The day was not a complete failure. We did make some important decisions
by consensus:

1. The UK OC will re-propose that plenaries last 2 hours
2. The UK OC will propose that the axis on neo-liberalism proposed at
Istanbul be split in two to incorporate: privatisation/trade union rights
and global poverty/justice
3. The UK OC will instruct the Coordinating Committee to set up a VISA
working group for asylum-seeker/refugees/non-EU participants
4. The UK OC will propose that plenaries have 4 speakers and 2 chairs,
that at least 50% of speakers and chairs are women and that each platform
has at least one non-white speaker
5. The UK OC will instruct the next CC to agree on a definitive list of
guidelines for all UK ESF organising meetings, using ATTAC UK’s proposal
as a basis for discussion.

We also received some important information on what happened in Istanbul,
what the current thinking of the programme group is and a number of proposals on themes and plenaries.

Istanbul Report Back

· the dates 14-17 October were agreed
· there will be some kind of event in the evening of the 14th
· the Assembly of the Social Movements will be three hours on the Sunday morning with a demonstration in the afternoon.
· there is still no agreement on whether the Assembly should run alongside plenaries/seminars/workshops at the same time.
· the European Assembly rejected as 'themes' the 13 topics proposed in the
'Developing the Programme' document presented at the previous Organising Committee.
· the proposed number of plenaries (8-13) was also rejected by the Assembly as being too radical a reduction. No final figure was given but it will probably be between 20-30.
· Istanbul once again stated that the ESF is not a UK event but a European one and that rigidities have to be replaced by a process able to involve all the peculiarities of different movements from different countries and political backgrounds.
· an open process at the European level was initiated in order to sort out the process by which plenaries will be decided in time for the next European Assembly in Berlin (19/20 June)
· 5 programme thematic axes and some 'transversals' (themes that should cut across the entire programme) were provisionally agreed that will help structure the plenaries:

Axes:

- War, peace, terrorism, system of war

- Citizenship, democracy, rights, EU

- Neoliberalism, deregulation, work

- Environmental crisis and sustainable societies

- Racism, fascism, far right

Transversals:
- Central and eastern Europe
- Gender

· a European programme working group was set up to facilitate the process and bring the proposals to Berlin with the website seen as a key tool to collect ideas and proposals
· proposals for seminar and workshops are now open and there are no pre-requisite for making proposals
· the process will aim to facilitate self-mergers using the website, although there is disagreement over how 'interactive' this will be
· forced mergers of seminars is likely to be necessary: the European working group will try to formulate some proposals about how this can be done.
· most European groups do not want other meetings to run at the same time as the Assembly of the Social movements.
· an important women's meeting discussed the world march of women proposal and the Women's Assembly in the ESF. No decision was taken about whether or not to hold the women’s assembly before or during the ESF and the proposal will be discussed again in Berlin. Before that an open consultation has to take place in all countries
· Babels has affiliated to the ESF2004 process on the following terms:

- Professional/non-professional interpreters to be treated equally
- All interpreters to be volunteers.
- Babels is affiliating
- A commitment to language diversity,
- Babels to be an officially affiliated member of the ESF04 process
- A commitment to provide decent working conditions for Babels’ volunteers,
- Babels to be provided with the financial means to participate actively in the organisation of the 2004 ESF
- Babels to be involved in the choice of interpretation equipment.

Recent Outreach

· a meeting of women and women's groups met Thursday, May 13th. It could not reach consensus on the idea of a Women’s Assembly but strongly supported the need for a gender analysis across all the themes/axes of the ESF.

Programme Working Group update

· the UK programme working group is currently talking about splitting the neoliberalism axis in two: (1) globalisation and workers rights, privatisation; (2) globalisation, trade, debt, development, poverty

Important Suggestions

· plenaries on 'experiences of resistance' to globalisation, neoliberalism and imperialism, such as in Latin America (Bernard Regan: Cuba Solidarity campaign).
· major focus on Europe and EU needed. EU is the driving force of neoliberalism and attacks on workers rights; the Constitution is the constitutionalising of neoliberalism. The debates about Europe and the Constitution are not different in Britain and the left. We need to have them here – especially if we are divided (Fred Le Plat: London UNISON
/Socialist Resistance)
· transversality of the themes should include race and disabilities. At least one seminar a day should be on disabled issues (Roy Webb: British Council of Disabled People)
· the ESF cannot just be about talking; we need actions and mobilisation. The Assembly of the Social Movements cannot be allowed to be diluted by other plenaries/seminars/workshops taking place at the same time.
· we also need to think about a Youth space or camp – not as a ghetto but as something that will help mobilise young people into the Forum (Rachel Hodgins: Revolution/Workers Power)

