The improved situation in Iraq will allow the new administration to shift its focus to Iran, where the clock is ticking on a dangerous and destabilizing nuclear program. Obama should offer direct official engagement with the Iranian government, without preconditions, along with other incentives in an attempt to turn Tehran away from developing the capacity to rapidly produce substantial amounts of nuclear-weapons-grade fuel. At the same time, he should lay the groundwork for an international effort to impose harsher sanctions on Iran if it proves unwilling to change course.

… Iran’s challenge has led other actors in the region to begin to work together and look to the United States for help. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have grown deeply disillusioned with U.S. leadership but would welcome an effective U.S. role. Even Syria, Iran’s ally, has launched peace negotiations with Israel partly to improve its relations with Washington and partly to avoid being stuck on the Shiite side of the emerging Sunni-Shiite divide. If the Obama administration could show that there are real payoffs for moderation, reconciliation, negotiation, and political and economic reform, it would recoup considerable U.S. influence throughout the region.

Obama will have to decide what to do about the conundrum posed by Hamas, which won the Palestinian elections in January 2006 and then took control of Gaza through a military putsch in June 2007. Hamas rejects both Israel’s right to exist and the agreements the Palestinians have already entered into with Israel. It also advocates and practices violence and terrorism (which it calls “resistance”) against Israel. Nonetheless, given Hamas’ control of Gaza and its support among at least one-third of Palestinians, a peace process that excludes it could well fail.

The way out of this dilemma is to make it clear that Hamas, and not the United States, is responsible for the Gazans’ fate.

I link to the essay, not because I agree with everything in it — parts of it strike me as over-optimistic — but because it is interesting and timely and it collects a useful list of problems facing the new “leader of the free world” in a region that is more important to World opinion than it is to humanity’s well-being. Indeed, I feel that the Middle East (especially Israel and the Palestinian Territories) generates discussion out of proportion with the number of human beings living there and the economic significance of their activities. Others go even further.

In the issue of the New Statesman for 11 September 2006 (one free hit), Lindsey Hilsum explains why she could not oppose the Iraq war, went along with it despite misgivings, but now thinks she was wrong to do so. Key to what she says was an Iraqi friend, Mohammed Fatnan, whose hopes, and whose desperation for change ‘even if it meant war’, she shared in some measure. He was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents in December 2004 and has not been seen since. The story she tells of Mohammed Fatnan’s fate she tells as being part of something wider, of the present state of Iraq and the ‘cruel chaos’ that has overtaken it. With this there can be no quarrel. But Hilsum’s article also has another purpose. She writes:

Here in Britain, the pro- and anti-war lobbies continue their arguments, tired and shrill. Everyone wants to prove that they were right. I was not right. I was swayed by Mohammed, who wanted the war, and was destroyed in its wake.

Not right, and her arguments no doubt not tired or shrill either. Hilsum is, nonetheless, sufficiently possessed now of the rightness of her abandoned wrongness, so to put it, as to be rather free and easy in how she lays about her. Here’s the central passage:

From the beginning, the debate in this country has been about British politics and prejudice, largely ignoring Iraqis, as if they were bit players in their own tragedy. The pro-war lobby — including the Euston Manifesto Group, heavily influenced by the Kurds, who have a different agenda from other Iraqis — refuses to acknowledge the disaster war has created. Even as Sunni insurgents slaughter Shias, and Shia ministry of interior thugs terrorise Sunnis, they claim that democracy is nascent. To them, anyone who states the obvious — that Iraq is a violent mess where life for ordinary people is worse than before — must be a covert apologist for Saddam. As Winston Churchill said during the Second World War: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

Their refusal to acknowledge the truth is as sickening as the cynical reasoning of the anti-war lobby, which opposed the war because its members hate America, not because they thought it would harm Iraqis. Most Iraqis I know agreed with Mohammed that there was no other way to get rid of Saddam, and that, however rough it was, war would in the long run bring a better life. They have been proved wrong, but the anti-war mob infantilises Iraqis, allowing them no responsibility for their own fate. They blame the US for all killings in Iraq, as if the murderous bands who detonate car bombs in Baghdad and Baquba were not responsible for their own actions.

