Johann Hari

Jeffrey Sachs has a simple message for the people of Britain. “Next week, don’t let the leaders [of the G8 countries] leave Scotland without offering serious plans for ending poverty and climate change. They need to know they are not going to Gleneagles for a game, or for a little vacation, not for photo ops, not for smiles. They are there to set us on a real path to ending extreme poverty. Give them a very serious warning - don’t leave here without doing your work. Don’t leave here without putting in place solutions to these problems.”

Are these the words of a man trapped outside the system, angrily tossing stones at the Gleneagles Hotel? Not quite. Sachs is – according to the New York Times – “the most important economist in the world”, and certainly one of the smartest. He was made a Harvard Professor at the age of 28, has worked as an economic advisor to governments on every continent on earth, and is now Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan. He has never aimed low, and he’s not going to start now: his new book – a primer for the G8 summit in Gleneagles and for “fulfilling the promise of the Enlightenment” – is called ‘The End of Poverty – how we can make it happen in our lifetime.’

As Sachs sits in a London hotel explaining how high the stakes are for the G8, he speaks like a tape playing at double speed with long, flowing paragraphs cascading from it. “You know, every day, your newspaper could put on its front page, ‘More than 20,000 people died yesterday because of extreme poverty.’ Every day. And every single one of those deaths is preventable. It’s not just something that just happens, like rain. It is something that we can change in a very short period of time. The G8 is the time for the world to stand up and say, no more. Extreme poverty can be ended in our lifetimes. If I have one message, one thing I want people to understand, it’s that.”

Sachs has heard the obvious objection – that this is utopian fantasy – a thousand times. “You know, when John Maynard Keynes was writing at the height of the Great Depression in 1930, he said there would no more extreme poverty in Europe and America by the end of the twentieth century – no starvation or absolute desperation. It sounded like fantasy then too, but Keynes got it right.”

He speed-speaks the problem into historical perspective: “Two hundreds years ago, everybody in the world - with just a handful of exceptions – was as poor as Africans are now. Your great-great-great-grandparents lived in grinding agricultural poverty, and so did mine. In 1820, the average person in Western Europe lived on just ninety percent of what an average African lives on today. Poverty was universal. It would have seemed utopian then to say that only one fifth of the world’s population would be in poverty, instead of ninety-nine percent. We all had the same starting point in 1820. What we need to do now is lift up the remaining one billion people who are struggling to stay alive on less than sixty pence a day. There are very practical, very pragmatic, realisable plans that can do this in our lifetimes.”

It’s easy to perish in a sea of statistics, so Sachs takes me on a verbal guided tour of a village in Malawi that represents “the perfect storm”: it has been hit by all the tornadoes that cause poverty. “It’s called Nthandire, about an hour along mud-roads from the capital, Lilongwe. I was there recently. It’s a village that depends on growing maize for subsistence, and it was horrible to see how death hanged over the village. There were no young men anywhere, so I asked if they were out in the fields working. But no. They are all dead from AIDS.” This is the first tornado. Every single one of those people could have been kept alive for decades – “could have risen from their deathbeds and cared for their children and worked”, as Sachs puts it – if they had a drug that costs sixty pence a day. “Because that doesn’t happen, I met grandmothers who were caring for fifteen orphaned children,” he says, and leaves a rare pause hanging in the room.

But isn’t all this – as right-wingers like to shrug – the result of corrupt, incompetent governments? “Malawi actually put together one of the earliest and best conceived strategies for bringing treatment to its dying population. It was incredibly thoughtful. They had structures for drug delivery, patient counselling, community outreach, everything. They used these plans and appealed to the international community for the means to treat a third of the total infected population – 300,000 people – with anti-AIDS drugs. And you know what the international community said? The plans are ‘too ambitious’. Cut them. So the government in Malawi cut their plans to saving 100,000 people. Still it was too much. The international community told them to cut another sixty percent from the plans. Malawi did it – and then they were told to put in place yet another cut. So in the end, only 25,000 people were saved. That’s not a failure of African government. That’s a failure to give enough aid to a good democratic African government.”

