"This will not make poverty history. It is a vastly disappointing result"

Earlier this afternoon the G8 leaders brought their summit in Gleneagles to a close and announced their achievements. The full texts were published in the last couple of hours - and the comments below are subject to a review of the fine detail there - but we already have a pretty clear picture of what the outcome has been.

Yesterday Tony Blair said: "It is particularly barbaric that [the London bombings] happened on the day when people are meeting to try to help tackle the problems of poverty in Africa and the changes in climate."

President Bush said: "You've got people here [at the G8 summit] who are working to alleviate poverty and to help rid the world of the pandemic of Aids. .......and on the other hand you have people killing innocent people."

So what have these great men, who have spent the week "working to alleviate poverty", finally achieved?

The flagship announcement was for a $50bn "boost" to aid for developing countries. Contrast this with the cost of the war in Iraq: now over $192 billion, and rising by $1 billion a week.

No further movement, it seems, on the EU pledge to spend of 0.56% of GDP on poverty reduction by 2010, and 0.7% by 2015. One wonders at what point the west will begin to experience feelings of embarrassment on this phantom target. The promise to spend 0.7% of GDP was a target for all donor governments established by the UN General Assembly in 1970 - 35 years ago - and the deadline for reaching that target was 1980. By 2015 the target will be 45 years old. The record, frankly, is pathetic

The debts of the 18 poorest countries are to be forgiven. This was announced weeks ago, but on New Labour's past form we can expect the announcement to be recycled today. Rather less noise will be made about the conditions for the majority of developing countries yet to qualify for the relief: to "boost private-sector development" and eliminate "impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign". These liberalisation policies, while profitable for western businesses, have cost sub-Saharan Africa US$272 billion over the last 20 years; enough to wipe out all of its debt and allow all of its children to be vaccinated and go to school. Policies that damage Africa are being presented as acts of philanthropy.

Also announced were a "signal" for a new deal on trade and a "commitment" to find an end date for farm subsidies. This scarcely merits comment.

Contrast the G8 dismal effort with the stark realities of world poverty. Every day 30,000 children die as a result of extreme deprivation; 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.

The development charities are not impressed. Christian Aid said, "This will not make poverty history. It is a vastly disappointing result. Millions of campaigners all over the world have been led to the top of the mountain, shown the view and now we are being frog-marched down again.....this is a sad day for poor people in Africa and all over the world. Tony Blair says this is a start and it will not please everyone: he is horribly accurate in this because this package will not deliver poor countries from the terrorism of poverty which kills 30,000 a day."

War on Want, said: "On debt it is a 10th of what we were asking for. On aid it is just a fifth. On trade it has gone totally backwards. The G8 has turned its back on the world's poor."

Cafod's George Gelber added: "For the G8 leaders the cost of making poverty history was too high. Sadly it is the poor who will pay the price with their lives and their livelihoods."

What's become clear is that leading figures in the British government have cynically used the Make Poverty History campaign as a political branding exercise; a desperate grab for the moral capital they squandered in their illegal war on Iraq. One need only contrast their posturing of these past few weeks with the miserable deal they finally came up with, together with the other G8 leaders. In their calculations of political profit and loss a new factor ought to be added for their consideration. Several billion people had the facts of global poverty spelled out to them repeatedly during the Live8 concerts last week, and over the course of the Make Poverty History campaign. World poverty is no longer a silent holocaust. Billions are alive to this issue as never before and few of them will forgive New Labour and the G8 leaders for this contemptible show of moral absenteeism. Ultimately, since the G8 nations are all democracies to some extent, the leader's failures are our failures; their crimes are our crimes. If we really have been mobilised to make poverty history this year, then our task now is to ensure that those eight men who supposedly represent us pay the full political cost for their failure, and that future leaders have demonstrated to them, in no uncertain terms, the consequences of letting the disaster of poverty, in Africa and across the third world, continue to claim innocent lives on a biblical scale.