As it’s not something I do very often, I’ll start here by defending ‘the anti-war lobby’. Lindsey Hilsum does what supporters of the Euston Manifesto are widely accused (but without justification) of doing: she simplifies opposition to the war as if all of it was based on hatred of America rather than on any concern for the well-being of Iraqis. But while this properly characterizes part of the anti-war movement, it is a travesty if applied to the whole. There were people (including, it may be said for the nth time, amongst supporters of the Euston Manifesto) who opposed the war not out of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, or ‘anti-imperialism’, but because of their estimate — or merely worry — that the consequences of the war would be all-round negative.

I turn to what she says about the Euston Manifesto Group. Hilsum relies on an ambiguity in her statement ‘they claim that democracy is nascent’. The Euston Manifesto says that once Saddam’s regime had been overthrown…

…the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted…

If ‘nascent’ is taken in this spirit — in the spirit of the possibility of democracy being born in Iraq, of a battle for, an effort at, transformation and democratization — then yes, pro-war Eustonians might reasonably be said to regard democracy as nascent. We have argued that there was a project there to be supported, against those forces trying to defeat it — a project for which there was evidence from two elections that millions of Iraqis themselves supported. But Hilsum’s meaning for ‘nascent’ would seem to be the more closed one, in support of her unshrill but condemnatory purpose: namely, that we Eustonians think democracy is being born born regardless of the forces ranged against it and as though it were a foregone conclusion. And that is pure invention. As also is her allegation that supporters of the war can’t see and won’t acknowledge that, in her words, Iraq is ‘a violent mess’; and that for us anyone who says so must be an apologist for Saddam. I repeat, pure invention. Iraq is now a violent mess, if this is how you want to put it; and there is no foregone conclusion about the democratic project which those of us who supported the war were supporting in doing so. This is not something that — speaking for myself — I’ve just got round to today. You can read here and here and here to see the point made perfectly clearly.

If the whole democratic project does come to grief in Iraq, then the hopes of those of us who supported the war will have been defeated, and the estimates of anyone who did think the outcome was a foregone conclusion confounded. This doesn’t show that, turning the clock back to late 2002/early 2003, the decision to support the war was self-evidently wrong. That decision was made on the basis of information available at the time, of estimates of probable consequences both ways — with war and without it — and of ignorance about certain things that hadn’t yet happened; not on the basis of 20-20 hindsight. Those like Lindsey Hilsum who now wax righteously indignant after changing their mind about the war face the small difficulty that they themselves, on the basis of what they knew and didn’t know back then, made precisely the same call as those at whom they are so indignant.

What is it that Hilsum takes to license such self-righteousness? I don’t know her, so I don’t know. But one possibility is that, having had Iraqi friends like Mohammed Fatnan, friends she knows she cared and cares about, she imagines that this puts her in a different category from the rest of us: you know, those both pro- and anti-war who ignored the needs and interests of Iraqis to focus on ‘British politics and prejudice’. What an unlovely moral conceit. ‘Only I (or some small ‘we’) care about the suffering of Iraqis; all you others… just shrill and callous.’ Give yourself that satisfaction if you will, but it isn’t how the world goes. Others (than Lindsey Hilsum) who supported the war also had Iraqi friends or acquaintances. And still others, although they didn’t, were moved by the same considerations as she was — ‘swayed by Mohammed, who wanted the war’, thinking just like ‘most’ of the Iraqis Hilsum knew ‘that there was no other way to get rid of Saddam, and that, however rough it was, war would in the long run bring a better life.’ And others than Hilsum have been every bit as dismayed and upset and troubled as she is by the current tragic sufferings of the Iraqi people.

It may be thought that self-righteousness only afflicts those who remain resolute in a single unchanging view. Never, though, underestimate the capacity for self-righteousness of the recently ‘saved’. (Thanks: GK.)

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

A wide range of Iraqi organisations has united and need your support in a week of Solidarity with the Iraqi People against terrorism, political sectarianism, administrative and financial corruption, and to support the disbanding of civilian militias, national reconciliation and the unity of Iraqi people in order to build a united, pluralist, federal and democratic Iraq, writes Gary Kent of Labour Friends of Iraq.