The Problems and How to Stop them Happening

This aside, most of the agenda was never reached on Sunday and this leaves unresolved a number of urgent decisions and issues that needed to be dealt with and still have to be sorted asap. A number of controversial developments have taken place over the previous month that many people were and remain unhappy about, including:

· The quiet recruitment of a few volunteers to a temporary office without consultation or invitation to groups, organisations and networks who have been involved in the ESF process. This was announced at a coordinating committee meeting on 6 May by the Office Working Group, but that Working Group had failed to consult some of its own members
· The absence of a clear procedure and criteria for reduced-rate affiliations
· The continuing absence of a clear legal structure preventing a large number of NGOs from affiliating because of fears over legal liability
· The continuing absence of useful, translated website with the functionality required to facilitate the programme self-organisation process

These were just some of the issues that a number of people and groups wanted to get resolved at the Organising Committee (OC). In addition, the Istanbul Assembly had made a number of important decisions that needed action on within the OC. The main decision was the creation of a European Programme Group that would meet in Paris on 29-30 May to help facilitate the thematic axes and produce a process by which plenaries and speakers
would be decided. The European Assembly had agreed that the UK process would be allowed to send a higher number of representatives in order to reflect the different political traditions within the UK process and eliminate any feelings of distrust and disenfranchisement. This meant the OC would have to allocate adequate time to discuss the criteria by which we would select our representatives and then hopefully manage to agree on a short-list because of the need to book transport and accommodation in
Paris asap.

Unfortunately, none of the controversial issues on the practicalities side, or the decisions on who would represent the ESF UK process in Paris were reached in the time allotted on Sunday. Much of the 4 hours were instead wasted by fairly needless arguing, macho-posturing, stubbornness, insensitive, selfish behaviour and unhelpful chairing.

Things turned ugly from the beginning with a 40-minute row over the agenda. A proposed agenda had been printed and circulated by Teresa Hoskyns of the London Social Forum who was acting as host for the meeting.

It was clearly not perfect and did need some amending but it was not the place of the main chair – Rahul Patel (London Unison and SWP) – to suggest a major overhaul of the 'proposed' agenda without some democratic discussion first. Rahul insisted on promoting a 2 hour discussion on the programme content above much-needed discussions on the process for selecting representatives, the practicalities – finance, affiliations,
company, office, website – as well as urgent report backs from working groups.

This proposal was never going to get consensus because there was no logic to spending so long on one issue that was already proceeding well in both the UK programme group and at the European level. Moreover, as Julie Stoll from Babels UK argued, the past experience of all UK ESF meetings is that the most controversial issues and practicalities are routinely pushed down the agendas of all meetings and then bad chairing and arguments prevent them ever getting reached. Many of us were determined that this was not
going to happen this time. The way that some expressed opposition to this was not helpful and lessons need to be learned – the main being that instead of opposing something completely, a compromise should be proposed.

However, others were equally determined that the programme content should dominate the OC's discussions and were also not prepared to compromise. The fact that there was no consensus on changing the proposed agenda in the way Rahul suggested meant that the chair should have withdrawn his proposal or offered a compromise of his own. The broader question is – why is the chair proposing such changes when he/she is only supposed to be
facilitating the meeting?

The next and most disgraceful showdown occurred when we reconvened at around 3:40pm to discuss how to select the programme representatives for the Paris European Programme Group. There was consensus that this discussion would end at 4.15 to get the Babels report in. However, when Rahul Patel (Chair) qualified this by saying that we would first need to have another discussion about the programme themes on the completely
spurious point that "whoever was chosen would know what the issues were that had to be represented in Paris" all hell broke loose. It is little wonder – representatives would have had nearly 2 weeks to be briefed on the 'UK' position, whatever that is.

