(An update of the 2006 chapter Messiah Politics in practice which deals with poverty in Africa, climate change policy, and Mr Blair's support for President Bush's militarism.)

Saving the World 1: Ending poverty in Africa

Africa - and the world stage
There has been a good deal of speculation that Tony Blair's big ambition is to hang on to power until June 2007, so he can shine at the annual G8 meeting. Actually, this may be hard to do as the world's aid and AIDS campaigners repeat their 2006 accusations that the rich world's leaders have reneged on the high promise of the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in 2005. Some debt has been cancelled, some more aid paid over: but double-counting, missed deadlines, and budgetary fudges have covered what is probably a failure of will.

Future historians may view Gleneagles as a landmark for the poor in Africa. It more certainly marked the high water mark of Tony Blair's aspirational politics: he was the inspired host to the world's traditional great powers as they had their annual bout of conscience. It was also the moment when he brilliantly portrayed himself as the embattled realist, and sold the idea of his being the man who had done all that was humanly possible for virtue, and could do no more. Having flirted with the poverty campaigners all summer, he casually remarked that government and campaigners were not natural bedfellows.

It does not take much of a sceptical mind to understand how little happened that summer. In December 2006, the OECD said that except for help to Iraq, Nigeria and victims of the 2005 tsunami, aid flows were "essentially flat". [Link] Even great increases might not have done much good. Policies on aid evolve slowly, not necessarily improving as they do so, as the fashions of political correctness and economic policy ebb and flow. Africa's poor may start to do better soon, and the reason may indeed lie in changes of mind in the West that have occurred over the last decade. It may as much be China's need of raw materials. We'll see.

A scar on Blair's conscience
Mr Blair has made some extraordinary moves on the issue of Third World development in general, and especially aid to Africa. In particular, he has made it his personal mission. "On Africa, I fear my own conscience and I fear the judgement of future generations", he told the audience at the launch of his Commission for Africa, timed to coincide with Red Nose Day 2005. He has always used the kind of passionate appeal to moral imperatives that an ardent campaigning outsider might apply to whip along a complacently indifferent government. But this was different.

"Apply snake-oil"
The point is that when Mr Blair has addressed African poverty it has been as a snake-oil Messiah. I mean that he ought to have known, and may have known, how far his deeds would fall short of his words. The recipes he doled out stood no chance of working. Doubtless, on a personal level, he cares (more or less) about the issue.

It is far too late to argue successfully that Britain's government should steer clear of trying to help the Third World. The public has come to accept, and probably even to demand, that its foreign policy should include a small development and humanitarian aid dimension. Indeed, British aid has historically been regarded as being of rather high quality. At its best, it has seemed canny and even mildly successful, not least because of Britain's colonial legacy. The development ministry has a track record of knowing well the people who receive its support, and of being able to talk to them in robust fashion.

But Mr Blair has gone much further than any previous Prime Minister. He has talked as though he wants his country to be more generous. Worse, he has talked as though he now knows the recipe for successful aid; as though it were to be found, say, in The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey Sachs. [[6]] And, perhaps worst of all, Blair seems sometimes to support the idea that the model for successful development is an essentially leftist one, as Make Poverty History would have us believe.

Mr Blair, like many campaigners and much of the public, has looked out on the poor of the world and seen them in essentially the same way as an old-time Labour politician might have seen the working class. From this perspective, the answer would be to tax the middle classes (ordinary Western citizens) and redistribute this wealth through state channels to provide state welfare services for the benighted poor in Africa.