There were two types of radical response to the world’s troubles available in Bethnal Green today. A demonstration of about 150 organised by an outfit called Islam4UK was protesting about New Labour’s Contest 2 Strategy. They also seem to be cross about “corruption spread everywhere and the masses steeped in atheism and agnosticism”. My hunch is that their prediction that we will have sharia in England, Germany, Belgium and America is slightly off the mark. Those Belgians are too fond of their beer and sausages in my experience. But I’ve been wrong so many times before.

Inside the Rich Mix centre the organisers of 6 Billion Ways had organised “a day where the arts meet ideas, discussion and action to explore the causes and find solutions to these interlinked global crises.” It was three things I’m not. Young, big and enthusiastic. It was a vast event spread over three cinemas and a number of meeting spaces and, according to what one hears, about two thousand people had pre-registered. The venue was bunged during the mid afternoon and it was an all dayer.

One of the organisers told me that it came out of discussions about what to do now that the social forum movement in Britain has run out of steam and it had all the strengths and weaknesses of that origin. Much of the input came from NGOs, voluntary organisations and charities. Now this might sound cynical but there was a fair bit of innovative though confused thinking. Exhibit one is an outfit called Pants To Poverty which seemed to be based on the idea that by buying and, more importantly, wearing and displaying the right type of underpants you can reduce world poverty. That’s them in the photo. I’ve doubled checked the Transitional Programme and can find no mention of this by Trotsky. On the other open there was a variety of pro-asylum seekers organisation and groups selling Palestinian goods.

We all know how much the people around the social fora distrust leadership and structure so the workshop on leadership was the first port of call. Expectations of a major discussion on strategy, democracy and all that were shortlived. It was more along the lines of make sure you let people know when your meeting is and it’s a good idea to have someone chair it.

The session on food and, poverty and climate change was more meaty. Pardon the pun. This had an audience mostly under the age of 30. Not unreasonably much of the discussion examined individual solutions. This is a generation which has very limited experience of successful mass action. A young comrade who was obviously from a left current, though I don’t know which one, flagged up next weekend’s Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Conference and rebutted a point someone had made about how the recession is not entirely a bad thing. I chipped in later and droned on about planning, developing an ecological programme that would be attractive to millions of people and bigged up CACCTU again. It seemed uncontroversial enough with the audience and then the next speaker was back to composting.

You can’t dance at every wedding but it was really missing a trick not to have worked out just how significant this event was beforehand. Two thousand young people looking for answers about what is wrong with the world. If it’s on next year you’d be a fool to miss it.