[g8-sheffield] Inside the Murky World of Make Poverty History

[zerosevenfour two]

a must read

http://indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/06/315058.html

Make Poverty History would seem an unprecedented success story. Uniting 
trade unions, charities, NGOs and a stellar-cast of celebrities, its cause 
is dominating media coverage while the campaign's white wristband is being 
worn the world over. So why, as the G8 summit approaches, are leading 
members briefing against each other to the press and African social 
movements saying ‘nothing about us, without us'? Stuart Hodkinson 
investigates.

For a sun-soaked Friday in late May, there was an unusual air of panic at 
the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) for the monthly members' assembly of 
Make Poverty History (MPH). Officials hurriedly briefed reception with some 
last-minute security instructions: “You must make sure that only assembly 
members are let in,” one instructed. “The meeting is open to the public, but 
only public members of Make Poverty History.”

The nerves were understandable. Two damning stories about MPH were about to 
break in the British national press. The cover story of British centre-left 
weekly, New Statesman, ‘Why Oxfam is failing Africa', had exposed deep anger 
among members of the MPH coalition at Oxfam's ‘revolving door' relationship 
with UK government officials and policies, accusing it of allowing Britain's 
two most powerful politicians, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor 
Gordon Brown, to co-opt MPH as a front for New Labour's own questionable 
anti-poverty drive.

The right-wing Sunday Telegraph, meanwhile, had given notice of its shocking 
exclusive on how large numbers of the ubiquitous MPH white wristband – the 
very symbol of the campaign – had been knowingly sourced from Chinese 
sweatshops with Oxfam's blessing.

Inside MPH, however, the embarrassing revelations were no surprise. For the 
past six months, some of the UK 's leading development and environmental 
NGOs have been increasingly vocal in their unease about a campaign high on 
celebrity octane but low on radical politics. One insider, active in a key 
MPH working group, argues there “has often been a complete divergence 
between the democratically agreed message of our public campaign and the 
actual spin that greets the outside world”. He is angry:

“Our real demands on trade, aid and debt, and criticisms of UK government 
policy in developing countries have been consistently swallowed up by white 
bands, celebrity luvvies and praise upon praise for Blair and Brown being 
ahead of other world leaders on these issues.”

THE RISE AND RISE OF MPH

This is surely not what campaigners had in mind back in late 2003 when Oxfam 
initiated a series of informal meetings with charities and campaigning 
organisations to consider forming an unprecedented coalition against poverty 
in 2005 to coincide with the UK presidency of both the G8 summit and EU, the 
first five year evaluation of progress on the UN Millennium Development 
Goals (MDGs) agreed in 2000, the 6th WTO Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong, 
and the 20th anniversary of Live Aid.

In September 2004, the Make Poverty History coalition was officially 
launched as the UK mobilisation of an international coalition, the Global 
Call to Action Against Poverty (G-CAP), led by Oxfam International, Action 
Aid and DATA – the controversial Africa charity set up by U2 frontman, Bono 
and multi-billionnaires, George Soros, and Microsoft's Bill Gates, the 
world's second richest person with a fortune of just under $50 billion.

Since then, MPH has become an impressive campaigning coalition, boasting 
over 460 member organisations including all the major trade unions and the 
TUC, development NGOs, charities, churches as well as several faith and 
diaspora groups. Its successful mix of celebrity backers and anti-poverty 
message has captured the attention of both politicians and mass media, 
encapsulated in the near-hysteria following the annoucement by veteran rock 
star and Africa campaigner, Bob Geldof, that a series of free concerts in 
London, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, and Berlin would take place under the 
banner ‘Live 8' to coincide with the MPH campaign to lobby the G8 summit in 
Gleneagles, Scotland in July.

