Honesty from a DFID junior minister (or he might have been a civil servant - not q sure).

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.

sorry, that Cambridge University was meant to be under Address, NOT Web Address. That was a mistake