At the heart of public service reform is the empowerment of the service user. And central to that, argues Pat McFadden MP, is a new and liberating politics of time.

'Solidarity and Rights: The Euston Manifesto one year on'

The Euston Manifesto Group will stage a one-day conference at SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, on 30 May 2007. The event will be hosted with the help of the SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies and take place in the Khalili Lecture Theatre, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG.

If you would like a ticket, please send an email to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Tickets are 5.50 GBP (plus donation at your discretion). You can pay by PayPal or by cheque made payable to 'the Euston Manifesto Group'.

The Kurdistan Development Corporation invites you to a poetry reading by Kurdish exile Nazand Begikhani on Mon 14May07 at the House of Commons, from 17:00 to 18:30. The reading will take place and refreshments will be served in the Inter-Parliamentary Union Room. You must register to attend by contacting This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or ringing 020 7170 4300

In her new collection, poet and women's rights activist Nazand Begikhani explores the experience of being an exiled Kurdish woman in visionary poems of rare political and spiritual depth.

“Nazand Begikhani is not prepared to just float with the current of the times or tradition. In her poems she fights with the Anfal, the genocidal campaign carried out against Kurdish civilians at the end of the 80s; she fights against honour killings and she fights for the perception of the Kurds in the West. These are painful poems: but pain expressed, of women, of the Kurdish peoples, above all needs to be witnessed by poets and their readers.” ---Richard McKane.

The reading is hosted by Ann Clwyd MP, Special Envoy to the Prime Minister on Human Rights in Iraq, and Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, Kurdistan Regional Government High Representative to the UK.

The signing form at the Euston site was built in a rush to meet our original publication deadline and fit the Joomla system that runs this site so it had a number of holes that have been exploited by spammers for some months, resulting in the repeated corruption of the list with links to porn sites.

Because of this I (Damian Counsell) and Andrew Regan have to devote a lot of time to manually pruning the database of fake signatories. We will solve this problem when we migrate the whole of the site to WordPress, but neither of us has the time to do this long and involved job right now.

I am therefore temporarily suspending the sign-up form. If you would like to sign the manifesto please email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Democratiya, The Euston Manifesto, Engage, and Mishcon de Reya are delighted to invite you to a conversation with Nick Cohen. In What's Left? How Liberals Lost their Way Cohen tells the story of how parts of the Liberal-Left of the 20th Century ended up supporting the far Right of the 21st in the shape of Islamic extremism.

Eve Garrard has collected together a list of publications by signatories of the Euston Manifesto and a list of works relevant to the concerns of the Euston Manifesto that Euston signatories have found valuable. You can reach them from our new Publications page.

Neither list is by any means complete and if you have any useful suggestions for additions or corrections please email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it with them. We intend to update this resource frequently.

We are pleased to publish an Arabic translation of the Euston Manifesto. The translation was co-ordinated by Ammar Abdulhamid, director of The Tharwa Foundation, and affiliated to the Brookings Institution in Washington. We are particularly keen to hear responses from our Arabic readers.

Jackie Guerra's Workin' It radio interview with Abdullah Muhsin and Alan Johnson, authors of Hadi Never Died: Hadi Saleh and the Iraqi Unions (TUC, 2006) is now available to listen or download.

In Independent Labour Publications' Democratic Socialist, Bernard Hughes, a reluctant supporter, writes about the Euston Manifesto and the general phenomenon of online political blogging in Britain. He also coins the term "Eustonard".

Two questions about the Euston phenomenon arise from its life so far: first, is this a genuinely new form of political organisation that deserves attention?; secondly, are the politics of this thing actually any good?