update from planning...

gayle and i attended the wider planning group on saturday. a few things to note:

the new venue being talked for new forms isn't going to happen so it is a toss up between gold cup and foxhunter. sarah will be at the planning meeting on march 15 so we can find out more then.

contemplative venue - real possibility of using sovreign lounge which is an indoor venue. could also have a bit of an expanded programme. no promises yet but looks good. GB have also booked richard rohr, someone else whose name i forget who is a bit of a guru in tat area, and they've had a proposal about meditation stuff in from someone else - so all these things can combine here...

monday will have a focus on the make pverty history campaign. simon nateson is co-ordinating efforts for GB and has sent this blurb round about it:

The key campaign issue of MAKEPOVERTYMONDAY will be forced liberalisation.

This is a complex issue, and so it is easily sidelined by the powers that be, but it is the centrepiece of the campaign.

The story goes like this.

Throughout 2005, if we are not very careful, our own government will tell us that it supports the aims of Make Poverty History, and we will go to sleep. Championing issues that the public believes it understands ˆ aid and debt relief ˆ Gordon Brown will make much of the fact that the government is giving more aid to poor countries and are busy campaigning for debt relief at the G8 summit.

In fact, G8 governments and multinationals ˆ through organisations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Union ˆ have understood the trick of using promises of aid and debt relief to divide the poorest countries against each other and force them into signing trade agreements which will ensure their future in poverty ˆ for our benefit.

Their message is: we must help to poor to have a share in free trade.
Our message is: what you call free trade is unfair trade.

Why? Well here‚s one example.

For decades Western companies have been spoon fed by their governments, i.e. subsidized by your taxes, and they have gained a stronghold on world markets. They are the big boys.

Until now, poor countries have had the right to protect themselves by charging decent import taxes. The big boys cannot just walk in for nothing, and poor countries can control to some degree how they operate while on their turf.

But to weaken their ability to trade and work their way out of poverty, we have charged poor countries comparatively extortionate taxes to import their goods into Britain and Europe. The result is that while we can bring our goods to their markets, they cannot bring theirs to ours.

Now it gets worse.

In recent years, and this year more than any other, our government is busy telling poor countries: open your gates completely, let us do what we want with your workers and your markets, and in return we will let you bring things into Europe for less. We will stop spoonfeeding our fat companies, and you must agree not to feed your malnourished ones. This is fair, free trade.

In fact, the result will be that poor countries and their fledgling attempts to trade with the West will be overun, bought out and shut down. In no time at all they will have nothing to export except slave labour. Hence the term neo-colonialism‚. This is not an American phenomenon. Our government, admittedly with a different logic, believes it is for the best. They believe that there will be a Œtrickle down effect‚. After all, what more can we ask for?

Here‚s what:

We know what the trickle-down effect means. We have suffered from it ourselves, and continue to do so. The rich get steadily richer, the poor get a little bit extra. But in social, spiritual, environmental and, in reality, physical and material terms, that widening gap acts to make the poor, to all intents and purposes, poorer.

Poor countries must be allowed to subsidise their young businesses as we done have for decades. We must Œfreeze‚ the subsidisation of our own obese interests. We must stop charging ludicrous import taxes and allow developing nations to get on their feet and become competetive and also allow them, for a fair and agreed period, to keep charging us a higher tax for bringing our goods into their countries in order to avoid us swamping them before they even get going.

In reality, however, aid and debt relief are being used to force developing countries to sign trade agreements (E.U. EPAs, for example) which not only put them in the awful position we have described, but which manipulatively break up alliances between poor countries which would have been beneficial to their market growth.

You can see that it is a complex issue ˆ not morally, but just to follow. There is no simple analogy, and we all need to think very creatively about how we can get this across at a popular level. But this is the issue that we have to win. We must make sure that aid and debt relief do not become the wool that is pulled over our eyes.