During this part of the meeting, a number of people used offensive language and behaved in an unacceptable way. Javier Ruiz (Indymedia) was the most prominent: he used the f**k word in a variety of forms which drew accusations of intimidatory and bullying behaviour from a few people – this is a bit of an exaggeration. Javier’s outburst was directed at the chairing and he accused Rahul of abusing his position, being unfair in his
pressing for consensus on some issues over others and of his alleged patronising attitude to those who disagreed with him. However, a number of other people used foul and abusive language more discreetly, which once again provoked more outbursts from others. During this time, people did go up to the microphone and begin speaking out of turn to complain about the perceived hijacking of the practicalities discussion by the programme
issue.

If peoples' behaviour was out of order, then so was the attempted rail-roading by the chair of yet another discussion about the programme content with only a quarter of the meeting left by three-quarters of the original agenda to go through. It simply confirmed to some that certain parties were attempting to talk out the other more controversial agenda items I outlined at the beginning of my report.

A number of posts to the ESF-UK list have focused on the issue of women’s liberation. From my perspective, during the tense debate that followed on the programme, two main issues related to the programme themes were raised:

(1) Naima Bouteldja (Just Peace) argued that on the racism axis, if Islamophobia was going to be included, then 'anti-semitism' would also have to be for balance. She proposed that the UK Organising Committee suggest this to the European programme Working Group.

(2) Anne Kane (Abortion Rights/Socialist Action) proposed that some reference to gender empowerment and equality be included in the axes. She attempted a number of times to have the phrase 'women's liberation' inserted into the axis on ‘Democracy’ and warned that failure to do so would send a very bad message to the women and women's groups that attended the women's caucus meeting in the week.

There was no consensus on either proposal. However, Rahul Patel (chair) treated the two proposals in very different ways. When about a third of the meeting supported Naima's request to add "anti-semitism" to the anti-racism axis (or, alternatively, to delete Islamobhobia), a large minority disagreed. Rahul declared that there was "no consensus" and the formulation remained in its original state.

When a similarly sized group demanded the inclusion of "women's liberation" to the democracy axis, again a third or so of the meeting strongly disagreed for a wide range of reasons. The main reason was that this did not achieve transversality and would therefore mean reference to all other oppressed sectors of society in the 5 themes would be required – a very difficult thing to achieve given there are so many! For example,
Kofi (Pan-African Network) explained that Africaphobia would also have to be included in the racism axis while Roy Webb (British Council for Disabled People) called out that disability issues would also have to be included. However, Rahul insisted on asking if there was consensus, and repeatedly attempted to try and steer people to accept the controversial term 'women's liberation'.

The discussion became increasingly recriminatory. Two people in particular – Ann Kane and Louise Hutchins (who was supposed to be taking minutes) – made the unfortunate comment that those who opposed the wording were 'opposed to women's liberation'. This inevitably provoked more hostility.

It was quite clear that noone was objecting to a formulation that satisfied the theme of gender empowerment and equality or explicit reference to women. The point was how this could be done – we could not agree on the formulations proposed. Several constructive proposals were put forward on how the issue could be resolved. Dave Timms (WDM) and
Sheila Triggs (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) both suggested that the proposals and disagreements be noted down and taken to the programme group meeting, and the European meeting. They also argued that not agreeing to the demand there and then did not mean that such issues could not be included in ESF promotional literature.

Eventually, at 4.45 – with just 15 minutes left of the meeting – Rahul Patel (Chair) moved the agenda on to discuss 'selecting programme representatives to Paris'. Given that this was the one major decision that had to made at the organising committee, or at least the criteria for choosing representatives discussed, 15 minutes of time was clearly not
going to be enough. The chairs were asked if they would agree to extend the meeting. Teresa Hoskyns (London Social Forum) stated that LSE was prepared to let us stay until 6pm – this was objected to by Rahul Patel (chair) as well as those who had spent the last 30 minutes refusing to accept that their proposals did not have a consensus.

The meeting continued for another half an hour. In that time, it became clear that there were two very different interpretations of what had been agreed at the Istanbul Assembly. Hannah Griffiths (FOE) argued that the creation of the European Programme Working Group was complemented by a decision to allow the UK around 6 representatives – double other countries allocations – so as to ensure broad political representation and trust in
response to our obvious political disagreements. She argued that the party affiliation issue would be an inevitable criteria and that meant some honesty would be needed. She also argued that the meeting of 30 NGOs that took place on Monday agreed that Dave Timms would represent the NGOs in the process.

