Making poverty history - no comments

The white bands are everywhere - I should imagine a good proportion of the blogs on our list have them, together with vast numbers of other liberal/leftish blogs.

No sane person would disagree with their message, but is their ("trade justice", "drop the debt" and "more and better aid" - I'm quoting here) strategy sufficient, or even correct? I haven't been able to commit my own blogs to these, or display the banner, if only because of doubts about that. After all, to me, it's by no means a radical departure from past failure, and does depend upon money that was spent badly in the past being spent better in the future, which requires a certain optimism about politicians and about bureaucrats. I was also concerned about how countries that had debts cancelled would be able to obtain credit in the future.

Anyway, Stephen Pollard has an interesting article on this very subject. The celebrity-bashing should get on some people's nerves, but there are some interesting figures, and good points that must at least be worth thinking about. Could it be that we are entrenching subsistence agriculture, rather than giving people the chance to make a proper living?

If my memory serves, Labour was committed to Free Trade in 1906 and has been for most of the period since (in stark contrast to the Conservatives). Were they misguided then, or perhaps it was a principled stance, long before the term 'Fair Trade' was created?