The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Warm, Soft and Brown

The Chancellor has sent me an email. He wishes to update me about the G8 finance ministers' summit, which he believes "will be remembered as the 100 per cent debt relief summit". The Chancellor's grounds for this belief are not specified. I hope this doesn't mean that he confuses beliefs with facts, in the fashion to which his next-door neighbour is so unfortunately prone.

Talking of neighbours, the Chancellor is quick to pre-empt (if that is not too tactless a term) any speculation about rifts, ambitions, successions and so forth. "Tony and I are proud," he declares, "that with a Labour presidency of the G8 and the EU we have the opportunity to change the world for the better." So there you are. They're on first-name terms and everything.

That "Labour presidency" is rather fine, too; you'd think the G8 and the European Union had given the party of Team Tony and I a mandate to change the world, much as twenty-something per cent of the electorate did last month in Britain. The wicked, irreverent thought that the presidencies of G8 and the EU might carry a responsibility beyond party politics is clearly far below the famously sober half of Team Tony and I. Certainly Tony himself, with his healthy sense of self-esteem and his scrupulous non-rigidity regarding matters of fact, would have little time for the idea that the EU's rotating presidency, rather than bestowing itself naturally upon the deserving, tends merely to fall upon whoever happens to be next in line.

The Chancellor recounts that he has visited Africa to see our little brown brothers in their woe. "I will never forget the 12- year-old orphan girl I met. Her parents had died from Aids. She was already sick from tuberculosis. ... At an age when you should be optimistic and joyful with all your life in front of you, I could see only desolation in her eyes." But amid the "abject poverty" there is also "great potential". Yes: behind the sad brown eyes of every tubercular orphan girl, Thabo Mbeki is struggling to get out.

"As I planned Saturday's summit," the Chancellor continues. "that young girl's desolation was at the forefront of my thoughts." In that case, it's a good thing we have secretaries and pocket calculators to deal with the minutiae involved in planning a summit, e.g. planning the summit. It is to be hoped that the sober half of Team Tony and I has not started believing he can alter undesirable facts by the mere act of keeping them at the forefront of his thoughts.

Anyway, the Chancellor continues, "Every child is precious. It is because as parents we believe that every child is unique and deserves care that the world must act." That first homily is the title of the email: "Every child is precious". Somebody has spent too long in the company of pop singers. The second sentence is ominously Blairite in tone: we, representing The Parents, hold a belief, therefore everybody in the world must act upon it.

So what did everybody do? Under New Labour's brilliant presidency, the summit "wrote off 55 billion dollars of debts but went far beyond debt cancellation - with a plan for 40 billion dollars extra aid; a timetable for ending protectionist export subsidies, and new funds to tackle the scourge of HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria." Apparently fifty-five billion constitutes a hundred per cent debt relief; either that, or the Chancellor's belief that the summit will be remembered as "the 100 per cent debt relief summit" rests on somewhat enigmatic grounds. "The meeting," the Chancellor continues, "demanded an end to unfair subsidies that do most for the wealthiest farmers in Europe but harm the poorest workers in Africa." Not only are we helping our little brown brothers; we are doing so at the expense of the perfidious French. Virtue truly is its own reward.

With exemplary tact, the Chancellor omits to mention the conditions which those desolate orphans will have to meet before they qualify for his compassion. Countries will have to "boost private sector development" and eliminate "impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign". Those scourges (you remember the scourges?) can be tackled, all right; but not unless there's profit in it. This charming Protestant practicality doubtless explains why the Team Tony and I League of Parental Righteousness seems so much less concerned about the precious ones in Iraq than those in Africa. We, with the world behind us, can help in as much as it profits us; but if bigger profits seem likely through starving, bombing and poisoning the precious ones, we must choke back a tear and do what's right. It's a market thing, you see.

Lastly, the Chancellor "knows", by what means I know not, that I share his hope that, instead of the desolation he saw, "there can be a new faith that tomorrow can be better than today". Hoping that our victims may find faith in unspecified future improvements appears rather a damp squib after the proud, world-changing, hundred per cent first paragraph. However, I share this hope with the Chancellor "as a Labour supporter"; which makes all the difference, obviously.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home