Europe Follow

THE RIGHT wing tabloids and the Daily Telegraph have whipped up a frenzy over two issues over greater European integration. The furore is over the referendum over the European constitution, and whether Britain should adopt the euro currency.

THE WORLD'S number one war criminal is set to face huge protests when he comes to Europe at the end of this month. George Bush is to attend the G8 summit of "world leaders" in the town of Evian, in France. Protesters will be travelling from across Europe to greet him.

GEORGE BUSH is coming to Europe on Sunday 1 June. Thousands of anti-war and anti-capitalist protesters plan to give him the welcome he deserves. Bush will be at a meeting of the G8 grouping of world leaders in Evian near the French-Swiss border. The G8 meeting is a major opportunity to protest against the chief warmongers - Bush and Blair - and their occupation of Iraq.

THREE CHEERS for the protesters who gave Tony Blair and the other pro-war prime ministers such a hot time when they visited Athens for the European Union summit last week. At the beginning of June George Bush will attend the Group of Eight (G8) meeting in the French city of Evian, just over the border from Geneva in Switzerland.

REMEMBER THE headlines when in January Spanish police arrested 16 North Africans who lived in Barcelona and Girona? "Major Al Qaida Attack Foiled" trumpeted the BBC. Tabloid papers ran lurid tales and the Guardian declared that "the group was poised to launch bomb attacks in Europe".

LAST SATURDAY'S great demonstration was one of those "once in a lifetime" events which it would be hard to find anything to match. One of the few that begin to compare - in my experience at least - was the million-strong anti-war march that concluded the European Social Forum (ESF) in Florence on 9 November last year.

WE NEED to identify what "Empire" means. Does it mean the US government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that? In many countries Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous by-products-nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course, terrorism.

Parliament is not nearly democratic enough. We need a revolution to get genuine control, writes Paul Foot

THE BRITISH National Party (BNP) hopes to make wider gains after getting council seats in Burnley, Blackburn and now Halifax. The Nazis want to start establishing the kind of strength their counterparts in Europe like Le Pen's National Front have achieved. Ten years ago the BNP Nazis thought they were on the brink of such a breakthrough in Britain.

ADF have been out of the spotlight for the last few years-what have you been doing? We've been all over the world and what we've seen influenced us enormously. We've played in the former Yugoslavia to 28,000 Bosnians and Serbs. We went to Brazil and took an idea for a track called "19 Rebellions" with us. We worked with young Brazilian musicians to create the track as it appears on the album.

THE ITALIAN state is clamping down on the anti-capitalist movement. That should concern every reader of Socialist Worker and every activist. Since the extraordinary success of the European Social Forum in Florence, the Italian government has arrested 42 leading activists and charged them with political crimes. Some of the charges carry five to ten year sentences.

THERE WERE two sharply contrasting faces of 2002: the mushrooming resistance to the priorities of the world's leaders, and more evidence of the cost of those priorities. We saw the biggest political demonstrations in Europe since the Second World War.