An Invitation

We are honoured to invite you to participate in a week of Solidarity with the Iraqi People against terrorism, political sectarianism, administrative and financial corruption, and to support the disbanding of civilian militias, national reconciliation and the unity of Iraqi people in order to build a united, pluralist, federal and democratic Iraq.

Activities

Participating in a seminar in British parliament on Thursday 7 September:

Cultural festival on Sunday 10-9-2006 between 7 and 10pm

Solidarity with Iraqi people is a humane duty to avoid terrorism crimes and sectarian conflict

To supporters of freedom and human rights

To the United Nations, World Governments and Humanitarian Organizations

Iraqi people have suffered for more than three years amid bitter life, accidental killings committed by terrorist groups, organized gangs, and remnants of the defeated dictatorial regime, in addition to the horrible conditions of health, municipality, security, educational services, and the collapse of post, transport, water and electricity nets, amid the worsening of administrative duties and the huge spread of corruption. What is making things worse and more dangerous is the political nature of the sectarian conflict, the spread of killings based on identity, and the imposing migration on hundreds of thousands of families, just on the
basis of sectarian and religious backgrounds, something that has never been a problem to the Iraqi people who have been living in harmony with various nationalities, religions and sects.

There is no doubt that if this situation continues or worsens it will lead not only to the destruction of Iraq’s national harmony but also to the disintegration of Iraq’s national unity, and may push Iraq into an unprecedented catastrophe that would threaten neighbouring countries and the whole region with security chaos and instability. It would also threaten the whole world by the spreading of violence far worse than what is happening now.

We believe that such a scenario is becoming much clearer to all who are following the situation in Iraq now as well as to all governments and various sections of the public.

We, members of the Iraqi community, are looking forward to a quicker build up of Iraqi military and security forces so there would not be a necessity for the existence of foreign troops in our country. Thus we appeal to you to double your efforts of solidarity with our people, to continue the fight against terrorism and sectarianism, and to support political forces, organizations and social sections who are facing terrorist crimes and disintegration, in holding firmly the unity of the people and their right to choose their future.

Along the road, the road of mobilizing solidarity with our people, we, groups of political, cultural and social organizations, in addition to academics and political personalities in the U.K have decided to hold a solidarity week with our people, in coordination with a solidarity campaign in a number of European countries and the U.S.A. We hope that you will support us.

The Committee of Solidarity week with the people of Iraq - U.K

2-9-2006

- Patriotic united of Kurdistan
- Democratic Party of Kurdistan
- Iraqi Communist Party
- The Communist Party of Kurdistan
- Iraqi Workers’ Federation
- Organization of Free Kurdish Families

- Democratic Patriotic Alliance
- Iraqi Patriotic List
- Iraqi Community Association
- The Movement Coordinating Democratic Trends
- Committee for Support of Democracy
- Union of Iraqi Writers and Journalists
- Al-Mandan Society
- Assyrian Democratic Movement
- League of Iraqi Academics
- Iraqi Women League
- Communist Partisan League
- Democratic Union of Youth and Students in Iraq
- Malabar Centre against Al-Anal

Have you heard the latest out of England? A commitment to the institutions of democracy. No excuses or apologies for tyranny. A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An affirmation that the United States is a great country and nation.

These notions may seem common sense, bordering on banal. Yet they have caused quite the ruckus within the British and North American left. They are key tenets of the “Euston Manifesto,” a statement of broadly left-liberal principles cooked up last spring by a collection of London-based journalists, activists and academics. First published in the New Statesman in early April, the manifesto was officially launched on May 25 (and is available online at eustonmanifesto.org).

The purpose of the Euston Manifesto is, essentially, to save the left from itself. It is an attempt to draw a clear line between the social-democratic liberal left and the anti-war left, the latter of which has, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, made common cause with tyrants, excused terrorists, and — in some cases — sold out the rights of women to reactionary theologians, all in the service of a single-minded opposition to the United States. Enough, write the authors of the Euston Manifesto: “We must define ourselves against those for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic ‘anti-imperialism’ and/or hostility to the current US administration.”

full text

Speakers at the meeting will include Gary Kent, Director of Labour Friends of Iraq (in a personal capacity) who recently led a soldarity delegation to Iraq, and Alan Johnson, co-author with Abdullah Muhsin of Hadi Never Died: Hadi Saleh and the Iraqi Trade Unions, just published by the TUC. There will be lots of time for questions and discussion.

