Smash hit

I go along with neither argument. Yet my response is unlikely to be heard amid the din. If $500 billion has done Africa more harm than good, how can doubling it possibly do more good than harm? We know that aid induces dependency. The idea of aiding only those governments of whose policies we approve is what happens when charity is nationalised. It denies the humanitarian imperative, which by its nature is ad hoc and personal.

Helping only those that help themselves is a contradiction in terms. A child dying on television may be distressing, but children are dying “off television” the world over. Western peace of mind may be a worthy goal of policy, but it cannot justify a new age of imperialism in Africa.

I hear Geldof screaming again, “So what would you do? Just let them effing die?” I reply that, if I know of people dying, I will try to save them through charity. But if Geldof and his friends want to play politics, showing demagogic muscle means nothing. His revellers must join in the democratic debate and engage with a complex argument. The exploitation of “just in time” protest is no alternative to formal democracy. A Live 8 ticket is not a vote. Make poverty history is a cliché, not a programme.

Relieving debt is a mixed blessing for poor countries since it damages their access to new investment. I would certainly cancel much of it, since its giving was as corrupt as its receiving. But debt relief has been progressing with no need of four-letter words or a heavy drum-and-bass line. Cancellation should not now be a back door for political intervention.

I have no trouble giving private charity at the point of need. Live Aid was at least an honest, if politically naive, response to disaster. Today Geldof’s head has been turned by politics. He makes no appeal for Darfur relief in Sudan. He has not even selected a “quick-win” objective such as Aids.

Over the next three years some £15 billion is needed for anti-retroviral drugs in Africa. While Geldof bills and coos with Blair on television this week, will he mention that this gigantic sum is exactly what Blair intends to blow on a single, useless ID computer? The quickest salve to poverty in Africa is entirely within reach of Britain’s exchequer. For the cost of an equally useless NHS computer, Blair could conquer malaria as well.

Nor do I have trouble with reforming western trade to make it fair and less a sanction on African economies. But this requires complex bilateral deals with individual states. It means treating them as autonomous partners who can accept sovereign responsibility, not as Geldof’s lumpen mass of starving blacks.

Yet there is no Live 8 concert in Brussels or on the sugar beet prairies of East Anglia.

Nor will Live 8 plead with the NHS to stop its most vicious sanction, the poaching of a third of Africa’s qualified doctors and nurses. Such action is too close to reality for Geldof’s musicians. The politics Live 8 does not do is the politics of painful choices.

What we see is another chapter in an old story, glibness triumphing over thought and the rich yearning for excuses to impose their values on the poor. We know we cannot “make poverty history”. This week we are trying to make it geography. Perhaps, just for once, we should make it economics.

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