But despite the success, there is widespread unhappiness within the 
coalition over the campaign's public face and its cosiness to Blair and 
Brown. Critics argue that on paper at least, MPH's policy demands on the UK 
government are fairly radical, especially its calls for “trade justice not 
free trade”, which would require G8 and EU countries, notably the UK, to 
stop forcing through free market policies on poor countries as part of aid, 
trade deals or debt relief. MPH also says rich countries should immediately 
double aid by $50bn per year and finally meet 35-year old promises to spend 
0.7 per cent of their national income in development aid. More and better 
aid, meanwhile, should be matched by cancellation of the “unpayabale” debts 
of the world's poorest countries through a “fair and transparent 
international process” that uses new money, not slashed aid budgets. With 
additional calls for the regulation of multinationals and the 
democratisation of the IMF and World Bank, John Hilary, Campaigns Director 
of UK development NGO, War on Want, has a point when he asserts that MPH's 
policies “strike at the very heart of the neo-liberal agenda.”

The problem, however, is that when these policies are relayed to a public 
audience, they become virtually indistinguishable from those of the UK 
government. This was brought home back in March this year when Blair's 
deeply compromised Commission for Africa set out its neo-liberal proposals 
for the corporate plunder of Africa's human and natural resources under the 
identical headlines used by MPH – ‘trade justice', ‘drop the debt' and ‘more 
and better aid'. In return, most MPH members, led by Oxfam and the TUC, 
warmly welcomed the report's recommendations. As Ghana 's Yao Graham makes 
clear in July's Red Pepper, African civil society is far less enamoured with 
the Commission's report, which he argues lays out a blueprint for “the new 
scramble for Africa ”.

REVOLVING DOORS

Thanks to the New Statesman exposé, much of the blame is placed on the 
leadership of Oxfam – the UK 's biggest and most powerful development 
agency. Despite its pro-poor image around the world, over the last two 
decades, Oxfam has become a feeder school for government special advisers 
and World Bank officials and has a particularly close relationship with New 
Labour. Blair's special advisor on international development, Justin 
Forsyth, was previously Oxfam's campaigns manager. Forsyth's opposite number 
at the Treasury is Oxfam board member, Shriti Vadera, a former director at 
the US bank, UBS Warburg, and specialist in public-private partnerships, a 
policy that litters the Africa Commission's report. Less well known is John 
Clark, who left Oxfam for the World Bank in 1992 to join the World Bank 
where he was responsible for the Bank's co-optation strategy with civil 
society before advising Tony Blair in 2000 on his “Africa Partnership 
Initiative” that directly led to the New Partnership for Africa 's 
Development (NEPAD) in 2001. At the heart of MPH is Oxfam's Sarah Kline, a 
former World Bank official who champions the organisation's ‘constructive 
dialogue' approach with the IMF and World Bank.

Oxfam's political independence from neo-liberal governance is also 
compromised by the £40m or so of its annual income that comes from 
government or other public funds. Nearly £14m alone originates from the 
Department for International Development (DfID), which is a major champion 
of privatisation and its benefits for UK companies in developing countries. 
In this, Oxfam is of course by no means alone – almost every development NGO 
in Britain is on DfID's payroll. While it is possible to take and use 
government money progressively while being critical of the donor's policies, 
such large amounts of government funding inevitably influence how far Oxfam 
will stick its neck out politically and risk future funding cuts.

Oxfam's unrivalled financial resources and existing public profile make it 
by far the most powerful organisation in the MPH coalition. Last year, 
Oxfam's annual income surpassed £180m – three times the amount received by 
its nearest rival, Christian Aid, and dwarfing more social movement-oriented 
development NGOs like WDM and War on Want who punch way above their weight 
on just over £1m each. Such wealth disparity inevitably translates into the 
direction taken by the coalition, especially its public image. Oxfam's army 
of press officers, researchers and campaign officers can naturally take 
advantage of the huge media opportunities generated by the campaign.

But making Oxfam the scapegoat for MPH's co-optation by New Labour misses 
the key role played by Comic Relief and its celebrity co-founder, the film 
director, Richard Curtis. As one of Britain's most prolific and brilliant 
comedy writers, Curtis shot to fame in the 1980s with the TV series 
Blackadder, and his since penned hits like Mr Bean, The Vicar of Dibley, and 
the blockbuster movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral. With wealth and fame has 
come enormous political clout. In 2001, British centre-left daily 
broadsheet, The Guardian, ranked him the 10th most powerful person in the UK 
media industry, ahead of every national newspaper editor, except Paul Dacre 
of the Daily Mail.