Come along if you are interested in the under-reported story of Iraqi reconstruction and the role that the Iraqi trade union movement has in building the new Iraq.

Please email londoneuston at the domain googlemail.com to confirm your attendance and so you can be sent directions.

In the latest issue of Red Pepper, there is a critique of the Euston Manifesto by David Beetham and Pat Devine — both old friends of mine. Their article is also available online at ZNet. I respond here to a single theme connecting a number of the points David and Pat make early on in their article. Later posts will deal with other points.

One preliminary. Above the ZNet version of their article, the Euston Manifesto is billed as being ‘by a group of left-leaning journalists and others who backed the Iraq war’. Red Pepper has it more accurately, indicating that most of the group behind the manifesto backed the war.

But if the manifesto is presented at ZNet with this error of fact, it is an error that is faithful to what David and Pat have written. For it is the impression the two of them convey in this remarkable opening passage:

They [the manifesto’s authors] purport to defend the ‘authentic values’ of the left against those who opposed the war on Iraq and oppose the continuing occupation, asserting that we operate double standards by supporting forces hostile to our values.

While this is certainly true of some of those who opposed the war, it is a travesty as a characterisation of the overwhelming majority of those in the anti-war movement. The values that the manifesto espouses are historically, and remain today, those that the democratic left has always advocated and struggled for, and the attempt to appropriate them by this group for their own purposes is deeply offensive to the wide spectrum of those on the left who have been working for them all their lives.

The Manifesto Group’s attempt to draw a line between those who support the values of the Enlightenment, of modernity, of the Age of Revolutions, against those who do not, or are prepared to compromise them, is wholly spurious. The suggestion that the differences that exist are over values, or indeed over whether there are universal values, is to overemphasise the influence of post-modern relativism and is a diversion.

I call the passage remarkable not because of the way it turns the manifesto into a criticism of ‘those who opposed the war’ — those who opposed the war, period. For although this is a mischaracterization, the claim is by now unremarkable, having been made rather often since the manifesto was published in mid-April. Against it I will merely say yet one more time that the text of the manifesto is perfectly clear on this matter — ‘The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree… etc’ — and that several of its original signatories (including Michael Walzer) opposed the Iraq war. It continues to be a surprising piece of carelessness that neither the text itself nor this fact about the signatories gives pause to those criticizing the manifesto as a pro-war document. But it is a mischaracterization that has ceased to be remarkable.

What makes the above passage remarkable is its further claim that we of the Euston Manifesto Group have appropriated for our own purposes the values ‘the democratic left has always advocated and struggled for’ — as if we regarded these values as exclusive to ourselves. This charge is based on precisely nothing. In the manifesto we treat the central values we want to see upheld as being the common inheritance of the left: speaking of them (in the Preamble) as the left’s ‘authentic values’; and (at B 15) as ‘the inheritance of us all’. We do, indeed, criticize others on the left for compromising these values; but when we do, we say, for example, ‘currents that have lately etc’, and ‘those left-liberal voices today’, and ‘much self-proclaimed progressive opinion’, and ‘too many on the Left’. None of these is a totalizing judgement. None of them either says or implies that supporters of the Euston Manifesto extend the criticisms to the entirety of the left save only ourselves. As I’ve put this once before, if the cap doesn’t fit, no need to wear it. The group who produced the Euston Manifesto is a tiny number of people, and the idea that we would lay exclusive claim to a commitment to values such as pluralist democracy, human rights, equality, freedom of opinion and so forth, is preposterous. People sometimes do, of course, make preposterous claims, but you need a bit of evidence to establish persuasively that that is what they have done if you think they have. In the present case Pat and David don’t even gesture towards any evidence, let alone provide it.

