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

[Chris Malins]

Exciting news, this must have been some tip off:

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).

Socialists come on rally: sell newspapers, shock!!!

zerosevenfour two wrote:
> 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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