Curtis's personal commitment to raising money for Africa goes back to 1985 
when, at the height of the Ethiopian famine, he visited refugee camps as a 
guest of Oxfam. It was a life-changing experience and on his return to 
London persuaded showbiz friends to set up Comic Relief, the celebrity-led 
charity that uses the medium of comedy to raise both awareness about 
poverty, famine and disease in Africa , and huge sums of money to such 
causes.

Despite its incredible success in bringing in the bacon – over £337m since 
its inception – Comic Relief's live televised shows every two years are also 
criticised for their distinct lack of politics and inaccurate portrayal of 
Africa as a continent-come-country ravaged by natural disasters and warring 
tribes – the roles of colonialism, IMF and World Bank structural adjustment 
programmes and Western corporations don't get a look in.

THE MPH MEDIA MACHINE

Comic Relief's apolitical approach to Africa is deeply important to the 
fractious debate inside MPH. For while Bono and Geldof get the limelight and 
Oxfam dominates the policy agenda, it is Richard Curtis who is in the 
driving seat of MPH's all-important publicity machine.

Curtis's power partly lies in the financial and human resources he brings to 
the campaign. He has personally ensured the bankrolling of MPH, convincing 
Scottish multi-millionaire business tycoon, Sir Tom Hunter, to donate a £1m 
to the campaign, and advertising executives to donate more than £4m of free 
airtime. This helped propel his ‘Click' advert worldwide in which global 
film and music mega-stars, like George Clooney, Bono and Kylie Minogue, 
kitted out in full white T-shirt and wristband regalia, click their fingers 
every three seconds to mark another child dying in Africa . Curtis has used 
his unrivalled celebrity address book to ensure that MPH's platforms, events 
and entire PR strategy are dripping with celebrities.

While most MPH members gratefully accept that Curtis's celebrity support has 
been integral to the campaign's phenomenal marketing success (sales of the 
MPH white wristband are nearly 4 million and the website gets thousands of 
hits a minute), some believe it has come with too heavy a price. First 
there's the dubious role of Sir Tom Hunter, no ordinary sharp-dressed 
philanthropist. Worth £678m, his Hunter Foundation charity is an evangelical 
force behind public-private partnerships and child entrepreneurism in 
Scotland . Since 2001, it has helped fund the Scottish Executive's Schools 
Enterprise Programme in which the private sector helps groom children as 
young as five in the wonders of business.

Ewan Hunter, CEO of The Hunter Foundation, rejects this characterisation of 
the scheme as “completely erroneous”, and claims it is “a world leading 
initiative” to support a “can do” attitude in children: “For the record we 
consult widely with the relevant trade unions, councils, governments, 
teachers and children before agreeing any investment in education.” Note he 
doesn't actually refute the business-child relationship.

Tom Hunter recently caused a storm even in the right-wing tabloid press when 
he began selling special edition charity Live 8-MPH white wristbands stamped 
with the logos of six global fashion brands, including Hilfiger Denim whose 
owner, Tommy Hilfiger Corporation, is accused by labour right campaigners of 
sourcing its clothes from anti-union sweatshops in Latin America and the 
East Asia.

According to Stephen Coats, Executive Director of the Chicago-based US/Labor 
Education in the Americas Project that monitors and supports the basic 
rights of workers in Latin America, Hilfiger's labour record falls short of 
minimum standards:

“In our experience, Tommy Hilfiger is at the bottom of the list in 
demonstrating refusal to accept responsibility for the way workers are 
treated.”

Back in October 2003, the company was accused by labour rights campaigners 
of cutting and running from its responsibilities to workers when evidence 
was uncovered of labour abuses at the Tarrant blue jean factory in Ajalpan , 
Mexico .