With his solid black hair and preppy smile, Sachs looks like Barbie’s ex, Ken, worn down by a life of seeing things a preppy boy just shouldn’t see. But there is no time to make this observation: he is locked in Nthandire. “And the village was levelled by another disease that we could deal with very easily: malaria,” he says. “As many as three million people die in Africa every year of malaria. Even though it is a preventable disease if you use bed-nets and other environmental controls! There is no clinic nearby to help with this. There is no aid here. That’s what my friend Bono calls insane, stupid poverty, deaths for the price of pennies, and it’s true."

The role of aid, Sachs say, is to lift countries out of “poverty traps” like this. “When you are struggling to live from day to day, struggling to eat, you have no surplus capital to build roads or to acquire medicine or malaria nets, and nor does your government. So your poverty literally traps you. There is no margin of income above survival that can be invested for the future. When people say Africa needs ‘trade not aid’, they miss the point. They need trade plus aid. They need aid to get out of the poverty trap – we have calculated you actually need a very small amount to end all of them, just $15bn, a thirtieth of what the US spends on the military – and then you have trade.”

He says aid at its best can provide "Weapons of Mass Salvation." He smiles lightly and explains, "For far, far less than the cost of a nuclear bomb, we can save millions of people with vaccines that already exist. Isn’t that something we want to do?”

But we are not finished with Ntandire’s preventable disasters. It has also been hit by environmental stresses. The rains have failed this year, and even when they come, the soil has been severely depleted of its nutrients through overuse. “That’s why Tony Blair was right to make poverty and climate change the issues of the G8. But everyone has to understand – they are not separate issues. Not at all. Let me give you another example. I was recently in northern Ethiopia, where I saw for myself the effect of the drastic changes in weather patterns that are now happening across the world.” The people there have depended for millennia on two seasons when they could grow crops: the short rains in March and April, and the long rains in the summer months. “But now the short rains are gone entirely, and the long rains have become erratic,” he explains. “The result? Hunger is omnipresent. Half of the children are severely underweight. That’s where climate change meets poverty.”

He pauses, shakes his head slightly, and picks up again, his voice even faster and more urgent. “And this is happening all over sub-Saharan Africa. You can see it in Malawi, and I could see it in Ntandire. Over the past 25 years, rainfall has fallen considerably, while at the same time the surface temperature of the nearby Indian Ocean is rising. That suggests this is part of the long-term process of man-made global warming.”

In other words, it’s our fault; we did this? “It seems so. And in the long-term it can lead to the breakdown of communal relations and violence. There’s research suggesting the genocide in Rwanda was the result of environmental stresses and fighting over increasingly scarce natural resources. Same with Darfur.” So we have to deal with climate change, or we will Make Poverty the Future? “Exactly. The environmental shocks to come if we don’t act will have a huge impact of poverty, from extreme weather events to rising sea levels.”

“But all these problems hitting Nhandire and thousands of villages like it are soluble,” he says, quickly returning to determined optimism. “Climactic disaster, impoverishment, AIDS and malaria – all soluble. This is the promise of the Enlightenment: that we can learn things, understand them, and solve them. It’s how we eradicated extreme poverty in Europe and North America, and it’s how we can do it in Africa.”

But part of the problem is that the institutions that should be helping the economies of poor countries – the IMF and World Bank – usually make their problems far worse. Sachs orbited these institutions throughout the 1980s and 1990s, even trying – vainly – to steer the catastrophic IMF-supervised pillaging of the post-Soviet Russian economy in a sane direction. The only time his speech slows and his eyes avoid mine is when I ask about this period. “It was a terrible time. I could see what was happening and… I… I quit when I could see I was having zero influence. I haven’t been back to Russia since. I couldn’t…” He trails off.

He says today’s development economics is like eighteenth-century medicine, when doctors would use leeches to draw blood from their patients and half the time kill them in the process. “In the past quarter century, when impoverished countries have begged the rich world for help, they have been sent to the IMF,” he explains. “And the IMF has had one treatment only: tighten your belt, cut taxes, cut spending. And when this creates rioting, coups, the collapse of public services and chaos, the IMF just says, ‘Gee, the government was weak and doomed anyway.’” Sachs is a mainstream social democrat. He believes in a strong market economy matched by a strong tax-and-spending-and-regulating activist government – on a global scale. But instead the IMF has forced on the poor world a form of market fundamentalism that demands they hand everything – health, education, the environment – over to markets and effectively dismantle their states. It sees government as the enemy, not the essential ally, of development. “They demanded the poor pay for their own health and education, which of course they cannot afford to do. The IMF strategy of imposing user fees on the extreme poor is basically a history of excluding them from basic services.”

