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Commentary and Opinion
from The Guardian of London
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR –
George Monbiot is the author of The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for
a New World Order, published by Flamingo; Captive State: The Corporate
Takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,
Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented
him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental
achievement. He has also won the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize
for his screenplay The Norwegian, a Sony Award for radio production,
the Sir Peter Kent Award and the OneWorld National Press Award. The
columns reproduced here were first published in the British national
newspaper, The Guardian.
ABOUT
THE COLUMNS –
These columns will be posted each week as 2-page articles ready for
printing as inserts into an 8.5" by 11" binder. The cover
(above) may be downloaded for printing as a binder insert.
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NEW
- December 28, 2004
A scandal of secrecy and profligacy
One of the ways in which the government can avoid the freedom of information
laws, which come into force at the end of this week, is to classify
public business as private business. Under the act, information can
be withheld from the public if its disclosure would “prejudice
the commercial interests of any person”. Wherever the government
has entered into partnership with a private company, it can argue that
it would damage the company’s interests if it told us what it was
doing. So unless there is a public inquiry, we might never discover
why a bridge that should have cost £25m to build has now cost
£93m. .
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December 21, 2004
America's war on itself
I have a persistent mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts
me even in my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around
the globe, looking for its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance,
retreating from it. It opens fire, unaware that it is shooting its own
rear. Is this too fanciful a picture? Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein were groomed and armed by the United States. Until the invasion
of Iraq, there were no links between the Ba’athists and al-Qaida:
now Bush’s government has created the monster it claimed to be
slaying.
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here to download (40kb)
December 14, 2004
A deadly reversal
I hope that newspapers do not represent public opinion. If they do,
it means that we consider the Home Secretary’s love affair more
important than the resumption of the most deadly conflict since the
second world war. On Sunday, the civil war in the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC), already responsible for 3.8 million deaths, started
again. If you missed it, you’re in good company.
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here to download (40kb)
December
7, 2004
Why I'm a wolf man
It
hardly compares in importance to the invasion of Iraq, or the fall of
the dollar, or the outcome of the next election. But in some ways the
decision that we are being asked to make will say more about us and
the world that we choose to inhabit than any of the grand political
themes. Last week, a man called Paul Lister held a conference in Scotland.
He explained that, if his plans are accepted by the public, within five
years he will be able to reintroduce the wolf, the bear, the Eurasian
lynx, the wild boar and the European bison to the Highlands. Similar
claims have been made before, but Lister is the first enthusiast who
can make it happen.
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here to download (40kb)
November
30, 2004
A roaring failure
Two
years ago I accused the British government in this column of nine kinds
of fraud and false accounting, arising from its private finance initiative.
If any of these charges were false, I suggested, the chancellor of the
exchequer should repudiate them. If he failed to do so, the Guardian’s
readers should conclude that he had no defence to offer. Neither the
chancellor nor anyone else in the government responded. Since then,
several reports laying down even graver charges have been published.
The government has ignored them, and the opposition has left it in peace.
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here to download (40kb)
November
23, 2004
Fuel for nought
If
human beings were without sin, we would still live in an imperfect world.
Adam Smith’s notion that by pursuing his own interest, a man “frequently
promotes that of ... society more effectually than when he really intends
to promote it”, and Karl Marx’s picture of a society in which
“the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all” are both mocked by one obvious constraint. The world is
finite. This means that when one group of people pursues its own interests,
it damages the interests of others.
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here to download (40kb)
November
16, 2004
The risks of a killing
It
was the most impressive exercise in democracy the world has ever seen.
Hundreds of millions came out to vote. The dollars queued for hours
in the rain and sun. The result was indisputable: the candidates with
the most money won. No constituency gained more from the US election
than the dollars belonging to a company called WR Grace. On November
3, its shares rose by 14%. By November 5 they were up 26%: the highest
they had ever been. It wasn’t Bush’s victory the stockbrokers
were celebrating as much as the defeat of Tom Daschle, the leader of
the Democrats in the US Senate.
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here to download (40kb)
November
9, 2004
Puritanism of the rich
If
Bush wins,” the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before
the election, “fascism is possible in the United States.”
Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and
the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
She’s wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush’s security
state as “soft fascism” in the Guardian last month. So is
the endless traffic on the internet.
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here to download (40kb)
October
19, 2004
Exploitation on tap
No
one could have accused the Conservative government of breaking its promise
to bring back Victorian values. When, in 1992, it permitted private
water companes to install pre-paid meters in Birmingham, the people
who couldn’t afford to flush their toilets started defecating into
pots, which they then emptied out of the windows of their tower blocks.
It made one quite nostalgic. The meters were ruled illegal in 1998,
on the grounds that they deprived the poor of their most important resource.
So it goes without saying that the model has now been exported to two
of the world’s poorest urban communities..
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here to download (40kb)
October
5, 2004
Far too soft on crime
Behind
every great fortune there are two crimes: the crime required to obtain
it, and the crime required to maintain it. Well, that isn’t quite
true. There may be no moral difference between evading tax and avoiding
it, but there is a legal one. If a rich man is well advised, he can
lawfully keep every penny to himself. Until this has been sorted out,
there is precious little point in proposing, as both the Liberal Democrats
and a group of rebel Labour MPs did last week, that income tax be increased
to 50% for people earning more than £100,000 a year. It is just,
it is necessary, but it simply raises the incentive for the very rich
to find new means of staying that way.
Click
here to download (40kb)
September
28, 2004
Publish and be damned
Behind
every great fortune there are two crimes: the crime required to obtain
it, and the crime required to maintain it. Well, that isn’t quite
true. There may be no moral difference between evading tax and avoiding
it, but there is a legal one. If a rich man is well advised, he can
lawfully keep every penny to himself. Until this has been sorted out,
there is precious little point in proposing, as both the Liberal Democrats
and a group of rebel Labour MPs did last week, that income tax be increased
to 50% for people earning more than £100,000 a year. It is just,
it is necessary, but it simply raises the incentive for the very rich
to find new means of staying that way.
Click
here to download (40kb)
September
21, 2004
Proliferation treaty
Here
is the world’s most nonsensical job description. Your duty is to
work tirelessly to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And
to work tirelessly to encourage the proliferation of the means of building
them. This is the task of the head of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, Mohamed El Baradei. He is an able diplomat, and as bold as his
predecessor, Hans Blix, in standing up to the global powers. But what
he is obliged to take away with one hand, he is obliged to give with
the other. His message to the non-nuclear powers is this: you are not
allowed to develop the bomb, but we will give you the materials and
expertise with which you can build one. It is this mortal contradiction
which permitted the government of Iran this weekend to tell him to bog
off.
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here to download (40kb)
September
14, 2004
Class war on the hoof
There
is one thing on which both sides agree: hunting is not a class issue.
The hunters claim that it’s no longer the preserve of the aristocracy.
Labour MPs insist that their determination to ban it has nothing to
do with the social order: it’s about animals. Both sides are wrong.
This is class war. The Countryside Alliance, the Telegraph, the Field,
and Horse and Hound magazine maintain that opposition to foxhunting
is the newfangled concern of the dilettantes of Islington, who know
nothing of the countryside. The hunters plainly know nothing of history.
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here to download (40kb)
September
7, 2004
There is an alternative
For
50 years, nuclear power has been a solution in search of a problem.
Now – oh, happy days! – two of them have arrived at once.
Suddenly, climate change exists: George Bush says so. After years of
ridicule, the greens’ jeremiads about declining oil production
are now spilling from other people’s mouths. Politicians and the
press have at last picked up our arguments, and are using them as a
stick with which to beat us. If we care about climate change, if we
care about future energy supplies, then surely we should support the
revival of nuclear power?
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here to download (40kb)
August
31, 2004
Adventure playground
Here’s
how one estate agency, promoting homes in Mark Thatcher’s Cape
Town suburb, Constantia, describes the benefits of living in South Africa.