The revelations have once again left Make Poverty History campaigners angry 
at the contamination of their high-profile symbol by its association with 
anti-labour companies. War on Want's John Hilary speaks for many inside MPH 
when he says that unless Hilfiger had suddenly reformed without them knowing 
“it's not the sort of company we'd want to be associated with”.

Then there's Abbot Mead Vickers (AMV), the UK 's largest advertising agency 
that has previously worked for Comic Relief and has been brought in to help 
with the campaign's communication strategy. Among AMV's many ‘politically 
incorrect' proposals rejected by incensed MPH members was a high-profile 
billboard campaign in which images of Ghandi and Nelson Mandela would sit 
alongside Gordon Brown, with the caption ‘2005…?'. The ad's message was 
clear: this could be the year in which Brown himself becomes a ‘man of 
history', cajoling the G8 into the ultimate sacrifice of dropping Africa 's 
debt to take his place alongside two martyrs of anti-colonialism.

Unsurprisingly, this ridiculous proposal to draw an equivalence between 
those whose lives were dedicated to fighting white supremacist imperialism, 
and a man who wants to turn Africa into a giant free trade zone on behalf of 
Western multinationals, was blocked by several incensed Make Poverty History 
members. But such insensitivity comes with the turf: AMV's corporate clients 
not only include Pepsi Cola, Pfizer, Sainsbury, Camelot, and the Economist 
but also, ironically, Diageo, the drinks multinational which happens to own 
the Gleneagles Hotel where the G8 leaders will be meeting, and is a major 
investor in Africa.

According to Lucy Michaels from UK-based research and campaigning 
organisation, Corporate Watch, Diageo has a track record of lobbying OECD 
and G8 countries to push for greater investment liberalisation in developing 
countries and its PR activities in Africa are deeply controversial:

“Diageo aggressively promotes its products in Africa by attacking one the 
continent's key micro-scale industries – home brewing. It recently released 
its 'Corporate Citizenship Report for East Africa' in which it labelled 
unbranded alcohol as posing severe 'health and social risks', despite 
evidence from the International Centre of Alcohol Policies, incidentally 
funded by Diageo, that 'illicit' brew' is generally of good quality and is 
vital to the household and local economy.”

SANITISING MPH'S MESSAGE

But the most destructive aspect of Curtis's involvement, critics argue, has 
been his personal intervention in the public communications of MPH to ensure 
that the politics are routinely buried by the personality as part of his own 
personal and completely unaccountable strategy to change G8 policy: 
“Richard's philosophy has become painfully obvious to everyone in MPH,” one 
critic argues. “He believes that we should support the efforts of the UK 
government to bring other G8 countries into its line on aid and debt, and is 
adamant that Brown and Blair should not be criticised.”

A few months ago, tensions came to a head when members challenged the 
discrepancy between MPH's agreed position and the campaign's pro-government 
public face. The response from a key Comic Relief official was that Curtis 
“found it difficult” to turn against the government because of his personal 
friendship with Gordon Brown. The extent of the Curtis-Brown relationship 
was revealed on primetime national television on Saturday 25 June in 
Curtis's BBC 1 film, The Girl in the Café (bizarrely announced as being 
shown across Africa ).

A love story between Gina, an idealistic young campaigner, and Lawrence, an 
adviser to a tough but caring Gordon Brown-style Chancellor, who helps his 
new lover get an audience with world leaders at a pretend G8 summit in 
Iceland and inspires the UK government to insist on ‘making poverty 
history'. Brown even attended the Scottish première of the film in May at an 
event organised by MPH paymaster, Tom Hunter, who has since been knighted in 
the Queen's Birthday Honours List.

Against this background, it is little wonder that a number of NGOs in MPH 
have recently felt forced to try to undermine the Oxfam-Curtis-Brown axis by 
making their displeasure known to the press. The ensuing fall out led to MPH 
members agreeing to quickly distance the coalition from the government by 
rushing forward by several weeks a report criticising UK government policy. 
However, the respite was only temporary. The coup de grâce came in a recent 
announcement that Gordon Brown has been invited to the 2 July rally in 
Edinburgh .