But – again – the optimism returns. “I think the IMF is finally beginning to learn,” he says. “We need a transition to a what I call clinical economics. My wife Sonia is a paediatrician, and I think we should approach sick economies like she approaches sick patients. You take care to understand the patient – not just their symptoms but how they live, their wider environment. You are careful to learn from experience and to use the best evidence. Right now, we need a development equivalent to the Hippocratic Oath, because when we deal with poor countries, we are playing with millions of lives.” This is indeed badly needed – but his optimism about the IMF was the one moment in our interview when his optimism rang hollow.

He shifts back to the immediate future. “The fight against extreme poverty can be won in Gleneagles next week. Tony Blair needs to bring his friend George Bush back to reality, to an understanding that the US military alone will never secure a world beset by hunger, disease, and deprivation. And the British people need to make Blair do it. Hold him to it.” He adds that although he thinks it was “a terrible mistake” to go to war in Iraq, Blair and Gordon Brown are “in a different league, a different planet” to Bush on development, and “they really understand these issues. Their speeches can be really radical.”

And with that, he dashes away as quickly as he arrived, and it feels like a cluster-bomb of ideas has exploded in the room. Suddenly he sticks his head through the door again, and says with Concorde-speed, “Tell everyone it’s their job to bring Nthandire to the streets of Scotland. Remember – don’t let them leave until there are real, serious plans.”

A contagious blog phenomenon at the mo' is to list ten things you've never done. A reader suggested I join in, so here goes.

I have never...

1) Ridden a bike
2) Been able to swim (in the sea, or anywhere else)
3) Praised a dictator
4) Declined a Big Mac meal (supersize, of course)
5) Agreed with a Daily Mail editorial
6) Spent more than £100 on an item of clothing (or bought it because of the label)
7) Wondered if God exists (He doesn’t)
8) Really hated a woman
9) Stopped loving somebody once I’d started
10) Talked on my mobile when I was being served at a till (isn’t that the rudest thing imaginable?)

The Make Poverty History protests in a fortnight give us an incredible opportunity. The leaders of the world's most powerful states, gathering in Scotland, will be faced by the only superpower that should count in the end - global public opinion. Hundreds of thousands of protesters will form a giant white band around the city of Edinburgh demanding justice for the people of Africa. They want an end to the unfair trade rules that suffocate Africa's economy, a doubling of aid, and a cancellation of African debt. They will be reflecting the will of Africa's 900 million people, unrepresented at the global top table.

If these voices are drowned out by aggressive policing and a small minority of violent protesters, this opportunity will be tossed away. It has happened before. Last time there were huge demonstrations outside a G8 meeting was Genoa in 2001. I still remember the body of Carlo Giuliani, a protester gunned down and run over by the Italian police. I remember slipping on a carpet in a youth hostel that had been raided hours before by the Italian police, and realising the crunch beneath my feet came from broken teeth. I remember how badly it all went wrong.

Thanks to the violence, most people remember Genoa - if at all - as a brief whiff of rage and teargas and nothing more. This is a travesty of what Genoa was about, and it will be a travesty if Edinburgh goes the same way.

So what went wrong in Italy that summer, and how can we avoid it happening here? First, the myths must be debunked. The vast majority of protesters who went to Genoa were peaceful and - far from being the "football hooligans" or "anarchist travelling road-show" conjured up by the right-wing press - extremely smart and clued-up.

They were people like Anna Tuit, a Dutchwoman in her mid twenties whom I met. She worked for several years for Médecins Sans Frontières, a humanitarian aid charity that had a strong unofficial presence in Genoa. She explained that she had recently worked in Africa and was protesting that corporate globalisation is denying Aids drugs to dying people.

