Numbers

A friend of mine came to register at around 4pm today (friday). When he did so, he recieved a free travelcard. Since only the first 20,000 people to register were to recieve a free travelcard, I can only assume that this means that by well into the start of the ESF, less than 20,000 people had registered, well short of both Florence and Paris. In part this was only to be expected, given the cost of the event for punters compared to previous years, and the cost of coming to London, but it still represents a somewhat dissapointing figure for the European movement. Having said that, the movement in Britain has never experienced any event which approaches the level of plurality which is clearly on display in the ESF this year, the fiasco of the organising process notwithstanding, and we can only hope that we manage to take that on board, and that the ESF will come to represent a major step forward for the movement in Britain, despite rather than because of the influence of the major political groupings which have dominated the organisation of the ESF. London is no Florence or even Paris, but I think you can discern the spirit of the new global movements here nonetheless.