Despite supporting the Euston Manifesto, I already wrote about how I will be more interested in what, if anything, it can generate rather than the thing itself. Having said that, I do have a few quibbles with the content, but not enough to prevent me signing up for it.

For example, I am not sure that singling out the Israel/Palestine issue as a whole point is productive. It just seems far too specific compared to all the other points. There are other flashpoints and territorial disputes in the world.

Something else was bothering me, but I couldn’t quite work out what it was until I read this today:

Paine’s importance in history consists in the fact that he made the preaching of democracy democratic. There were, in the eighteenth century, democrats among French and English aristocrats, among philosophes and Nonconformist ministers. But all of them presented their political speculations in a form designed to appeal only to the educated. Paine, while his doctrine contained nothing novel, was an innovator in the manner of his writing, which was simple, direct, unlearned, and such as every intelligent working man could appreciate. This made him dangerous; and when he added religious unorthodoxy to his other crimes, the defenders of privilege seized the opportunity to load him with obloquy.

Somehow that (from a Bertrand Russell essay about Thomas Paine) struck a chord with me, and articulated a lot of what what I had been thinking about the Euston Manifesto. A shortcoming rather than a failure, and one which many will say is shared with the whole ‘New’ Labour experiment. It would be a shame if ‘Euston’ just became the new word for ‘Islington’.

I am not suggesting that the average working man cannot understand, appreciate, or use good rhetoric – you only have to look at some of the Labour movement’s great trade unionist speakers to see that – but he does like directness, and I think I would have preferred it to be more direct.

Another thing from the Paine essay made me realise that there is something missing: surely a document stating principles of democracy should have space to mention the unacceptability of hereditary power in any form? Or did I miss that bit?

I’m sure that the authors will take this in the positive spirit it is meant, after all the manifesto is supposed to be a starting point for debate isn’t it? And I can’t complain – I never bothered to take part in Andrew’s online collaborative manifesto last year, which probably contributed in some way.