Note the symmetry here, however. Just as we are supposed to be claiming that it is ‘against those who opposed the war’ (without any further qualification) that we defend the values we defend, so we are supposed to have tried to appropriate these values for ourselves in a way that would exclude the rest of the democratic left. The effect in the two cases is to turn a criticism directed against specific tendencies of argument and apologia, against some currents of opinion on the liberal-left, against documented cases of individual advocacy, into a blanket condemnation of opposition to the war as such and the entirety of the liberal-left.

Read on and you will see that pretty much the same thing is repeated here:

The manifesto also accuses the anti-war movement of anti-Americanism and suggests that criticism of Israel’s racist treatment of the occupied Palestinian people is often a cover for anti-semitism. Once again, this misses the point. While there undoubtedly exists blanket anti-Americanism and some resurgence of anti-semitism, the real issue is not that of being pro or anti America or Israel, but recognition of the differences that exist within countries and the decision as to which internal forces the democratic left should support in terms of its values.

You need perhaps to read that twice to see what its logical structure is. The passage tells you that the Eustonians miss the point because… there is another point. But this is an elementary logical error, since it’s possible for there to be more than one point at any given time. If, as David and Pat allow, blanket anti-Americanism does exist and there has been some resurgence of anti-Semitism, why wouldn’t it be to the point to combat both the one and the other? In its best traditions, the left has always stood against prejudice and bigotry, and there seems every reason for it to continue doing that. Countries do, of course, contain different internal forces, to be supported or opposed (as appropriate) by people on the democratic left. But that is a real issue, rather than the real issue, if the latter phrase is meant to convey that anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have no serious purchase anywhere today.

And this really is the crux of the matter. On each of these points, David and Pat seemingly agree with supporters of the Euston Manifesto that the criticisms the manifesto makes have some application. They evidently think, though, that their application is marginal. And we don’t think it is. We think there is significant evidence, which we have done our share over the last three years to assemble, for our view. But in any case that — a judgement about the spread, the extent, of certain contemporary themes of political argument — is something there can be serious discussion about. Nothing is gained towards such a discussion, however, by seeking to diminish the significance and extent of what we for our part criticize, via the suggestion that we present it as rampant, omnipresent — and then knocking this down. Nothing is gained by the several fictions that the Euston Manifesto stands against opposition to the Iraq war as such, or that it lays claim to democratic and universalist values to the exclusion of everyone else on the liberal-left, or (by implication) that we treat every criticism of Israel and of US foreign policy as instances of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism respectively.

Finally, it is by the same impulse to diminish, that Pat and David say that we Eustonians ‘overemphasise the influence of post-modern relativism’ — as if post-modern relativism exhausted the reasons for the differences over values that the manifesto talks about. We think that cultural relativism plays some part in these differences (see B3). But that is all we’ve ever said. We also point to other sources of them, like double standards and a simplistic ‘anti-imperialism’.

When people on the Western left make excuses for suicide terrorism, when others — some of them, writers of world renown — treat the contemporary US as comparable with Nazi Germany, when some of those who opposed the Iraq war cannot bring themselves to comprehend what considerations might have impelled others to support it, when it is not uncommon for the crimes committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib to be seen as overshadowing what happened in that same place during Saddam Hussein’s rule, when well-known left or liberal journalists tell you that democracy may not be for everybody or that an attachment to the legacy of the Enlightenment is a form of Islamophobia — this is not all due to cultural relativism, much less to postmodernism (though some of it may be). But it does betoken a difference of some kind over values, notwithstanding Pat and David’s view that the attempt to argue so is ‘wholly spurious’.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

[The following appears, slightly abridged, in today’s Guardian, and at Comment is Free.]

Was the Euston Manifesto written, as some wags now say, in a pub? Well, no. Would you want beer spilt over your manifesto? Would you want it smelling of smoke? The document was mooted — yes, mooted — in one pub and discussed in another. But it was written where things get written these days, on computers. And this, in a sense, is also where it came from. It came out of the blogosphere and into the world.

