25 Feb: still waiting.

Zander – I don’t dispute that Oxfam and other development NGOs are doing plenty of other useful stuff. What I DO dispute is that this march is useful. As you say, the platform for this march is “sufficiently vague to be universally acceptable”, and that’s just the problem with it. An illustration: the government announced today that it was imposing tougher curbs on non-EU migrant workers (http://is.gd/kttA). Presumably, the unions think this is great, while development NGOs think it’s pretty bad. But since the platform’s so vague, they can still go on the same march! That’s not a campaigning win in my book…

Any big march bringing different groups together has to agree something sufficiently vague to be universally acceptable but that isn’t all that NGOs like Oxfam are doing.

For example I’m going to Sierra Leone next week to do a case study on the impact of the Financial Crisis on the world’s poorest country to inform lobbying and media work around the G20. I’ll also be working with Oxfam’s programmes and trying to use twitter from upcountry Sierra Leone!

No one’s got all the answers to how to respond to the credit crunch but bringing new perspectives to the debate is a start.

“The platform is united by three linked calls: Decent jobs and public services for all, end poverty and inequality, build a green economy.

More specific demands on the UK government are to:

- Create a ‘Green New Deal’ to create jobs in the environmental sector

- Invest in essential services including social housing

- Provide emergency funding to countries that need it to protect jobs and provide social protection

- Tackle tax havens – especially those linked to the UK

- Insist on democratic reform of the World Bank and IMF

- Make all financial institutions and multinational corporations transparent and accountable

- Ensure that poorer states are allowed to take responsibility for managing their own economies rather than having liberalisation measures forced upon them

- Introduce robust regulatory requirements and financial incentives at national level and push for them at international level to stop climate chaos
- Commit to substantial new resource transfer from North to South to support low carbon development”

Let’s remind ourselves what the unions are all fired up about at the moment: http://is.gd/joLP. When the unions tell their members to join this march, a great number of those members will interpret it as a ‘British jobs for British workers’ march. Some of them will attempt to persuade the media to report it as such. Lots of the media probably will.

The question then is where that will leave the development and environment NGOs in positioning terms. If there had been a clear statement of what the march was for, then the fact that the NGOs are junior partners in all this wouldn’t matter; it would be a well thought-through tactical alliance, and who knows, maybe it would deliver some actual results.

But as it is, this march is all things to all people – with, as I say, a pretty good chance that it will be reported in heavily protectionist terms. In the background, the larger questions remain: What is this march asking for? Who is it trying to influence?

As you say, “this is all about the various strands of the British Soft Left struggling to find a common narrative”. Too bloody right…