See also:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg51518.html
[Biofuel] Bards of the Powerful
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4654447.stm
BBC NEWS |
Tuesday, 5 July, 2005
Galloway claims Africa deception
Ministers are using aid for Africa to cover up for the disaster of
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, MP George Galloway has claimed.
Mr Galloway told MPs the government was cynically trying to turn
around its international reputation "on the sea of bodies" caused by
poverty.
In a Commons debate on this week's G8 summit, the Respect MP said the
G8 system itself had to be overturned.
But minister Kim Howells accused him of "self-righteous paranoia".
Deception charge
Mr Galloway called Tuesday's adjournment debate and delivered his
first speech since winning Bethnal Green and Bow from Labour at the
election.
He said Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been "rumbled" by Make
Poverty History campaigners.
The MP argued the government was wrongly suggesting it was pushing
for all debts from developing countries to be written off.
They had reduced poverty problems to a question of heavily
conditional cancellation of some countries' debts, he said.
"The government are engaged in a carefully calculated deception of
public opinion to try and draw a veil over the disaster in Iraq and
Afghanistan," he said.
Status Quo
Ministers were trying to "scramble up at least the foot hills of the
moral high ground on the greatest issue facing the world today", said
Mr Galloway.
He said: "For me [Blair and Brown] are not the Lennon and McCartney
of world development issues.
"They are the Status Quo and it's a mangy status quo which will do
nothing to resolve the ocean of misery and poverty that exists in the
world."
He said the privatisations and the IMF, World Bank, venture
capitalists and the "robber barons" of globalised corporations had
left poor countries strangled by free market reforms.
"We won't make poverty history until we make the G8 and their system
history," he said, pointing to unfair trade rules.
Sloganising
Mr Galloway added: "The poor countries are poor because the rich
countries became rich in part through making them and keeping them
poor.
"Until a seismic shift of wealth is transferred to the people we
robbed then justice will not be done."
But Foreign Office Minister Mr Howells said Mr Galloway was using
easy political sound bites and slogans as a substitute for proper
argument.
He said he could not pre-empt the talks taking place at this week's
Gleneagles summit, chaired by the UK Government.
But he promised the negotiations were detailed and were not a sham.
Mr Howells said: "Our G8 agenda is deliberately ambitious. This
government believes that future generations would not understand if
we failed to take this opportunity for progress."
The minister argued a real difference could be made through the
existing international machinery.
Attempts to encourage a revolution against capitalism had only
brought poverty and war, he suggested.
"We have got to work with what we have got," he said, admitting it
was not perfect.
Mr Howells said dicatators in Africa had not just come from the
right-wing but included left-wingers such as Robert Mugabe in
Zimbabwe.
"They're not just American puppets, they were Soviet puppets," he added.
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