Sundry Eustonian items...
> There's some confusion here (see the post by Ian70). Who is the real Alan Johnson?
> In Media Guardian today (free registration), Keith Flett thinks it a point against the Euston Manifesto that it emerged from the blogosphere.
The pro-war blog Harry's Place has a counter on its site that shows the numbers online at any one time. It is rarely more than 10. Suddenly those leftwing meetings I have been going to for the past 30 years seem strangely well populated.To help him along a bit with his numbers: another way of putting the same thing is that Harry's Place has thousands of visitors each day - like few of the meetings Keith has been attending all those years.
> In the same place, there's this piece about a revamp of the New Statesman:
The left has undergone something of a schism in Britain in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and Kampfner insists his magazine is "a broad church", giving ample space to the range of - often blistering - arguments that rage across the fault-lines. He published the Euston Manifesto - which, in the words of one of its leading lights, Norman Geras, "states a commitment to certain general principles and identifies patterns of left-liberal argument that we think fall short of those principles" - in full on the NS website, although "its critique of the anti-war movement" made his "blood boil".The Observer columnist Nick Cohen, who is also a NS contributor, is one of the Euston Manifesto's signatories. He thinks the NS does "better than the Guardian and the Independent" when it comes to giving sufficient space to the views of those on the left who are regarded by many mainstream liberals as beyond the pale. "At least you can have arguments in the New Statesman, although they are sometimes very bitter arguments," he says. "On the other hand, it reflects the way the majority of mainstream liberal thinking has gone. Most of the time you will see the characteristic features of modern liberal-left thought that America is responsible for everything. You'll see the reliance on satire and hypocrisy rather than putting forward constructive proposals. When I write stuff like that in the New Statesman, some of its readers go absolutely potty. But it's had editors who are not worried if part of their readership gets upset."
> Across at In minoranza, Eugenio Mastroviti has made a start on translating the Euston platforms into Italian. Binario 1 is up. Thanks, Eugenio.