Poverty's Still Here

From Planet 177

Ian Rappel interviews George Monbiot

During seven years of investigative journeys in Indonesia, Brazil and East Africa, George Monbiot was shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked and stung into a poisoned coma by hornets. He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria.
In Britain, he joined the roads protest movement. He was hospitalised by security guards, who drove a metal spike through his foot, smashing the middle bone. He helped to found The Land is Ours, which has occupied land all over the country, including 13 acres of prime real estate in Wandsworth belonging to the Guinness Corporation and destined for a giant superstore. The protesters beat Guinness in court, built an eco-village and occupied the land for six months.
He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics) and East London (environmental science). He is currently Visiting Professor of Planning at Oxford Brookes University. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He has also won the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize for his screenplay The Norwegian, a Sony Award for radio production, the Sir Peter Kent Award and the OneWorld National Press Award.

With the UK Government at the head of the G8, 2005 was supposed to be the year when poverty was made history, Africa was saved and global warming was tackled. What’s the reality of our situation in your opinion?

Well, on all counts, the G8 governments failed. And they failed because they didn’t really even try to succeed. If fact, far from Tony Blair dragging George Bush towards a stronger agreement on climate change, Bush seems to have dragged Blair even away from any sort of meaningful post-Kyoto commitment. Consequently, we’ve seen Blair waver on climate change just as he’s had to waver on every other moral issue that he’s had to deal with, which is ironic because he said that he was going to lead the world.
As for “making poverty history” and saving Africa, well the very limited concessions that were made at Gleneagles pretty well all unravelled within three months. Even now the residual agreements are still unravelling as the International Monetary Fund refuses to agree to the terms of the debt reduction that the G8 nations claim to have established. As far as the people of poor nations are concerned Gleneagles was a waste of time.

In relation to the G8 and the multinational companies that they represent, do you feel that what went on at Gleneagles actually enhanced the power of these institutions?

I think that a very dangerous way of looking at the problem of poverty was established in the build up to the Gleneagles summit principally I have to say, by Bob Geldof and Bono. They portrayed the G8 leaders solely as if they were part of the solution, and not as if they were part of the problem. In this respect, they would only praise them very publicly and lavishly, and would say nothing that in any way hinted at the damage that G8 policies were doing to the people of the poor world. What that did was to allow the G8 to persist in the implementation of these damaging policies, because the impression was created in the public mind that there weren’t any such damaging policies.
I think that, although they were well intentioned, both Geldof and Bono severely set back the causes that they claimed to be supporting, and replaced a call for global justice with a call for philanthropy.

How then would you evaluate the overall effectiveness of the Make Poverty History campaign?

Well, I would separate Make Poverty History from Live8. Make Poverty History was a coalition of a very diverse bunch of people that after Gleneagles broke up in all but name. I mean it’s still there, there is still something called Make Poverty History and all the groups are still ostensibly members of the campaign but there was a furious falling out after Gleneagles. This was principally as a result of Geldof coming out and saying that the outcome of the G8 Summit was a wonderful deal for the world’s poor, and scoring the G8 leaders eight out of ten on debt relief, and ten out of ten on aid — “mission accomplished frankly”.
This was completely at variance with what the NGOs inside Make Poverty History were saying. Yet Geldof’s views were those that made the media because he was the public face of the campaign. The fury within the coalition has to be seen to be believed. They can’t go public with everything that they feel about what happened, but in an article that I wrote I tried to convey some sense of what they were feeling without being able to quote individual members of the coalition. They were spitting nails about the situation — they felt completely betrayed and felt that everything that they had been working towards for years had been undone and destroyed, principally by this incredibly close relationship between Mr Geldof, the public face of it all, and George Bush and Tony Blair. We saw that photograph of Geldof resting his head on Blair’s shoulders with that love-struck grin on his face, which spoke volumes.

So where do you feel that the global justice/anti-capitalist movement goes from here?

Well there’s still everything to fight for, but the problem is that a lot of people think that the battle has been fought and won because of all that “mission accomplished frankly” stuff — reminiscent of George Bush standing on the aircraft carrier with that banner.
So, we have more of a struggle now than we did before Gleneagles because we not only have to tell people that the situation is still bad, but that we have to tell them that it’s still bad despite all the claims that it is now good. It is often such apparent victories that destroy a movement rather than overt defeats.

Do you think then that we can point, for example, to the war in Iraq as an illustration that things are still bad, and as a way of politicising the situation further? Would such an approach be helpful to keep the movement going forward?

That could be an argument. But one thing that I’m a bit concerned about is that if we always link the global justice agenda with the war in Iraq then the global justice agenda doesn’t come out quite as clearly as it might otherwise do. We have to campaign on both issues but there might be a danger in mixing them up too much.
Iraq clearly accounts for a huge amount of money, especially aid money that could have gone to Africa but it’s gone to Iraq where it has promptly disappeared instead of being used for reconstruction. Of course the whole Iraq adventure was proposed by Bush and Blair as a humanitarian action and that has become the centrepiece of their apparent “ethical” foreign policy — going to Iraq and killing a hundred thousand people. And it’s true that in their minds there’s no difference between killing people and helping them. So it’s easy to see why we might want to keep thinking of these two issues together. But I think that it’s quite important to separate them because the public’s confused enough about the sources of injustice.