The British Agenda

[lockdown]

This is an edited transcript of a speech given at the G8 Alternatives Summit in July

I’m used to reading a lot of tosh in the mainstream media but I have to say that the reporting on British policy towards poverty in Africa really does take the biscuit. To read the mainstream media now is to enter a fantasy world where Blair and Brown are seriously regarded as the saviours of Africa. Treasury press releases are forming the basis of whole articles and absurdities spouted by British leaders are being reported uncritically. Unreported is what Britain’s real agenda is, which is actually very easy to discover, because you only really need to read Gordon Brown’s speeches that are on the on the treasury website. British elites’ basic aim in the world is toaid British companies getting their hands on other countries’ resources. So secret files from the late 1960s state: ‘we should bend our energies to help produce a world economic climate in which our external trade, our income from invisibles and our balance of payments can prosper.’ The key is to protect sources of raw materials in the Middle East, South East Asia and Southern Africa, to promote ‘freer’ global trade and ‘increase our efforts to open up new markets in Europe, Latin America, the Far East and elsewhere.’ Within the hundreds ofde classified files that I’ve seen on UK policy towards Africa I’ve never seen anything at all on human rights or even the wishes and needs of Africans. This is purely for the cameras.

Now reshaping the global economy in the interests of corporations is the basic New Labour project and Gordon Brown is the clearly identified leader of that strategy. He couldn’t have spelled it out more clearly in his speeches. Brown’s whole strategy is based on this concept of the poor countries and the rich countries each ‘meeting our obligations’, and the poorest countries’ obligations are to pursue stability and create the conditions for new investment. Now the naïve might think that the poorest countries have no obligations towards us, particularly those countries where thousands of people are dying every day of poverty. But in fact they do, and they are about creating the conditions for our companies to make more profits. That is the basis of Brown’s strategy. In speech after speech Brown has hammered it home that countries must create the right domestic conditions for business investment. And in article after article the media has failed to mention it. And I think the reason why New Labour is so keen on debt relief is precisely because it provides them with a lever to reshape the global economy in the interests of private investment. Brown has delivered speech after speech reassuring business of the government’s pro-business agenda; again, just look at the treasury website. And the aim of the project is very explicit and should be clear what it is. In Brown’s words it is ‘to remove, one by one, all the barriers in the way of enterprise.’ And that is to be pursued domestically and globally.

Now this championing of business interests is probably rivalled in government only by the Department for International Development, which is meant to be the aid ministry. Let me just read to you from a document of DFID’s called partnerships with business: ‘most of DFID’s partner countries are commercially important to the business sector not just as export markets but also for sourcing inputs and raw materials for foreign investment and joint ventures. Business may become involved in the identification of key policy and regulatory constraints to the business environment and thereby in the design and implementation of reform.’ Now this is not a secret agenda, this is an open agenda, which explains why ministers have never said anything critical at all at any stage over the last eight years under New Labour about transnational corporations. And it seems to me that talking about international development without mentioning transnational corporations is a bit like talking about malaria without mentioning mosquitoes.

On trade, ‘we want to open up protected markets in developing countries’. That’s not Lord Palmerston, that’s Patricia Hewitt, who recently ended her term as Trade Secretary. You can’t get more explicit than that. Aid – well, the Foreign Office described aid, in files from 1958, as ‘a weapon in the armoury of our foreign policy.’ Now aid is being used to force water privatisation on poor countries and most British aid is tied in to World Bank/IMF economic programs forcing free market conditions onto poor countries. Now poor countries don’t need moreaid of this kind, in fact less aid would probably be more in their interests. And they don’t need more debt relief when it comes with those strings attached and they don’t need more trade with rich countries when poor countries are forced to open up their markets as well. And I think the great danger of where things stand currently is that the G8 will achieve its goal ofdeepening the corporate liberalisation project precisely through the aid and debt proposals currently on the table.

...

http://www.ukwatch.net/article/891