"I was seeing people who could be treated - whose lives could be extended by 10, 20, 30 years - but we could offer them nothing. The Western pharmaceutical companies do not permit the manufacture of cheap generic Aids drugs in Africa, because they want to protect their copyright and their patents. Our governments put this corporate interest before the human interest. So thousands of people die. I can't just forget the people we turned away."

Or they were groups like - my favourite - the Pink Fairies (dressed as their name demands), who preached the doctrine of "tactical frivolity". They built a "revolutionary spaghetti catapult" to "splatter the leaders with pasta". It didn't work out, but they did succeed in organising a "mass laughing session". When the leaders gathered for their pompous photo-shoot, tens of thousands of protesters simultaneously fell into long, infectious laughing fits, to show - as one protester put it - "how ridiculous, how offensive, how beneath us we find their little power games while so many people are starving". Genoa shook, not with bombs but with laughter.

So how did this sound get drowned out? The main reason is unbelievably aggressive policing. The Italian police weren't just cack-handed; they went out of their way to provoke the protesters, tossing around teargas like it was confetti. I even saw them gas a gaggle of nuns protesting against debt. Hundreds of people determined to protest peacefully saw red and rioted.

Ah, we cluck, but our police aren't so frightfully vulgar, are they? Our police will be the opposite: hands-off and cooling-down - surely? We can't take this for granted. At the recent May Day demonstrations, the Scottish police were notably aggressive, and the Scottish Centre for Human Rights warns they are under huge pressure from the security services of eight countries - and especially the UK national government - to be even tougher.

So what red flags might be waved at the protesters? The police are likely to resort to Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, as they have across Britain over the past few years. This allows them to stop and search anyone they like, without giving a reason and without any reasonable suspicion, in any area they deem risky.

Many of us would accept these powers if the police used them only, say, to track a Madrid-style train bomber, but they are being routinely used against peaceful protests. In 2003, a group who gathered to protest against the Defence Systems and Equipment International arms fair in east London were detained under Section 44. How are they "terrorists"? Indeed, they were trying to stop the sale of weapons to leaders - like those of Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan - who terrorise their own people.

The human rights group Liberty predicts that Section 44 will be used in Edinburgh. Memo to the police: tell people they are being stopped under a law designed for mini-Bin Ladens, and you are guaranteed to provoke rage.

That's not all. The police are also trying to block a demo that would pass by the Gleneagles Hotel on 6 July. Why are we giving the security services £10m a PM or president if they can't deal with a simple, peaceful march? In Genoa, this kind of ban - erecting a stupidly large "red zone" in the centre of town where protesters were forbidden - was a boon to the small "black bloc" of violent protesters. Why repeat the mistake?

But the responsibility isn't only on Them; some of it falls to Us too. To the protesters - it is essential that, if the police do play up again, don't let yourselves be provoked. Don't play into the hands of the people who want to dismiss this movement as the ravings of the irrelevant or irreverent. And that goes to the people considering violent protest too. Whatever you think of the ethics of violence - and I'm no pacifist - please realise that in this instance, every violent act will be a gift to the enemies of the African people and of global justice.

Remember how high the stakes are. In the first week of July, the world will only hear one message. It could be the sound of breaking glass and the hiss of teargas. Or it could be the sound of millions of people united behind Nelson Mandela's message to the End Poverty History campaign: "Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Many of the world's poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free." It's down to you.

NOTE: Apologies again to everbody who's e-mailed to say they miss the comments section. Letters will be printed every Friday, and the best one each week will win a book picked by, er, me. So e-mail comments on this or any other article to j.hari@independent.co.uk

When in doubt, sneer. That's the motto of Western culture in the early 21st century. A mood of low, jeering pessimism is slathered over every topic that comes along: you can't trust anyone, they're all crooks and liars, nothing will ever change.

The Make Poverty History campaign has confused the keepers of this culture. Millions of privileged Westerners have spontaneously announced that they refuse to live in a world where 50,000 people die every day in Africa simply because they are too poor to stay alive. They refuse to accept a trading system that is rigged in favour of the rich and strangles African industries in their infancy. They refuse to accept that we spend more on pet food than on aid to Africa, or that three billionaires now hold more wealth than the poorest 800 million people on earth, or that the equivalent to 6,000 attacks on the World Trade Centre happens in Africa because of poverty every year. And they are prepared to do something about it: write and fight and protest and shout.