Frustration would not perhaps be so intense if there was real pluralism and 
democracy in MPH's organising practices. But as the G8 draws near, MPH 
apparatchiks have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that come the 2 
July rally in Edinburgh , only the branded, monolithic message and speakers 
of MPH are seen and heard.

DON'T MENTION THE WAR

MPH's website fails to even acknowledge the other protests, events and 
groups like Dissent, Trident Ploughshares and G8Alternatives, but who 
themselves are actively encouraging everyone to go and support the MPH 
rally. The MPH Coordinating Team, which includes Oxfam, Comic Relief and the 
TUC, has also twice unanimously vetoed the Stop the War Coalition's (STWC) 
application to join MPH on the Orwellian grounds that the issues of economic 
justice and development are separate from that of war, and STWC's 
participation in Edinburgh on 2 July would confuse the message. It will be 
interesting, then, to see if Oxfam bans itself – it is currently leading a 
global campaign for an international arms treaty on the basis that 
“uncontrolled arms fuels poverty and suffering”.

STWC has since been banned from even having a stall at the MPH rally. A 
leaked email in late May to MPH from Milipedia, the ‘ethical' events 
management company helping to organise the MPH rally, asks the coalition to 
“consider the desirability / strategy for removing people from our event who 
are setting up unwanted stalls, ad hoc events, facilities etc” and to draw 
up a list “of the likely infiltrators and decide what we're prepared to 
tolerate and at what point we draw the line and what action we want to 
take”. This followed a tip-off that the Socialist Party (formerly Militant 
Tendency) is planning to sell its newspaper on the Edinburgh rally, shout 
slogans through megaphones and wear red MakeCapitalismHistory T-shirts and 
wristbands (Red Pepper, incidentally, will be wearing ‘Make the G8 History' 
T-shirts on the day).

The email also recounts how, in response to Stop the War's announced 
intention to lead a break away rally at 4.30pm on 2 July, the local council, 
the police and MPH organisers are working together to ensure that STWC would 
be denied their own stage in order to retain “our ownership of the event and 
our key messaging”.

This is not just about political domination. Part of MPH's concern lies in 
the perceived threat to its monopoly of all commercial trade taking place on 
the day – the coalition has taken out a market traders licence for the 2 
July that will solely benefit the coalition's members and empowers MPH to 
move illegal traders, including political activists, off the site. Comic 
Relief has also registered the MakePovertyHistory slogan as a trademark with 
the European Union and is threatening to take action against “any misuse or 
alleged of the Trademark”.

But concerns about MPH lie much deeper than the political divisions within 
the UK development scene. The most obvious question, increasingly on the 
lips of even mainstream journalists, is where are the voices of African 
civil society, and other social movements of the Global South, in a campaign 
that is supposedly about them?

“‘NOTHING ABOUT US, WITHOUT US”

Kofi Maluwi Klu, a leading Ghanaian Pan-African activist and international 
coordinator of Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign in the late 1990s, is angered by 
MPH's lack of representativeness: “We have a saying in the African 
liberation movement – ‘nothing about us, without us'. Make Poverty History 
is a massive step backwards in this regard, even from Jubilee 2000.The 
campaign is overwhelmingly led by Northern NGOs and its basic message is 
about white millionaire popstars saving Africa 's helpless. The political 
movements still fighting for liberation on the ground are completely 
erased”.

The absence of the South in the leadership of MPH inevitably translates into 
the campaign's politics. For instance, Southern NGO's and movements are 
generally critical of making demands on the G8: “The G8 is a completely 
illegitimate and unnaccountable body of global governance; its governments 
and corporations are historically responsible for most of the problems of 
developing countries, and remain so today” say Nicola Bullard , of the 
Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, the respected international 
non-government policy research and advocacy organisation. “Lobbying the G8 
contradicts the very clear call made by hundreds of social movements, NGOs 
and trade unions from the South and the North at this year's World Social 
Forum to mobilise protests against the G8 summit.”

