NEW VENUE. Because of unexpectedly high demand for tickets—we were sold out in two days!—the venue for (but not the time of) the public launch of the Euston Manifesto has changed. It will now take place on Thursday 25 May 2006 at 7pm (19:00hrs BST, 18:00 UTC) at The Union Chapel, Compton Terrace N1 2UN
If you would like to attend the Launch Meeting, please email tickets@eustonmanifesto.org. The email should contain your full name, the number of tickets you would like, and the address you would like the tickets to be sent to.
Members of the media with questions should email “media” at this domain: “eustonmanifesto.org”.
“Misguided support for dictators destroyed the left’s credibility. Christopher Hitchens welcomes a volte-face“
“One can stare at a simple sign or banner or placard for a long time before its true meaning discloses itself. The late John Sparrow, warden of All Souls College, Oxford, was once struck motionless by a notice at the foot of the escalator at Oxford Circus Tube station. “Dogs,” it read, “must be carried.” What to do then, wondered this celebrated pedant, if you hadn’t got a dog with you?
“And then there came a day, well evoked by Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday, when hundreds of people I knew were prepared to traipse through the streets of London behind a huge banner that read “No war on Iraq. Freedom for Palestine”. This was in fact the official slogan of the organisers. Let us gaze at these two simple injunctions for a second…”
link to full article online
Norman Geras explains why one short passage in the manifesto will be reworded.
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A manifesto of the ‘pro-war left’ is a cry of pain and an argument about ownership of a corpse
You will have to read the Euston Manifesto in full for yourself. Likewise the churning arguments that are developing about it on commentisfree.com and other weblogs. But there are two big things you need to know as the debate on this latest leftwing prescription begins to move into the mainstream press. The first is that the authors’ main purpose is to rescue what remains of the British left from an obsession with the Iraq invasion and American imperialism and to shake it out of apologising for violent Islamists. The second is that the document is a cry of pain.
link to full article
On a Saturday last May, right after the general election, 20 or so similarly minded people met in a pub in London. We had no specific agenda, merely a desire to talk about where things were politically. Those present were all of the left: some bloggers or running other websites, their readers, a few with labour movement connections, one or two students. Many of us were supporters of the military intervention in Iraq, and those who weren’t – who had indeed opposed it—none the less found themselves increasingly out of tune with the dominant anti-war discourse. They were at odds, too, with how it related to other prominent issues—terrorism and the fight against it, US foreign policy, the record of the Blair government, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more generally, attitudes to democratic values.
link to full article online