You are, of course, right about democracy being one dividing line: my criticism is that it appears to be the only one given any prominence in the EM.

But I will take my hat off to your group for starting some interesting debate on and offline.

I don’t have any stats on the gender balance of the signers and it’s too late to try and work it out by people’s first names, but bear in mind that a lot will have come from blogs, from political blogs, and the world of ideological rants and willy-waving, so it may be that women are generally less well represented here. And we have only had the “web launch” - all sorts of real-world events are planned.

If you have you own theories, I’d be interested to hear them. One the face of it, the ‘message’ doesn’t imply (to me) any gender bias.

The “class” issue is being discussed here at the moment:

http://www.dirtyleftie.co.uk/?p=93

To me, the mere word “class” would add little value to the discussion, but turn vast numbers of people off, as well as taking us down a blind Trot alley. Something like “institutionalised poverty, social immobility, etc.” would express it better. Section ‘B-5′ and ‘C’ do talk about poverty, but the intention is to establish principles, rather than specific policies for tackling it. The EM may be encouraging people to be more open to different political views, but it’s not about replacing political parties as instruments of change.

> The new dividing line is about where you stand on dictatorship, eh?

Don’t think the EM is saying that that is *the* dividing line, but that there *is* a dividing line on support for democracy. If you don’t have that, then even if your dictator allows you enough food and a standard of living, you’re poor and oppressed in so many other ways.

We’ll be thinking of you in Manchester!!