’s own radio station to broadcast extreme anti-Tutsi propaganda and denounce the peace agreement.

On 6 April 1994, just as the preparations for genocide were being threatened by huge international pressure on the regime to comply with the transitional power-sharing arrangements, Habyarimana was assassinated when his aircraft was shot down. Within hours the Hutu prime minister had also been executed and extremists took control of the government. The genocide had begun.

First impressions are often deceptive. Bobigny’s pre-1989 street names may speak of another era, but the Communist-controlled suburb’s promotional material boasted of ‘participatory’ budgeting and town-planning. Visiting the three-day programme of the French ‘local social forum’ space in Saint-Denis (strangely marginalised by the Forum’s organisers), you learned how some 150 social forums now regularly meet across France, bringing campaigning groups, immigrant movements and local citizens disillusioned with the ‘old politics’ together to debate practical but radical alternatives to privatisation, environmental decay and racist immigration policies.

This fascinating mix of the innovative and the archaic is symbolic of the ESF as a whole. A regional offshoot of the annual World Social Forum (WSF), the ESF was dreamt up as a non-party, open meeting place for “reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and inter-linking for effective action by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism & and are committed to building a society centred on the human person”. The words come from the WSF Charter of Principles.

Some 300 French social movements, NGOs and trade unions and an assortment of political parties spent more than a year organising the Paris forum. An open, monthly French assembly endorsed the work of a day-to-day organising committee run by roughly 30 volunteers or seconded staff from whichever political organisations had the resources. This was done in conjunction with the European assembly of the ESF – an informal decision-making structure made up of delegates and representatives from social forces across the Continent.

The process was largely dominated by a few powerful left organisations like the French Communist Party and Attac, the international campaign for reform of global financial markets and institutions. This created some distrust and hostility among grassroots groups who felt excluded – particularly from the ‘official programme’. But the powerful could generally be checked through the ESF’s golden rule of consensus decision-making.

The single biggest complaint about Paris from both the volunteers and delegates on the ground, through to the translators and organisers was the venue. Florence was organised in and around a single site, which created ease for mobility and emergency problem-solving, as well as the feeling that we were at a ‘Forum’. But for a number of practical reasons as well as apparent political manoeuvrings from the Socialist Mayor of Paris, the Forum soon spread from its intended single hub at Saint-Denis to four different and geographically dispersed venues.

But this also had advantages. For Elizabeth Gautier, one of the organisers and director of Espaces Marx, a Marxist research network funded by the French Communist Party, “staging the Forum in four different local authorities enabled us to spread the financial risks and costs, as well as giving us more political bargaining power to extract more resources from the state. But we couldn’t have put the ESF on without local authority help”.

What Gautier surely means is this kind of ESF, for the dependence of an alternative political space and event on the very political structures it critiques – the vast majority of the 4 million euros it cost came from the state as well as a hefty donation from the French Socialist Party – seriously questions what and who the ESF is for. At least the political noose around the Greater London Authority means next year’s ESF will not have this problem when it comes to the UK.

In theory, the ESF opens to consideration a plethora of progressive civil society initiatives and encourages the planning of new ones. According to Laurent Vannini, one of the French organizers, “The ESF aims to create international networks among civil society organizations, find ways for them to reinforce one another’s work, and enrich the common assessment against neo-liberalism.”

Yet the sheer scale of this year’s ESF – 60,000 delegates attending over 600 meetings – suggests a rich diversity irreducible to a common assessment or programme. This may be a limitation when viewed from the rigid perspective of party politics, but shows that the ESF should not and cannot be closed to the emergence of new political issues, demands, or agencies of change.

There was certainly greater evidence of pluralism at this year’s ESF than at the Florence event in 2002. While Iraq was a recurring theme in many of the 55 plenaries, 250 seminars and 200-plus workshops, it certainly wasn’t dominant. Elizabeth Gautier explains: ‘We wanted to widen the themes and broaden the participation, particularly around trade unionism, the European Constitution, women, immigration and the Maghreb.’

A European assembly for women’s rights was organised a day prior to the ESF’s official opening. And in contrast to Florence, the gender balance of the largest plenaries was significantly improved in Paris. But this pattern wasn’t sustained through most of the smaller seminars and workshops.

The experience of migrant and Muslim activists was similarly variable. Naima Bouteldja of Just Peace said: ‘Immigrant and Muslim groups had a real input into the decision-making process and this was reflected in us, for the first time, being both seen and heard within the social forum. But for Muslims our intended dialogue with others never got beyond the deep suspicion, bordering on racism, of our faith and politics that is institutionalised in French society and much of the French left.’

And then there were the appalling facilities for disabled people.

Such disappointments have understandably fed into a critical grassroots evaluation of this year’s forum. But its achievements mustn’t be downplayed. Pascale Ader from the French small farmers’ group Confederation Paysanne, which served 40,000 meals under its many marquees in Paris, explained that while his organisation was already well connected globally to other peasant movements through the international network the Via Campesina, the ESF was “helpful in reaching out beyond the politics of interest to forge alliances with consumers and more traditional unions in the fight for food sovereignty”. Ader pinpoints one of the forum’s most valuable features: delegates are able to forge connections without the mediation of leaders and experts.

But networking opportunities for ordinary delegates were severely limited within the formal spaces in Paris. Masha, a Swiss environmentalist, expressed her disappointment at the retreat from some of the movement’s more innovative organisational practices. “‘Networking should mean the creation of ‘dis’organisations linked together through participatory debates and decentralised actions rather than through self-appointed leaderships talking to each other.”

It is impossible to gauge the overall impact of the ESF. In practical terms, the most immediate result is to let 1,000 email lists bloom. But these discussions will inspire new international campaigning networks and consolidate existing ones. This is what it means for the ESF to be a space and not a ‘locus of power’. It is socially horizontal, and incapable of ever being fully controlled.

With the ESF coming to London in 2004, the democratic energy and creativity generated in Paris and since will ensure that no one will be corralled down any Boulevard Lenine. The novelty of the ESF, and the global justice movement from which it arose, is its deep-rooted pluralism – the idea that the monoculture of global capitalism can only be overcome by recognising the specificity and autonomy of particular struggles. ‘Another world is possible’, as the Zapatistas say, but it is their less famous dictum ‘one no, many yeses’ to which we should aspire in London next year.