Alex Gordon (RMT) disagreed with Hannah's perspective. He argued that there was no chance of people going to Paris representing political parties. At this point, she interrupted Alex to say that this was not what she had said. Alex Gordon continued that representatives had to represent the broadest range of our movement. He proposed himself as a representative of trade unions and in addition: Jonathan Neale (Oxford
Globalise Resistance/SWP), Kate Hudson (CND/Communist Party of Britain), Sarah Colborne (Palestine Solidarity Campaign/Socialist Action), and possibly Ann Kane (Abortion Rights/Socialist Action). Readers will have to judge for themselves whether they think this is a broadly representative slate. He agreed that someone from the NGOs should go and if that meant Dave Timms, than fine. But he warned that any representatives to the Paris meeting would have to be affiliated to the Organising Committee. This was
a thinly-veiled comment at Dave whose NGO, WDM, had yet to affiliate.

These two very different interpretations of the criteria led to yet more arguments. There was an exchange on the role of the reps to the International Programme Group. Lee Brown (NAAR/Socialist Action) said that they should reflect the decisions of the OC. Oscar Reyes argued that they should reflect the decisions *and disagreements* within the OC, and
respect the diversity of views; Javier Ruiz (Indymedia) pointed out that we don't need to agree on everything or paper over political disagreements just because we all happen to live on the same island.

At no time were the criteria or the 6 representatives agreed. A number of people put themselves forward:
· Alex Gordon (RMT)
· Jonathan Neale (Oxford GR/SWP)
· Dave Timms (WDM)
· Naima Bouteldja (Just Peace)
· Helena Kotkowska (Attack UK/London SF)

And a number of alternative slates were put forward:

Chris Nineham (GR/SWP) put forward the following people:

· Jonathan Neale – "because he's worked hard in the programme group"
· Dave Timms – as the NGO rep
· Anne Kane (Abortion Rights/Socialist Action)
· Someone from the anti-war movement like Kate Hudson. (CND/CPB)/ A Burgin
(Socialist Resistance) (job-share)
· Someone from the trade union movement, “it could be Alex Gordon” (RMT)
· Someone from the anti-racist movement.

He added that one of them could be a "horizontal" although he stated that
didn't like the term.

Sheila Triggs (WLfIPF) proposed:

· Jonathan Neale
· Dave Timms
· Kate Hudson
· Alex Gordon
· Naima Bouteldja
· Helena Kotkowska

However, Rahul Patel (chair) only put forward Chris Nineham's proposed slate to the meeting. Again, there was understandable hostility to such blatant bias.

Overall, the meeting was punctuated by swearing and heckling by people on BOTH sides of the arguments. While Javier Ruiz was the most prolific in his use of the f##k word, he was not the only one and should not be made scapegoat. Some people need to take particular responsibility and apologise for their own provocative or reactive behaviour. I apologise unreservedly for my own calling out during that meeting.

If future meetings are to be conducted in a respectful, constructive manner, then certain provocative behaviour has to stop:
· People should not stand up and repeatedly request that those opposing a
suggestion declare whether their organisation has affiliated to the ESF
Organising Committee. The idea that one must be affiliated i.e. paid up
signatories to the UK process, is completely contrary to the spirit of
this process, the WSF charter of principles and the UK ESF OC charter.
Moreover, dozens of organisations are currently UNABLE to affiliate
because of the absence of a clear legal structure or due to financial
hardship.
· People should also not stand up and question the motives of those who
don't agree with a proposal, an argument, an issue etc. When people object
to a proposal, they should give a reason and allow a debate to occur.
Accusing people of being wreckers or wanting power is deliberately
inflammatory designed only to rile people up.
· The chairing of meetings has to now change. I regret to say that Rahul
Patel routinely abused his position as chair and showed little respect for
his co-chairs. His behaviour merely gave credibility to the perception
that he was there to push through the SWP's agenda for that meeting. In
future, important report-backs should not be unilaterally given to certain
secretly pre-arranged speakers but opened up to all. Everyone should be
given 2.5 minutes to speak, including SWP members and trade union
officials. The chair must also treat different proposals in the same way –
if there is no consensus, then allow time for a re-proposing of the
original idea and if no consensus can be reached, the disagreements are
noted and we move on.

Lets hope that what happened on Sunday shocks us all into sorting out this
process

Stuart