“A weak rand gives you tremendous buying power if you’re paying
with dollars or sterling,” EscapeArtist.com <http://www.EscapeArtist.com>
reveals. “Around R8,000 [£663] a month will do for a married
couple. What kind of lifestyle will this buy you? A villa with a pool,
a car and a daily maid... South Africa is one of the few places in the
world where you’ll find first world comforts and infrastructure,
and third world prices on everything from food, to diamonds, to real
estate ... South Africa has problems, but that’s what makes for
opportunity.” Africa, to the British upper classes, remains an
adventure playground, a deer park and a treasury. And Constantia is
one of those many enclaves of apartheid – to be found everywhere
from Table Mountain to Mt Kenya – prospering in a post-apartheid
continent. What happier roost could there be for Mark and his mother?
Margaret Thatcher found that permitting British companies to break the
sanctions against the apartheid regime turned South Africa’s problems
into our opportunities. When Mark was asked what he thought of his mother’s
position, he replied: “My sympathy is with the struggling white
community.”
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August
24, 2004
An answer in Somerset
"Never
again,” the Texas oil baron and corporate raider T Boone Pickens
announced this month, “will we pump more than 82m barrels.”
As we are pumping 82m barrels of oil a day at the moment, what Pickens
is saying is that global production has peaked. If he is right, then
the oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, who announced to general ridicule
last year that he was “99% confident” it would happen in 2004,
has been vindicated. Rather more importantly, industrial civilisation
is over. Not immediately, of course. But unless another source of energy,
just as cheap, with just as high a ratio of “energy return on energy
invested” (Eroei) is discovered or developed, there will be a gradual
decline in our ability to generate the growth required to keep the debt-based
financial system from collapsing.
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here to download (40kb)
August
17, 2004
The bad and the terrible
This
is the question which people ask themselves before almost every presidential
election: why, when the United States is teeming with brilliant and
inspiring people, are its voters so often faced with a choice between
two deeply unimpressive men? I would have thought the answer was pretty
obvious: because deeply unimpressive men continue to be elected. This
year, the American people have been instructed to elect one again. Almost
every powerful progressive voice has told them not to vote for the progressive
candidate, but to vote instead for The Man Who Isn’t There.
Click
here to download (40kb)
August
10, 2004
Goodbye, kind world
'We
live,” the cover story of the current Spectator tells us, “in
the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history.”
And who in the rich world would dare to deny it? The aristocrats, the
cardinals, Prince Charles, the National Front, perhaps: those, in other
words, whose former social dominance has been usurped by the times.
But the rest of us? Step forward the man or woman who would exchange
modern medicine for the leech, sewerage for the gutter, the washing
machine for the mangle, European Union for European wars, relative democracy
for absolute monarchy. Not many takers, then.
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here to download (40kb)
August
3, 2004
A threat to democracy
If
we have learned anything over the past 18 months it is this: that the
first rule of politics – power must never be trusted – still
applies. The government will neither regulate itself nor be regulated
by the institutions which surround it. Parliament chose to believe a
string of obvious lies. The media repeated them, the civil service let
them pass, the judiciary endorsed them. The answer to the age-old political
question – who guards the guards? – remains unchanged. Only
the people will hold the government to account. They have two means
of doing so. The first is to throw it out of office at the next election.
This works only when we are permitted to choose an alternative set of
policies. But in almost every nation, a new contract has now been struck
between the main political parties: they have chosen to agree on almost
all significant areas of policy. This leaves the people disenfranchised:
they can vote out the monkeys but not the organ-grinder. So voting is
now a less important democratic instrument than the second means: the
ability to register our discontent during a government’s term in
office.
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here to download (40kb)
July
27, 2004
Think inside the box
Every
year the figures inch downwards, and every year they are greeted as
a triumph. Britain now has the best record for road safety in Europe.
Only 3,508 people were killed on our roads last year, and only 171 of
them were children. Only 33,707 were gravely injured. Rejoice, just
bloody well rejoice. Among the dead, this year, was a friend of mine.
He was cycling home from a meeting about making the roads safer for
cyclists. He was run down by a young man who had just passed his test.
