Live 8: What's The Deal
The small print behind Drop The Debt
18 Jul 2005

"These people,” complained Sir Bob Geldof unpleasantly, “have nothing to do with me.”
The Dublin-born businessman was speaking upon his arrival in Scotland to join G8 leaders at their hotel at Gleneagles. “These people” were the thousands thronging in the streets to show their hostility to poverty politics.
Geldof’s disowning of the protesters came as a relief. Over the previous few days, at scores of formal and informal meetings around Edinburgh, argument had raged as to whether the political elite’s rock-star outriders were well-meaning chumps or conscious agents of the poverty-makers providing a shield against anger.
My own view was that, for safety, we should proceed on the assumption that the Live 8 crowd knew well what they were doing.
I was taken aback by the numbers who appeared seized by moral panic at this suggestion.
Three weeks earlier, Geldof had been quoted everywhere saying: “Tomorrow, 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny” – a statement crass beyond words on a number of levels. He was referring to a deal said to have been brokered by British Chancellor Gordon Brown, allegedly providing for $55 billion debt relief for 18 dirt-poor countries. (The figure is fraudulent, but for reasons of space and the purposes of argument we’ll let it stand.)
Geldof had nothing to say about the conditions attached to the deal, although he must have known. It had been spelt out in a G8 communique that the relief was predicated on the 18 countries “adjusting their gross assistance flows by the amount given”: the debt relief would be set against the aid for which each country would be deemed eligible. None had been guaranteed an extra cent.
The G8 communique also declared that, “it is essential that (the 18 countries) boost private sector development” and ensure “the elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign.“
Thus, the price of the putative debt relief was that each country put its public services up for sale to private interests. Another African bonanza for big business.
The result will be greater inequality in the targeted countries, with the least well-off excluded even more rigidly from health-care and education, and necessities of life – water, for example – subjected to market mechanisms and priced beyond the capacity of those most in need.
Why didn’t this rate a mention from the celebrity roster? It hardly matters, I suppose. What matters is that we recognise the role which it suggests the Live 8 celebrities have been playing.
Their efforts have had the effect of blunting the edge of political opposition to the rulers of the richest nations. It is this factor which brought the rock aristocracy and the political elite together, and which is symbolised in the knighthood conferred on Geldof by the Queen of England.
More important, perhaps, has been the function of the rock gentry in protecting criminal war-mongers from the repercussions of their crimes.
I travelled into Edinburgh for the 250,000-strong Make Poverty History rally on July 2nd on the parish bus from Tilliecoultry in Clackmanannshire. A more moderate, welcoming and idealistic busload of people you wouldn’t meet in a month of Scottish Sundays. Every one that I spoke to saw the connection between expenditure on war and the persistence of world poverty.
The US alone has already spent more than three times as much on the war against Iraq as all the G8 countries have pledged in debt relief and increased aid to Africa. Primary-school children have no difficulty understanding the relevance of this relationship.
So, who is it that Geldof and Bono think they’d be alienating if, in the course of what they say is a campaign against poverty, they spoke out against arms spending and war? Not the parishioners of St. John Vianney’s, Tilliecoultry, I can tell you.
So, who, then?
And contrarywise, whose interests are they bolstering when they resolve not only to sing dumb on the issue themselves but to ensure that others do, too?