The same is true for MPH's policy demands. While Southern movements welcome 
MPH's more holistic development agenda to Jubilee 2000's single issue 
campaign for debt relief, they argue that its position on debt contradicts 
what grassroots African and other Southern campaigners are demanding: “MPH 
is calling for 100 per cent cancellation of the unpayable debts of the 
poorest countries – but so is the UK government,” explains Jubilee South's 
Brian Ashley. “This does not address the ‘illegitimacy of the debt' in the 
first place, the fact that many South countries' debts were either a 
hangover from colonialism or came from the huge hike in interest rates 
during the 1970s and 80s, and have been paid back many times over, making 
the South the creditor of the North. We demand the total, unconditional and 
immediate cancellation of all Southern country debts, not just those of the 
very poorest as MPH requests.”

For Southern debt campaigners, the debate is almost identical to the one 
that led back in 1999, to the North-South split in the Jubilee 2000 movement 
and the creation of the Jubilee South network, which today brings together 
more than 80 debt campaigns, social movements and peoples' organisations 
from more than 40 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and 
Asia/Pacific. Jubilee South's founding principle was to create stronger 
South-South solidarity, to strengthen the collective voice, presence and 
leadership of the South in the international debt movement and lay the basis 
for global social transformation from the bottom-up.

While MPH is part of the Global Call for Action on Poverty (G-CAP) that has 
a Southern dimension in its leadership, dozens of Southern-based groups, 
including Jubilee South and Focus on the Global South, have refused to be 
part of G-CAP, declining's Oxfam and Action Aid's invitation to the 
September 2004 Johannesburg meeting that eventually launched the coalition. 
“Jubilee South decided not to go for the fairly simple reason that you don't 
launch a campaign on behalf of the South without fully briefing, consulting 
and working with Southern networks first,” says Brian Ashley. Nicola Bullard 
concurs, adding: “Focus on the Global South saw the Jo'burg meeting as a way 
to get a lot of radical groups and grassroots movements to give legitimacy 
to a pre-determined, Northern-led campaign. We believe you have to mobilise 
and construct movements from the bottom-up”.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of MPH's blending of its message with that 
of the government's, and its exclusion of critics North and South, is that 
it enables the state and media to draw a sharp line in the sand between the 
‘good protester' attending the 2 July Edinburgh rally, and the ‘bad 
protester' – anyone who is contemplating engaging in civil disobedience 
against what is, after all, an illegitimate institution and set of 
governments responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people each 
year.

THE MPH MONEY MACHINE

Those UK development NGOs unhappy with MPH's direction know this only too 
well, but refuse to publicly walk away from a campaign that is actively 
derailing the global justice movement. Although it may sound cynical, the 
reason is simple: MPHistory is a money-spinner. “Although we hate the 
message and the corporate branding, some NGOs are making thousands of pounds 
through the wristbands,” one arch critic admitted. “We have loads of new 
people on our database interested in our campaigns, and because the issues 
of trade, debt and aid are now suddenly sexy again, we have new funding 
bodies approaching us to do projects and research. MPH is paying for my job 
for the next three years.”

This, at the end of the day, is the NGO bottom-line and that is what 
MPHistory is all about – helping the world's poor in ways that guarantee 
your own organisational survival. By riding the MPH money-spinning tiger in 
the hope of becoming stronger, the UK's most respected development NGOs like 
Christian Aid, War on War and World Development Movement, are themselves in 
danger of becoming completely detached from their African comrades at a 
crucial time for unity against the New labour, the G8 and their plan to 
carve up Africa's natural wealth for Western corporations.

This must not be allowed to happen. It is still not too late for Make 
Poverty History's dissenting voices to quit en masse and use this symbolic 
power to inspire the millions of Make Poverty History members to resist the 
G8, and push Geldof, Bono, Curtis and co to at least use their media 
influence to criticise G8 policy. Otherwise, the only thing they are likely 
to be consigning to history is Africa itself.

* Stuart Hodkinson is the Associate Editor of Red Pepper

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