This doesn't fit the script, guys. Where's the self-interest? What's to jeer at? This senseless outburst of decency has produced months of confusion in the media. They were forced to explain quite complex and urgent policies with a straight, uncynical face. You could hear the sighs of relief when the pessimists found their angle over the past week. Drum-roll please: Even if the campaign succeeds completely - full debt cancellation, doubling of aid, a fair trading system - it won't make any difference! It'll just mean more money for the Mugabes. Tsk! Dumb naïve lefties.

Whenever somebody says this to you, there's a simple one-word answer: Tanzania. In 2001 - thanks to the Jubilee 2000 campaign - the country was given a hefty chunk of debt relief, on the condition that the proceeds were used for education, health and HIV/Aids. At the same time, the British Government significantly increased aid.

So, was it all squandered on corrupt officials? Not quite; 1,925 primary schools have been built, and 37,261 new teachers have been employed. The number of children at primary school has nearly doubled, and next year, for the first time, every child in Tanzania will receive a primary school education. An entire generation of children has been given the power of literacy by Africans on the ground and the campaigners in the West who sided with them.

Now they can read and write, the children of Tanzania will transform their country and their region. Only now - after aid - is it possible for them to seriously discuss trade; you can't trade when your people are illiterate, innumerate, diseased and starving.

So the right aid works. Debt relief works. As with the anti-slavery campaigns of the 18th century, it is possible for people separated by oceans and continents to support each other and force their governments to do the right thing.

Ah, the cynics say, but billions of pounds of aid have already been hurled at Africa since the Second World War - the equivalent to six Marshall Plans - and still poverty is rampant.

What's the flaw in this argument? Well, most of this budget wasn't humanitarian aid at all; it consisted of Kissingerian bribes to Cold War allies - including the most evil tyrants - to stay "on side" and maintain bases. (There are worrying signs that aid may drift in this direction again during the "war on terror"; check out the massive increases in so-called aid to Pakistan). The cynics do not distinguish between this fake aid and real aid. Nor do they distinguish between aid that works and aid that doesn't.

Picture this story as a trashy Channel Five documentary: When Good Aid Goes Bad. If you want to know why our aid often goes bad, look to the two great Western dogmas: Christian fundamentalism and market fundamentalism. Few people even in Europe have understood quite how deeply America's aid donations have been poisoned by extremely right-wing Christian dogma since 2000.

Since Bush became President, US aid money has been used to assault and undermine the providers of condoms and abortions in countries dying of Aids and lack of access to family planning. Bush’s advisory council on AIDS is staffed by men like Tom Coburn, a far right evangelical who claim that condoms do not work and says those who promote them as an effective way to avoid HIV infection should be charged ith “consumer
fraud”.

If you are an organisation in Africa seeking a single dollar of US funds, you have to agree that - across your entire organisation - you will sign up to the evangelical agenda. You must never mention abortion as an option, even to the victims of rape in war-zones. You must never "promote promiscuity" by handing out condoms or vigorously promoting their use. Instead, you must prioritise instructing the natives about abstaining from sex before marriage. Daniel Wolfe, a spokesman for Gay Men’s Health risis, explains, “By going after condoms as a tool, they are destabilizing the whole structure of HIV prevention as we know it. Their underlying message is that HIV prevention doesn’t work and there’s no use othering.”

I am actually quite glad Blair failed to persuade Bush to donate more aid last week; it is better to have no money than to have money with these insane and counter-productive conditions.

The British aid budget is thankfully free of superstition. But don't get too smug: when it comes to America's other fundamentalism, Britain is an eager supporter. Too often, poor countries can only receive aid if they agree to conditions laid down from the High Temples of market fundamentalism, the IMF and World Bank. If you want money for schools and hospitals, you have to agree to undemocratically privatise great chunks of your economy (even the parts that are working perfectly well, thank you very much) and allow much of your economy to be run by remote bankers with a disastrous track-record.

This can contaminate even the best aid programmes. Let's go back to Tanzania. In return for the amazing advances in schooling, the British Government demanded the privatisation of the water supply. The result? As many people predicted, water supplies ran chronically short last summer, and the charity ActionAid warns: "There is already evidence that poor households are now shifting towards unsafe water sources, with serious consequences for their families' health." Of course markets are an essential tool among many to achieve development, but blindly promoting markets as the answer to every problem is absurd.

