What is the point of the Global Poverty Project?

Last term Cambridge was full of leaflets and posters for the newly launched Global Poverty Project. It aims to end extreme poverty, which is defined as people living on the equivalent of less than $1.25 per day, within a generation. This is the situation 1.4 billion people find themselves in, so, says the GPP, we have 1.4 billion reasons to do something about it.

I admit I haven't been to one of their ninety minute presentations, “1.4.billion reasons.” The trailer for this begins with shots of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the Berlin Wall coming down. So does the GPP advocate a campaign of mass civil disobedience (King), a combination of violence and non-violence to overthrow reactionary governments (Mandela) or a mass uprising along the lines of 1989? Nope. They're setting their sights rather lower:

“To make sure that we get it right, we are working closely with advisors from NGOs, government, multilateral agencies, academics and civil society, who you can meet here. The presentation answers five big questions that people have about extreme poverty:
What is extreme poverty?
Can we do anything about it?
What are the barriers to ending extreme poverty?
Why should we care?
What can I do?”

The GPP doesn't want your money, it wants to raise awareness. It wants to “catalyse a movement to end extreme poverty.” The implication is this: people are heart-shatteringly poor because we haven't got around to doing anything about it yet. If only more people knew that poverty existed. The closest GPP comes to acknowledging a structural problem is when, during the presentation, we are told that one in seven people go hungry every night even though there is enough food in the world to feed everyone one-and-a-half times over. Does the GPP advocate a radical redistribution of wealth or changed political system to deal with this? Well, their online How-To guides tell us to buy Fairtrade and write to politicians. So no.

We've been here before. The GPP is a direct continuation of the Make Poverty History campaign (remember that?) Hugh Evans and Simon Moss, the people behind the GPP, were both leaders of Australian MPH. Simon Moss “has contributed on development issues at some of the world's leading conferences including the G20, the World Economic Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative.”

The ideology behind the GPP is good old fashioned development. More roads need to be built to allow aid to be effective, and so on. Why not volunteer overseas and teach kids English? So much more useful to them than learning one of their own languages. In fact, the GPP seems to write off the agency of the world's poorest all together. This is all about speaking for them. Indigenous peoples' movements and trade unions can make way for Western corporate-wannabe grad students and PR men.

Sitting on the “Global Activation Advisory Panel” of the GPP is Joe Talcott, head of marketing at New Ltd in Australia, a media group owned by that well-known champion of the poor, Rupert Murdoch. More worryingly, the former CEO of Levi's Australian operation, Peter Murphy, is also there. Levi's record on workers' rights in the past has been pretty appalling. And their environmental record, to put it kindly, leaves a lot to be desired. In this interview while he was still CEO, Murphy says “The cost differential currently today between imported and local manufacture is some 25 to 30 per cent.” In other words, we need to ship production to places where we can afford to pay people much less, and put people in Australia out of a job while we're at it. Surely someone committed to ending global poverty would have wanted to pay workers in poor countries at Western rates?

The GPP is a step backwards. If you're a liberal concerned with global poverty, why not just get involved with Oxfam? If you're a liberal concerned with human rights, why not just get involved in Amnesty? Is it cynical to suggest that there might be a bit of CV building going on? Fighting poverty with patronising platitudes has never worked in the past. What makes the GPP think it will work now?

Petition against summary expulsions at Sussex Uni

Six students have been suspended for their part in a peaceful demonstration against cuts at Sussex Uni.

This action shows that university managements are shaken and worried by protests but also sets a dangerous precedent for responses to protests in the future.

See the heavy handed police response to the protest here and sign the petition for the reinstatement of the six here.

Check for updates at

SU Manifesto Parody

Soon I will write a real post about student union elections. But for now, suffice to say that there are far too many candidates with manifestos that look like this:

Hi. I'm running for [position] in [students' union name] because I care about what the union can do for you. I am a friendly and approachable person with the passion and commitment to take our union forward. I am passionate about my CV and committed to my future career.

I have lots of experience sitting on some committee you've never heard of in a position you didn't elect, where my spineless toadying brought minimal changes. I was head [boy/girl] at my school full of rich kids who faced no actual problems, and for some reason think that this fact is relevant to my campaign for a leadership position in a union. I have also served as [treasurer/secretary/persistent arse licker] of the debating society which is weird because I have no discernible opinions about anything.

I will aim to represent all students rather than push a political agenda, because I'm afraid that if I tell people what I think about things, they will disagree with me. I will rise above factional politics by refusing to ever commit myself to anything. Students are sick of politics getting in the way of achieving change. I will improve communication by sending out more of the same emails that people will, for some reason, actually read this year.

Some people say that students have become apathetic. To them I say: I don't care about this. But I will put my name to some wanky liberal campaigns that no-one except a hard-right nut-bar could complain about. Probably something to do with the environment. But I pledge to continue to use the myth of student apathy as a cover for my right-wing views.

I have no principles in which to ground my policies so I will just write the first thing that comes into my head, something like [more vending machines/more student discounts/something vague to do with sports facilities] to make it sound like I've actually thought anything through.

I think it's imperative that we keep the cap on tuition fees because I want to pay lip service to a tradition of student radicalism to which I have never belonged. We can achieve this through mature negotiations and not mindless activism. I passionately believe that people are stupid enough to fall for this crap. We need to find dynamic and efficient new ways of sitting on our arse for a whole year while the Higher Education sector is smashed to pieces.

Vote for me because I am the pragmatic, experienced candidate and I will deliver on my promises, if you can remind me what any of them were. Here is a photo of me in some costume or other during freshers' week to remind you that I like a laugh, really. And in the end, isn't that what student unions are really about?

Occupation at University of Westminster

Students at the University of Westminster are occupying their Vice-Chancellor's office in protest against cuts and job losses in the university.

For more information see their blog http://www.fightcutsatuow.blogspot.com/

Occupation against cuts at Sussex University

It seems that an occupation has begun at Sussex Uni as part of an anti-cuts campaign there. The initial statement of the occupiers reads:

We have occupied the top floor of Bramber House, University of Sussex, Brighton. There are 106 of us.

The decision to occupy has been taken after weeks of concerted campaigning during which the university management have repeatedly failed to take away the threat of compulsory redundancies and course cuts.

We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us.

The room we have occupied is not a lecture theatre but a conference centre. As such, we are not disrupting the education of our fellow students; rather, we are disrupting a key part of management’s strategy to run the university as a profitable business.

They’re occupying everywhere in waves across California, New York, Greece, Croatia, Germany and Austria and elsewhere – and not only in the universities. We send greetings of solidarity and cheerful grins to all those occupation movements and everyone else fighting the pay cuts, cuts in services and jobs which will multiply everywhere as bosses and states try and pull out of the crisis.

But we are the crisis.

Profitability mean nothing against the livelihoods destroyed, lost homes, austerity measures, green or otherwise. We just heard we’ve increased ‘operational costs’ – they’d set out the building for a meeting and now they’ll have to do it again

We’ll show them “operational costs.”

Occupy again and again and again.

NO CUTS ANYWHERE.

THE UNIVERSITY IS A FACTORY. STRIKE. OCCUPY.

-All the occupiers of the 8th of February.

More info at the Stop the Cuts blog here and the local Socialist Party blog