Those of us who refuse to drive are among the most likely to be killed
by a car. The comparisons have been made before, but I’ll test
your patience by repeating them. The people who die on our roads every
year would fill 30 commercial airliners. The deaths caused by cars in
Britain since 1945 outnumber the deaths of British soldiers during the
second world war. Since March 2003, 61 British servicemen have died
in Iraq; as many people die in just one week of carnage (was there ever
an apter word?) on the roads. One in 17 of us will be killed or seriously
injured in a road crash.
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here to download (40kb)
July
20, 2004
Our lies led us into war
So
Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who claimed that the government had
sexed up the intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,
was mostly right. Much of the rest of the media, which took the doctored
intelligence at face value, was wrong. The reward for getting it right
was public immolation and the sack. The punishment for getting it wrong
was the usual annual bonus. No government commissions inquiries to discover
why reporters reproduce the government’s lies.
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here to download (40kb)
July
13, 2004
Greasing up to power
When
starving people find food, they don’t worry too much about the
ingredients. Michael Moore’s film is crude and sometimes patronising.
He puts words into people’s mouths. He finishes their sentences
for them. At times he is funny and moving, at others clumsy and incoherent.
But I was shaken by it, and I applauded at the end. For Fahrenheit 9/11
asks the questions that should have been asked every day for the past
four years. The success of his film testifies to the rest of the media’s
failure. Tomorrow the Butler report will reopen the debate about who
was to blame for the lies with which we went to war – the government
or the intelligence agencies. One thing the news networks will not be
discussing is the culpability of the news networks. After this inquiry,
we will need another one, whose purpose is to discover why journalists
help governments to lie to the people.
Click
here to download (40kb)
June
8, 2004
Break out the bicycles
"Some
people have wacky ideas,” the new Republican campaign ad alleges.
“Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That’s John
Kerry.” Cut to a shot of men in suits riding bicycles. Sadly, the
accusation is false. Kerry has been demanding that the price of oil
be held down. He wants George Bush to release supplies from the strategic
reserve and persuade Saudi Arabia to increase production. He has been
warning the American people that if the president doesn’t act soon,
he and Dick Cheney will have to share a car to work. Men riding bicycles
and sharing cars? Is there no end to this madness?
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here to download (40kb)
June 1, 2004
An empire of denial
One
could have called ours a raucous household. The passions of our first
two years at university were spent, and we were now buried in our books.
My work, as usual, was quixotic and contradictory (studying zoology
by day, writing a terrible novel by night), Niall’s was focussed
and unrelenting. He was charming, generous-spirited and easy to live
with, but I think it is fair to say that everyone was frightened of
him. It’s not just that my housemate knew his subject better than
his contemporaries, and knew where he wanted to take it. He also knew
how to do it. While the rest of us were fumbling with bunches of odd-shaped
keys, trying to jam each of them into the lock in turn, the doors kept
swinging open for him. Niall Ferguson is now professor of history at
New York University, and rapidly becoming one of the most celebrated
intellectuals in the United States.
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here to download (40kb)
NEW
- May 25, 2004
The immigrants the rich love
Those
perfidious foreigners have let us down again. There we were, ready to
repel the biggest invasion of one-legged roofers the world has seen,
and hardly anyone turns up. It goes to show how unreliable those east
European types can be. We should bill their governments for the pitchforks.
I regard their refusal to invade this country as a deliberate act of
economic sabotage. A key strategic industry – the tabloid press
– has been made to look ridiculous. The readers of the Daily Express,
still waiting for the 1.6 million Roma who were due to arrive on May
1 “to leech on us”, must be wondering whether they can ever
again believe a word it says. But the coverage of the flood that never
came raises an interesting question. Why do our rightwing papers campaign
against the arrival of economic migrants? The question may have been
answered last week.
Click
here to download (40kb)
May
18, 2004
This is what we paid for
Tony
Blair has lost the election. It’s true he wasn’t standing,
but we won’t split hairs. His policies have just been put to the
test by an electorate blessed with a viable opposition, and crushed.
In throwing him out of their lives, the voters of the Indian state of
Andhra Pradesh may have destroyed the world’s most dangerous economic
experiment.