The manifesto, which has its public launch today, states a commitment to certain general principles and identifies patterns of left-liberal argument that its supporters think fall short of those principles. So, we commend the democratic norms and institutions that typify the liberal democracies, despite their shortcomings, and criticize those on the left who make excuses for undemocratic movements and regimes. We affirm the importance of universal human rights values, rejecting the cultural relativist arguments and double standards by which these values get watered down or inconsistently applied. We express our opposition to terrorism and to indulgently ‘understanding’ (where this means condoning) it because it is thought to be motivated by legitimate grievances. We state an attachment to a broad ideal of equality in all spheres, from gender relations to economic justice. The full text can be read at the manifesto website.

The document stepped out of the virtual world into the real one and, my, didn’t people say hello. How do we feel about this, we ‘Eustonians’? Encouraged, no more. But also no less. Since it was published in April, it has generated an enormous volume of comment, from supportive, through critical, to jolly unfriendly. The abstract generality of its principles is one point of complaint. But we are unembarrassed by this. We make no claim to have formulated a programme for government; we hope merely to remind people on the liberal-left of the values they ought to be defending. A related point is the suggestion that this wish to remind is needless, since the manifesto’s criticisms don’t apply beyond a tiny section of the far left. We are just as relaxed on this second point as on the first. For the suggestion isn’t true, as has been amply documented on the blogs.

A third reaction is that of people who see the manifesto as pro-war — referring to the Iraq war. The short answer here is: no, it isn’t. This is stated as clearly as can be in the document itself, and it is a plain fact that a number of the original signatories opposed that war.

But a longer answer is worth spelling out for what it reveals about the ‘geography’ of the left in relation to the Iraq war, and how this is simplified by some of the war’s opponents. Their story is of a three-way division within left-liberal opinion: comprising (1) those who supported the war, the ‘left hawks’ or ‘muscular liberals’; (2) on the other side, but merely marginal - people in and around the Socialist Workers Party and Respect - a small body of anti-war opinion actually wanting America to come to grief in Iraq, supporting or making apology for the Iraqi so-called resistance and its murderous methods; (3) in between these, the largest sector of anti-war opinion, opposing the war for a combination of reasons, prominent amongst these the judgement that it was likely to turn out badly.

This mapping of the terrain underlies the mystification over how people who opposed the war could support the Euston Manifesto, and also the upset over criticisms directed at the left, when according to that map they apply to no more than a small band of souls on the far, and hard, left.

The real geography, however, has been different. Within the large ‘middle’ sector of left-liberal opinion opposed to the war there has been, from the start, a differentiating subdivision — between those who opposed the war without being in denial about the considerations on the other side of the argument, and those who precisely have been in denial about them. This latter group extends well beyond the far left.

The signs of denial are abundant in the recent public life of the Western democracies: in the banners and slogans for that Saturday on 15 February 2003, from which one would never have known that Saddam’s Iraq was a foul tyranny; in the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, many indeed unable to comprehend, why others of us supported a regime-change war; in a constant stream of comment in liberal daily newspapers and weeklies of the left; in the excommunications issued and more recent calls for apology or recantation; and, most seriously of all, in the perceptible lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise given its origins in a war led by George W Bush.

That is the actual geography, with four regions, not three. A significant segment of the international left lost touch with some of its most important values.

Conceived in a small blogospheric space because of a hunch that there were people out there in the world who found this state of affairs troubling, the Euston Manifesto stepped out. And the hunch has been confirmed.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

Unions representing workers in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan face incredible challenges in defending working people and rebuilding democracy. One of their requests for solidarity from British trade unionists is the provision of mobile phones — crucial for any union organiser these days, but especially in Iraq where travel can be dangerous and landlines aren’t sufficiently reliable or widespread.

But mobile phones can be expensive to buy in Iraq (and UK phone systems don’t work there yet), so buying new ones could eat up scarce union resources. Instead, the Iraqi trade union movement has identified a way of easily converting old European mobile phones for use in Iraq. So now the TUC Iraq Solidarity Committee has opened an appeal for used mobile phones alongside Labour Friends of Iraq.

Old mobile phones (and their chargers, of course) should be sent to the TUC Aid for Iraq appeal at Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3LS. Or bring them to the Euston Manifesto Group launch.