Blair, Brown and the Gleneagles agenda: making poverty history, or confronting the global politics of unequal development?

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer respectively, set out a highly ambitious ‘development’ agenda for 2005 at the Group of 8 annual summit in Gleneagles. This agenda embraced issues of aid and debt, trade and climate change. It was given additional prominence by the activities of the Making Poverty History campaign. But the G8 could never have worked to ‘make poverty history’ because such an achievement was not remotely within its compass. The details of the agreements reached at Gleneagles and at subsequent international meetings reveal a much less impressive record than the initial hyperbole suggested. The global politics of development is not animated any longer – ­if indeed it ever was - ­by what the ‘North’ is willing to do for the ‘South’. It is driven instead by a complex ‘global politics of unequal development’ into which Blair and Brown’s Gleneagles agenda has been swept up. The outcome may represent significant change in some of the patterns of global politics, but it will not mark the ending of poverty