British minister hitting the wrong targets
Nick Cater - Alert Net | 11.08.2001 06:34
Britain's Development Secretary Clare Short is hardly a stranger to controversy but her condemnation of international aid agencies for the protests at the G8 summit in Genoa is far more serious and revealing than any past gaffes.
Nick Cater - Alert Net
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DFID says Globalisation Will Be A Disaster
11.08.2001 14:15
I attended a talk by a man from DFID a few months ago at my university. On entering the packed hall, I saw that on every chair had been placed a copy of the afforementioned white paper. He talked about how they support third world development and stuff and I asked him what the actual agenda was - whether it was purely for strategic and selfish reasons or whether they actually claimed to be doing it for completely altruistic reasons. His answer came somewhere between these two extremes, claiming that the idea was that what was good for the world in general would in the long run be good for Britain. I guess that's called "enlightened self-interest". He said that his department did come into a considerable amount of conflict with other ministries and departments. The white paper we'd all been given was entitled Making Globalisation Work for the Poor. The minister (can't remember his name) seemed fairly positive about things for most of the talk but towards the end he admitted that while Clare Short genuinely believed that it could be made to work for the poor, "most of us believe that globalisation is going to be a disaster". I thought that was very interesting.
dave smith
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Cambridge University
correction
11.08.2001 20:50
me again