The Business on Christian Aid

By Alex Singleton | 6 November 2005

The Business newspaper has a scathing article about Christian Aid. Under the headline "Christian Aid can damage your wealth", it says that "Trade Justice lives in the fictional world of zero-sum economics".

Metamorphosis has been the trademark of the anti-capitalist movement. After each ideological defeat - from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the failure of third-world Marxism to the rise of capitalist India and China - it has changed its name, its tone and its target. Those who cheered on the so-called liberation movements and the rise of a new Marxist Left in the 1960s, the strikes which crippled Great Britain in the 1970s and the Europe-wide anti-Cruise missile protests of the early 1980s, went on, with a new generation of anti-capitalist protesters, to spend the 1990s fighting globalisation. Now the enemies of economic freedom have a new guise. The so-called Trade Justice movement is the latest evolution of the species. It can count on more middle-class do-gooding sympathy than your average anti-capitalist yobbery, which seems incapable of making its point without smashing up a convenient McDonald's. The modern world's substitute for rigorous debate - celebrity endorsement - can also be counted on. But it is a peculiar creature nevertheless: a mixture of truth and profound error, which means it will almost certainly dupe gullible European governments, including the current floundering British one.

Of course, the Trade Justice Movement is partly right. Its more sensible members like Oxfam and CAFOD have considered and thoughtful things to say - and they of course do a great deal of good in practical terms in developing countries. Oxfam in particular has helped push the development community to a recognition that trade is key to increasing development in developing countries. It has also worked effectively to get the British government to push European agricultural liberalisation. The problem is the more extreme anti-capitalist members of the Trade Justice Movement like War on Want, the World Development Movement and Christian Aid (or, rather, its economically-illiterate trade policy unit). "This once-great charity," the paper says of Christian Aid, "now devotes 12% of its £71m budget not to helping the poor but to political campaigns..."