Gig report from last night, and a couple of online reviews to come, but first, some politics! (yay! i hear you cry)
Today’s Guardian reports that Blair is a bit hacked off the aid agencies are down on the G8’s ‘acheivements’, but also suggests that he has some fairly ambitious plans during Britains tenure as president, to push for more movement on getting rid of farming subsidies, and for a new treaty on climate change.
Now, the problem here is, Tony now has a foil in both camps – he knows that Bush is not going to give in on capping emissions, and he knows the French aren’t going to go quietly on the CAP, so he can happily talk in non-definite terms about wanting things to ‘move forward’, ‘develop’ etc. without much fear that he’s actually going to have to do anything.
Of course, there’s the off-chance that he means it, which would be good. But there’s no real way of knowing. I don’t really trust him on anything these days. I can’t really see why anyone would after the outright lies he and his government told over Iraq. Why should he change now? He hasn’t even come clean over that disaster.
But I live in hope. We still have the problem of the G8/WTO/IMF/World Bank actually existing in the first place, but I’m a pragmatist and I really hope things move forward in a direction that is favourable for the world’s poor. We just need to remember that we’re still operating within a fundementally inequitous framework, and at some point, the world’s poor and working classes need to realise that the billionaires don’t really have our interests at heart. The globalised neo-feudalism of G8 style political dialogue is all about seeing what concessions they can make without spoiling things for share-holders. And therein lies the fundemental problem.