AUTHOR: Redaspie DATE: Monday, June 26, 2006 ----- BODY:

One of the most noticeable things about the world we live in is how the official discourses such as those you hear in the mainstream media carve various issues up, when in fact they should be seen as linked. A while ago I posted on links between the Iraq war and the GM foods industry. This morning I was privy to two supposedly unrelated interviews with two government ministers on two apparently separate aspects of the British government's foreign policy.

One was an interview with International Development Secretary Hilary Benn on BBC Breakfast News on BBC television concerning British-sponsored plans to set up a panel to monitor progress on aid promises to Africa made at the famous Gleneagles G8 summit last year. Mr Benn made all kinds of warm comments about the good that the pledges made by the G8 have benefited the poor in Africa - such as the cancellation of debt for the poorest 18 countries allowing the expansion of education and basic health, fresh water supplies etc. No mention was made however of the simple fact that the entire Gleneagles deal collapsed months ago, with the participants effectively backing out of all their key commitments - most striking was the revelation that the debt relief for the 18 poorest countries, so trumpeted in the immediate aftermath of the summit, was in fact merely enough money to write off their repayments for the next three years. The actual deal itself was hardly great anyway - the World Development Movement stated in its official press release at the time that the G8 were continuing down the path of linking aid to economic liberalisation in third world countries, despite the fact that this has been shown to increase poverty. The WDM, incidentally, also contends that the British government is actively fostering the privatisation of water in poor countries by hiring consultants to advise governments on how to manage their water - consultants with a massive pro-privatisation bias - and even by bailing out water companies when their private operations in Africa fail to turn a big enough profit.

The second interview was with a junior minister at the same department called Gareth Thomas, this time on Radio 4's Today programme, about the problem of the spread of small arms in third world countries, fuelling wars. Mr. Thomas again used warm words to describe the draconian restrictions on arms traders in Britain to ensure that such weapons don't fall into the wrong hands etc. And yet, British arms sales to Africa quadrupled in the first four years of the current decade. This included arms sales to Malawi, one of the least developed countries in the world, as well as ten out of fourteen countries involved in conflict in 2003.

No mention was made during this interview of the obvious point - that at the same time as the British government claims to be trying to foster development in Africa and fight poverty, they are also overseeing the ever expanding selling of expensive weapons to the governments of some of the poorest countries in the world, a policy that totally undercuts the government's credibility on fighting poverty. This is not simply disconnected thinking on the part of different government departments. The fact is that the goverment is pursuing the agenda of the business elites of this country, as well as that of the US - the facilitation of water privatisation and of arms sales, the continued linking of aid to the opening up of poor countries' economies to foreign corporations, and the failure to provide any more than the most minimal debt relief to poor countries, are all part of a systematic set of policies. They are designed to screw the world's poor to make money for the already obscenely rich. And while the government pursues these policies, the issues that they traverse and link are separated from each other in the minds of the general public by the practices of the media-driven discourses. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just one of the ways by which our rulers keep us in the dark.

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