So is the solution - as the cynics urge - to shrug and assume that aid, trade and debt relief will never work? Only if every time you see a dangerous driver, you argue for the banning of all cars. When it comes to aid, there are two fights right now. One is for a massive increase in funds. The second - just as important - is to ensure that aid is not conditional on accepting these Western dogmas. The revolution in Tanzania's primary schools show why we must fight the first battle; the collapse in Tanzania's water supply shows why we must fight the second.

Oh, by the way, if it took you three minutes to read this column, 60 children have died as you skimmed through, simply as a result of starvation or the preventable diseases of poverty. There's 60 reasons why pouring the acid of apathy and cynicism over this debate is despicable.

NOTE: Apologies again to everbody who's e-mailed to say they miss the comments section. Letters will be printed every Friday, and the best one each week will win a book picked by, er, me. So e-mail comments on this or any other article to j.hari@independent.co.uk

In one of his semi-literate columns this week, Dick Littlejohn says – yet again – that the left loves to “smear” him as racist, homophobic, sexist etc.

Regular readers will know I am extremely cautious about calling anybody racist or homophobic. They are extremely serious charges, and if you throw them around simply at people you disagree with, they lose their power and their potency. I have an on-going row with some of my friends on the left about Melanie Phillips, for example. Obviously I strongly, spewingly disagree with Melanie on almost everything – from drugs to asylum seekers to the role of markets to gay rights to the family, you name it – but I see no evidence that she is in any way racist or homophobic. (Indeed, I believe she is neither).

But it is demonstrably true that Littlejohn is a racist and a homophobe. It is not in any sense a “smear.”

Let me offer some firm evidence.

When Jews are being murdered, Littlejohn (quite rightly) responds with disgust. For example, he has condemned “the grotesque wave of anti-Semitism once more engulfing the world” and repeatedly invokes the Nazi Holocaust as one of the worst crimes in human history.

But when another genocide was being perpetrated – this time by black Hutus against black Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 – he wrote, "Does anyone really give a monkey's about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them."

Note the (possibly subliminal) use of the word ‘monkey’. Note the implicit idea that black people’s ethnic identifications are ridiculous – from a man who constantly ridicules the “smelly” French and “dictatorial” Germans.

But more importantly, note that in Littlejohn’s mental universe, a genocide perpetrated against people now regarded as ‘white’ is one of the worst crimes imaginable, but the exact same crime perpetrated against black people is a matter of aggressive indifference. Is this not classical racism?

Nor is this an isolated event. When a BNP supporter named Tony Martin shot a child burglar in the back as he was running away, Dick Littlejohn leapt to his defence. Despite the fact that Martin says Britain should be run by a dictator and has called for the extermination of gypsies (or “pikeys”, as Littlejohns calls them), Dick wrote, “In court Martin, a man of unblemished character, was portrayed as a bloodthirsty madman with a pathological hatred of gypsies… Eccentric? Yes. Mad, only in the sense that he was being driven to his wits' end by the criminal activities of local gypsies.” Littlejohn later commented, “True, [Martin] hated gypsies. He had every reason to hate them. He and his neighbours had been terrorised by them for years.”

Note how Littlejohn ascribes collective guilt to an entire race of people – one of the purest signifiers of racism. Try this for any other ethnic group, and the racism becomes obvious. “True, I hate blacks. I have every reason to hate them. I was burgled by black people on two different occasions.” “Of course I hate Jews. I have every reason to. They killed Christ.” “Of course I detest the Japanese. Look what they did to Alec Guinness in 'Bridge Over the River Kwai.'”

Of course individual gypsies commit crimes, just as individual white people, Sikhs, Jews, Arabs and members of all other ethnic groups sometimes do. A non-racist blames the individual, and seeks to arrest and charge them for their crimes. A racist generalises the act of the individual to the group, and hates all of them, even those who had nothing to do with the crime. Littlejohn manifestly falls into the second category.