Chandrababu Naidu, the state’s chief minister, was the west’s
favourite Indian. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton both visited him in Hyderabad,
the state capital. Time magazine named him south Asian of the year;
the governor of Illinois created a Naidu day in his honour; and the
British government and the World Bank flooded his state with money.
They loved him because he did what he was told.
Click
here to download (40kb)
May
11, 2004
The joy of sex education
The
flame of sexual liberation may soon have to be kept alive by us geriatric
delinquents. A US evangelical group has announced that next month it
will be recruiting British teenagers to its campaign against sex before
marriage. In the States, more than a million have taken the pledge.
“Great Britain,” the organiser insists, “is fascinated
with the idea of sexual abstinence.” In my day such a fellow would
have been horsewhipped. Yet young people are flocking to him. Is there
no end to the depravity of today’s youth? Not if the US government
can help it. . .
Click
here to download (40kb)
April
27, 2004
Beware the fossil fools
Picture
a situation in which most of the media, despite the overwhelming weight
of medical opinion, refused to accept that there was a connection between
smoking and lung cancer. Imagine that every time new evidence emerged,
they asked someone with no medical qualifications to write a piece dismissing
the evidence and claiming that there was no consensus on the issue.
Imagine that the BBC, in the interests of “debate”, wheeled
out one of the tiny number of scientists who says that smoking and cancer
aren’t linked, or that giving up isn’t worth the trouble,
every time the issue of cancer was raised . . .
Click
here to download (40kb)
April
20, 2004
Fanatics at the heart of power
To
understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand
what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you
should read the resolutions passed at the state’s Republican party
conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made
in Harris County, which covers much of Houston. The delegates began
by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters: homosexuality is contrary
to the truths ordained by God; “any mechanism to process, license,
record, register or monitor the ownership of guns” should be repealed;
income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should
be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences.Thus
fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state
7,000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that the
“screaming and near fist fights” began.
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here to download (40kb)
April
13, 2004
The victim’s licence
I
first encountered the phenomenon of Victim’s Licence when arguing
on a radio show with a British importer of mahogany from the Amazon.
I had pointed out that the timber cutters who supplied him were hiring
gunmen to shoot indigenous people. “Well,” he replied, “life
is cheap in Brazil.” I told him that was a shocking thing to say.
“Don’t you lecture me about human rights,” he snapped.
“My parents were killed in the Holocaust.” And, of course,
he put me on the back foot. I mumbled something to the effect that he
of all people should know the consequences of waiving the value of human
life. But despite his evident hypocrisy, he had acquired moral authority:
he had suffered horribly as a result of mass murder; I had not.
Click
here to download (40kb)
April 6, 2004
Jump on our bandwagon
Beside
the disaster in Iraq, the new Islamist terror campaign and the battle
over immigration policy, the survival of the black-browed albatross
may not look like the most pressing political issue. For many of those
on the left, environmentalism is at a best a distraction, at worst a
regression. As Christopher Hitchens said in a debate last week: “Environmentalism
and ecology... are conservative positions. They may be honourable ones,
they may be defensible ones, they are not radical ones.” This was
once true. The modern European green movement began as a response by
landowners to the rise of the middle class and the industries which
empowered it. Industrialism threatened both the landscapes which reflected
an unchanging social order and the aristocracy’s economic control.
Click
here to download (40kb)
March
30, 2004
The British threat
The
paradox of modern warfare works like this: by enhancing our military
strength, we enhance our opponents’ capacity to destroy us. The
Russian state developed thermobaric bombs (which release a cloud of
explosive material into the air) for use against Muslim guerrillas.
Now, according to New Scientist, Muslim terrorists are trying to copy
them. The United States has been producing weaponised anthrax, ostensibly
to anticipate terrorist threats. In 2001, anthrax stolen from this programme
was used to terrorise America. The greatest horrors with which terrorists
might threaten us are those whose development we funded.
Click
here to download (40kb)
March
23, 2004
A charter to intervene
The
survey that the BBC conducted in Iraq last week is shocking to those
of us who opposed the war. Most respondents say that life is now better
than it was before the invasion. Those who thought the US was wrong
to attack are outnumbered by those who thought it was right.
