Pascal Lamy, the EU Trade Commissioner, today visited St Anthony's College in Oxford to give a talk on the economic power of the EU. A number of activists in Oxford decided to undertake various actions to make him feel welcome.

Unfortunately, one of those actions, a demonstration outside the gates of St Anthony's didn't really materialise, due to poor turnout of people (apart from the numbers of activists inside the talk). This was quite disappointing; Lamy is an incredibly powerful man and a leading exponent of neoliberal globalisation, so for Oxford not to be able to muster a visible demonstration against him is a bit crap...especially given our successes in the past with the likes of Madeleine Albright. Obviously Lamy has a lower profile, but that is exactly WHY he needs to be protested. He is one of the men that the thousands of protestors at WTO summits are trying to get to, and that tens of thousands of police are protecting...yet when he turns up with one security guard in Oxford we don't even bother to show him how we feel!

Things went rather differently on the inside of the talk. Things got off to a good start with the distribution of spoof lecture notes about Pascal Lamy and his policies ( http://osanetwork.free.fr/download.php?view.6 ) which was accepted and read by everyone present (about 100 people). Copies were even given to the chair of the talk and to Lamy himself!

There were a number of different activists present in the talk, including both students and town residents; people from CND, the Green Party, WDM, and more. A group of student activists turned up dressed in suits and proceeded to encourage Lamy from the audience whenever he said anything positive about opening markets or privatisation. However, this didn't succeed as well as it could...it was caught between two stools; not really disrupting the talk but not really making a point, either. At times it looked a little petty; something for us all to bear in mind for next time....either engage with the debate or go the whole hog and humiliate the guy!

After a truly cringeworthy introduction from Timothy Garton Ash ('Pascal Lamy is one of Europe's great intellectuals'!!) which probably put more people off than all of the activism combined, Lamy spoke for about 25/30 minutes on the EU as an economic superpower. As expected he sounded unobjectionable enough; lots of talk about 'social justice', 'equality' and 'transparency'. Of course, anyone with a smidgen of knowledge about the man knows how much these words mean....but it was difficult to get that across to a largely credulous audience.

Then followed the questions, including some from faux 'enthusiastic' students, praising Lamy's agenda of privatisation and free trade. As might be expected from an experienced bureaucrat, Lamy proved to be skillful at not answering the questions put to him...and due to the format it was impossible to ask follow-up questions without heckling him. This was frustrating, as much of what he said consisted of total lies. Among his quotations were the claims that "the EU's trade agenda has nothing to do with privatisation" that "opening markets to the private sector is not the same as privatisation" and (my personal favourite) "the EU is not pushing for the privatisation of water provision. It is pushing for the privatisation of water DISTRIBUTION."

Oh. Well. That's alright then.

All in all, a mixed evening...while Lamy and his flunkies were left in no doubt as to the presence of 'altermondialistes' in Oxford, and to their hostility to Lamy, I can't help feeling that an opportunity was missed. This man needed to be taught a serious lesson, and unfortunately that didn't happen tonight. Next time, I propose that we drop the agenda of trying to engage with him on his own territory, and just dump a bucket of water over his expensive suit. At least then we might get an honest moment out of the arch-neo-liberal.