His prejudices about gay people are equally proveable. In 1995 in the Daily Mail, he took to joking about gay-bashing in a column ridiculing attempts by the South Yorkshire Police to become more alert to the concerns of the gay community, who are disproportionately subject to violent crime. Littlejohn contacted a “tyke friend of mine” who “reliably informed me there are no homosexuals in South Yorkshire. [The friend said,] 'Not live ones, anyway. We send them all down to London.'”

That’s it. That’s the punch-line. No live gays in Yorkshire… they are all, it is implied, killed or driven out. Would any non-homophobe think this was funny?

Again, this is part of a long pattern. Littlejohn constantly compares gay people to followers of the most extreme and bizarre fetishes. In his unreadable book ‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’, he attacks one man who came out so he could openly live with his male partner by demanding, “'Why? If he had a predilection for wearing a nappy made out of Bacofoil or retiring for the evening with a satsuma in his mouth and a bin liner over his head would he have felt obliged to share that with us too?”

Dick incessantly attacks such people as “proselytising homosexuals and lesbians”, and elsewhere refers to them “recruiting outside schoolgates”, clearly playing to the demonstrably false and homophobic link between homosexuality and paedophilia.

Littlejohn’s favourite tactic is to imply that anybody who wants equality for gay people is somehow mentally disordered and “obsessed” with homosexuality, rather than simply trying to make sexuality legally and socially irrelevant.

For example, Dick has accused Tony Blair of being “obsessed with poovery”, says “the C of E is drowning in a sea of poovery”, and contrived to get the word “poofs” into a lengthy attack on yours truly (perhaps the proudest day of my life).

Littlejohn’s comments about Blair and the CofE are a fascinating example of psychological projection, because if anybody is “obsessed with poovery” or “drowning in a sea of poovery”, it is Littlejohn himself.

The brilliant Marina Hyde of the Guardian has helpfully compiled a log of Dick’s references to homosexuality. In 2003, he referred “24 times to gays, 17 to homosexuals, 15 to cottaging, seven to rent boys, six to lesbians, six times to being "homophobic" and four times to "homophobia" (note Richard's scornful inverted commas), twice to poovery and once to buggery. That's a mere 82 mentions in 90-odd columns.” In 2004, he excelled himself, and “referred 42 times to gays, 16 times to lesbians, 15 to homosexuals, eight to bisexuals, twice to "homophobia" and six to being "homophobic" (note his scornful inverted commas), five times to cottaging, four to "gay sex in public toilets", three to poofs, twice to lesbianism, and once each to buggery, dykery, and poovery. This amounts to 104 references in 90-odd columns.”

It is a demonstrable, provable fact that Richard Littlejohn is a racist and homophobe.

If you really want to deny it, Dick, sue me, and I will be very happy to accept the verdict of a British court. In the meantime, spare us your lying bullshit about these facts being “a smear”, when you are happy to smear the victims of genocide as irrelevant tribal morons, smear gay people as closet paedophiles, and smear the supporters of gay equality as insane obsessives.

You couldn’t make it up? Littlejohn does – every week.

Before it gets lost in the fog that shrouds the Westminster village, it's important to figure out what the British people said last Thursday. If you combine the Labour and Liberal Democrat votes, it's a landslide for the centre-left, with 59 per cent of the British public voting for parties they knew - according to polls - were committed to higher taxes, higher public spending and redistribution of wealth to the poorest. At every election since 1979, fat majorities have done the same.

Yet the leftish nature of the British people is persistently obscured by a series of distorting and undemocratic filters: the electoral system, a ludicrously biased press and the disproportionate influence of the rich in shaping our public debate. Don't let all this make you forget that this is not a conservative country.

Even now the Tory press is trying to spin the derisory dribble of 33 per cent of votes cast to the Conservatives as "a come back" and "a partial victory for Howard". In the real world, the right received fewer votes even than in the disastrous defeat of 1997. The low-tax, low-spending, spit-on-asylum-seekers rhetoric of the Tories has crashed and burned. If the Tory press lulls the party into believing they simply need to be more right-wing to win, so much the better for progressives.

