Assembly meeting

Beyond the bureaucracy of the Eurocrats, or the catastrophic mismanagement by the EU of the refugee ‘crisis’, or the xenophobic rants of the tabloid press, there is another Europe – the real Europe – a continent of Europeans who are compassionate and for whom social justice is not a political slogan but something that is practised every day and every week. We need look no further than the econmic beleaguered Athens to find an example of this unassuming goodwill. The Greeks are well practised in the art of the alternative (or ‘parallel’) economy, having been ruled over decades by successive governments that have wrecked their national economy and seen Greece turn a vassal state of the EU. And alongside this self-managed economy is another specialism of the Greeks: direct democracy – where people manage their own lives without reference to government. Last year a group of anarchists who…