Our instinct is either to ignore these findings or to dismiss them.
When the questioner is employed by the state broadcaster of one of the
occupying powers, the respondents might be expected to answer warily.
But this is not how the poll looks to me.
Click
here to download (40kb)
March
16, 2004
The fruits of poverty
Every
year the list is the same, but every year it still comes as a shock.
Of the 10 richest people on Earth, five of them have the same surname.
It’s not Gates, or Murdoch, or Rockefeller, but Walton. They are
the heirs and trustees of the supermarket chain Wal-Mart. And between
them they are worth $100bn. Considering how the media fawns on the ultra
rich, we hear remarkably little about them. Perhaps this is because
their position is rather embarrassing. The company that enriches them
trades on the idea that it is the friend of the common man and woman,
distributing rather than concentrating wealth.
Click
here to download (40kb)
March
9, 2004
Starved of the truth
The
question is as simple as this: do you want a few corporations to monopolise
the global food supply? If the answer is yes, you should welcome the
announcement that the government is expected to make today that the
commercial planting of a genetically modified (GM) crop in Britain can
go ahead. If the answer is no, you should regret it. The principal promotional
effort of the genetic engineering industry is to distract us from this
question. GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything
we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes
that give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can’t be
grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from
reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing
them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse
market of all.
Click
here to download (40kb)
March
2, 2004
Extreme measures
So
now what happens? Our prime minister is up to his neck in it. His attorney
general appears to have changed his advice about the legality of the
war a few days before it began. Blair refuses to release either version,
apparently for fear that he will be exposed as a liar and a war criminal.
His government seems to have been complicit in the illegal bugging of
friendly foreign powers and the United Nations. It went to war on the
grounds of a threat which was both imaginary and known to be imaginary.
Now the opposition has withdrawn from his fake inquiry. Seldom has a
primeminister been so exposed and remained in office. Surely Blair will
fall? Not by himself, he won’t. If we have learned anything about
him over the past few months, it’s that he would rather stroll
naked round Parliament Square than resign before he has to. The press
has a short attention span, Iraq is a long way away and the opposition
is listless and unpopular. He has everything to gain by sweating it
out.
Click
here to download (40kb)
February
24, 2004
A business riddled with conflicts of interest
Pity
Andrew Wakefield. The doctor who suggested that there might be a link
between the MMR vaccine and autism, causing thousands of parents to
refuse to let their children have the jab, is being paraded through
the nation with the label “cheat” hung round his neck. The
General Medical Council is deciding whether to charge him with professional
misconduct, MPs have called for an inquiry and the newspapers are tearing
him to bits. There’s little doubt that he messed up. Some of his
findings have been disproved by further studies and we now know that
when he published his paper he failed to reveal that he was taking money
from the Legal Aid Board.
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here to download (40kb)
February
17, 2004
Of mice and money men
If
Comcast’s takeover of the Disney Corporation goes ahead, the world’s
biggest media conglomeration will be built around one of humankind’s
most ancient practices. Investing animals with human characteristics
is something we’ve been doing since we first applied charcoal to
the walls of a cave. Ten thousand years later, as the $500m we have
just spent watching Finding Nemo suggests, we still see ourselves as
animals and animals as ourselves.
Click
here to download (40kb)
January
13, 2004
Natural aesthetes
The
world, if the biologists’ projections turn out to be correct, will
soon begin to revert to the Bible’s fourth day of creation. There
will be grass and “herb-yielding seed” and “the fruit
tree yielding fruit”. But “the moving creature that hath life”,
the “fowl that may fly above the Earth”, or the “great
whales, and every living creature that moveth” may one day be almost
unknown to us.
Click
here to download (40kb)
January
7, 2004
On the edge of lunacy
Spare
a thought this bleak new year for all those who rely on charity. Open
your hearts, for example, to a group of people who, though they live
in London, are in such desperate need of handouts that last year they
received £7.6m in foreign aid. The Adam Smith Institute, the ultra-rightwing
lobby group, now receives more money from Britain’s Department
for International Development (DfID) than Liberia or Somalia, two of
the most desperate nations on Earth.
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