But there's another group of people who have not yet realised that Britain is quietly left-leaning: the Labour government. As soon as he was whisked back to government, David Blunkett was briefing the News of the World about his determination to crack down on scroungers. "Back... with a vengeance! Blunkett's first task is to get workshy 1m jobs", it declared, in a story clearly provided by the new Works and Pension Secretary who pledged to "end the gravy train". Yet again, he was using the language of the right to attack the poor. Is this what you voted for?

There was a particularly nasty irony in Blunkett's decision to scramble to the popular press - on his first day back in power - with this announcement. There is a group of people in Britain who are indisputably riding a gravy train, bleeding money away from the Exchequer - fill in your own cliché here.

Who is this group? Certainly not the recipients of a paltry £55-a-week incapacity benefit. No, they are the super-rich operating within our borders, epitomised by the News of the World's owner, Rupert Murdoch. His company News International has paid no net corporation tax at all in this country for more than a decade, despite having profits topping £300m. That's nothing: not a penny. The firm could not operate without the complex and costly services provided by the British state - the police, roads and rubbish collection - but News International is determined to make everybody else pay for it. Now remind me: who mentioned freeloading?

The mass tax avoidance of the rich - totalling $860bn a year, according to the Tax Justice Network - is one of the great scandals of our time. A tiny elite has decided to unilaterally exempt itself from democratic taxation, and elected leaders across the world have rolled over and accepted it. The real estate tycoon, Leona Helmsley, famously declared in the 1980s that "only little people pay taxes" on her way to the slammer. At the time, this view was considered shocking; today, it is the raison d'être of the global elite, a morning prayer for the 1 per cent of the world's population who hold more than 57 per cent of the planet's wealth. They routinely wash their cash through a dozen tax havens, carefully ensuring that nothing goes towards the societies where their businesses operate. This is technically legal - but why do governments maintain such dysfunctional laws?

The world's tax havens now hold $11.5 trillion of assets - the equivalent to ten Britains. The rich have exploited the fact that political globalisation has not caught up with economic globalisation: their multinational businesses are always a skip and a jump ahead of national governments. A great deal of that money rightly belongs in this country, paying for schools and hospitals, but even more of it belongs in developing countries. In places like Argentina or Nigeria, the entire rich class has stashed their money off shore.

We're going to hear a lot about Africa over the next few months - but will we acknowledge our responsibility for this vacuum sucking tax money out of poor countries? As John Christensen, international coordinator of the Tax Justice Network, explains, "Britain has taken the lead in the creation of tax havens. Of the world's 72 major tax havens, 35 are linked to Britain. Many are crown dependencies such as Jersey. The City of London is also a major tax haven. For example, Mohamed Fayed negotiated the amount of tax he paid with the Inland Revenue. Could you imagine the man off the street being able to negotiate his taxes?"

The money that is being ring-fenced from democratic control is enough to pay for the UN Millennium Development Goals - to eradicate abject poverty in Africa - twelve times over. So will our government work with other democracies to dismantle the tax havens?

The tax avoidance industry chortles at the thought. They baldly state that this is impossible because many of them will find new ways to rig the system. One UK accountant told the press in 2003, "No matter what legislation is in place, the accountants and lawyers will find a way around it. Rules are rules, but rules are meant to be broken." Now re-read that sentence, and imagine it was spoken by a single mum on an estate talking about incapacity benefit. What would the News of the World say then?

Ah, governments reply with a shrug, but if we try to tax them, they will simply go elsewhere. Close our tax havens and a thousand more will open. Yes, it's true that national governments cannot act alone; but that is no excuse for failing to act. When it became clear that al-Qa'ida was receiving funding through tax havens, laws were passed across the world to freeze the funds. How much easier would it be to deal with organisations that aren't even secret - that have big shiny offices in every capital city in the world? If the political will is there, then the global rich can be swiftly tracked and reintegrated into the world's tax system. The French have already made proposals to this effect. Will we?

Even after the British electorate has made it very clear we want a more fair and equal society, our government is still giving the global rich a Get Out of Tax Free card. When it comes to the petty scams of the poor and weak, they declare that "nothing is off limits." When it comes to the massive tax avoidance of the rich, they feign paralysis. Congratulations on your re-election, Prime Minister. Now please don't mention Africa or incapacity benefit until you have dealt with the antisocial behaviour of the super-rich.

johann@johannhari.com