Blair pledges to heal Africa.....again

Today is World Poverty Day. The situation is desperate, and ought to be a source of cringing shame to every single person in the developed world. As the UK General Election draws near how should voters assess the government's stance on the crisis?

Every day 30,000 children die as a result of extreme poverty; the equivalent of 10 9/11s. Malaria, a preventable and curable disease, kills a million African children each year; one every thirty seconds. Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation; the majority are children under 5. Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday. Every day HIV/AIDS kills 6,000 people and another 8,200 people are infected.

This continues in the face of staggering inequalities, starkly set out by Charlotte Denny in a 2002 article for The Guardian:

“For half the world's population the brutal reality is this: you'd be better off as a cow. The average European cow receives $2.20 (£1.40) a day from the taxpayer in subsidies and other aid. The richest 25 million Americans have an income equal to that of almost 2 billion people, while the assets of the world's three richest men is greater than the combined income of the world's least developed countries. At the UN millennium summit [in 2000], world leaders set themselves the task of halving global poverty. The cost is estimated at between $40bn and $60bn on top of current aid spending - about a sixth of what the west currently spends on subsidising its farmers”.

Britain’s political leaders marked today’s event with fresh pledges to tackle the crisis. Tory leader Michael Howard said ending world poverty was a "noble" ambition. Charles Kennedy called for the poorest nations' debts to be wiped out. Tony Blair said the scandal of Africa’s plight was that the richer nations could end the suffering, but had failed to do so. He said 2005 must represent “a new beginning” for the continent.

Blair has made strong statements of this kind before. In his landmark speech to the Labour party conference in the wake of 9/11, Blair said that “The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. But we could heal it”. Liberal commentator Polly Toynbee was in raptures: “like the Winds of Change speech that told Britain empire was over, this will stand as a moment British politics became vigorously, unashamedly, social democratic. The day it became missionary and almost Swedish in pursuit of universal justice”.

Turning to the prospect of Blair’s divine interventions being frustrated by the shortcomings of others, Toynbee mused that “It will take time to see whether the old sell-arms-to-anyone French have been similarly moved and changed”. In the event, disappointment came rather closer to home. Barely three months had passed before the New Labour government decided to grant British Aerospace an export licence to provide Tanzania with a $40m military air traffic control system. Aid agencies were stunned. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam’s senior policy adviser, said the deal “exposes the huge gulf between prime ministerial rhetoric and foreign policy realities. The immediate losers will be ordinary Tanzanians. One in three Tanzanian children is malnourished; every day about 500 die. The problem is that public spending on health is $2 per person. For Tanzania, the cost of the system, which the International Civil Aviation Authority says is massively over-priced and inadequate, is about equivalent to one third of the national health budget”. Nevertheless, Blair gave his personal backing to the sale.

For Mark Curtis, Director of the World Development Movement and former Head of Policy at Christian Aid, the gulf between rhetoric and reality is apparent across the spectrum of UK policy toward the third world. The media lavish praise on New Labour for increases in aid and debt relief, but fail to mention “the awkward fact that poor countries only get such increases when they agree to pursue economic policies "advised" by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. This invariably involves privatising companies and opening up their economies further to trade "liberalisation". The effect has regularly been to increase poverty and inequality, and to make the world safer for corporations. While Blair claims to be listening to Africa, his government has for the last decade been opposing at the World Trade Organisation African proposals to pursue alternative trade policies. Stopping selling arms to Africa might also just help the continent, but this - naturally - is completely off the radar screen”. British policy is led, not by a mission to heal the wounds of world poverty, but to serve the UK's economic interests abroad.

Cynicism should not be allowed to preclude even the smallest openings for political change on global poverty. The subject is far too serious for that. Voters and campaigners should therefore be mindful of such cynicism on the part of politicians, as manifested in the “huge gulf between prime ministerial rhetoric and foreign policy realities” described above by Oxfam’s senior policy adviser. Blair’s infamous 2001 speech also marked “a new beginning” – the beginning of a US/UK military crusade that would test his supporters’ loyalty to the limit. Now in 2005 he must appeal to his core constituency once again if he is to be elected to a third prime ministerial term. But if “the new beginning” he proclaims for the world’s poor is to be realised then we must look to ourselves, and not New Labour, to deliver it.