Fair trade gives you a warm cosy glow, free trade delivers the goods
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
May Day in the City brings the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres. to St Mary Le Bow in the name of fair trade. His diocesan adviser for social justice explains that the churches are joining together under the banner of JustShare. There will be songs of praise for global economic justice in St Botolph, Bishopsgate, and stalls in Guildhall Yard selling fairly traded tea and coffee. JustShare, whose backers stretch from the Baptist Union to the Manna Society by way of the Christian Socialist Movement, has a sweeping programme: 'Control capital, cancel the debt, invest ethically, transform the World Trade Organisation, protect the earth.' I am not sure how far I agree with any of this. I wonder who would be controlling the capital and why they should know any better than the people who provide it and the people who accept it. I also wonder who would decide which debts should be cancelled and what happened next. Iraq is only the latest example of a country deep in debt, with a stupendously rich ruler. If poor countries have their debts written off and are set free to borrow again, what is to stop the new money from going the way of the old, through corrupt channels into offshore bank accounts? The price of debt forgiveness must be honest and open government, in the interests of the governed. Investing ethically? Not if that means ticking boxes on readymade checklists, or signing up to a declaration adopted at some distant boondoggle by free-loading delegates assembled at their taxpayers' expense. Transforming the WTO? Yes. I want to make it work better, which is not, I think, what JustShare wants.
Doors closing
We have lived through a brief benign era when goods and services and money have been able to move freely round the world, and growth has responded. Now the WTO, which was called into being to foster free trade, has run into obstruction from the rich economies of Europe and America, and its negotiations are bogged down. JustShare's friends have a soft spot for Ghana's tomato growers — but nothing would do more to help the farmers of Africa, and Asia and Latin America too, than to give them open access to the world's biggest markets for food. They are kept out by the Common Agricultural Policy, that staple of bureaucracy, that breeding-ground for fraud, that antithesis of the market economy, that standing tax on homes and families all over Europe. I shall be happily surprised if JustShare finds a word to say against it.
Roll out that mind
Fair trade is a good modish catch-phrase, and brought the rioters to Seattle when the WTO tried to meet there. It brings the customers to Body Shop, which sells bubble baths with an added ingredient, the warm glow that goes with self-righteousness. Body Shop's booths on London railway stations are festooned with fair-trade stickers. Next week, I hope that fair trade will bring the crowds to St Mary Le Bow when the great bishop rolls him out his mind. I count on him to tell the faithful that in the relief of poverty and the sharing of prosperity, a warm cosy glow is not enough. Not for nothing did Peter Bauer define aid as the transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. Head and heart are both needed in the good cause of protecting the earth, and its inhabitants, too.
No cigar for Peter
Peter Ellwood stands down next week as Lloyds TSB's chief executive with one ambition unfulfilled. He came close twice — to Deutsche Bank, apparently — but never pulled off the great deal that would have taken Lloyds into Europe and, of course, Europe into Lloyds. Sir Brian Pitman, his predecessor, took a more robust view, Experience in France, he said, had taught him not to buy a business in a country where you could not fire the staff or, if you did, you still had to pay them. Next man in at Lloyds is Eric Daniels, part of the great diaspora of bright executives from Citicorp who got on the wrong side of Sandy Weill, its chairman. His first priority must be to earn the dividend, and Lloyds' wider ambitions have been shelved. German banks, although cheaper, could still be expensive. The genial Mr Ellwood is resurfacing as chairman of the Royal Parks, and if he can clear Hyde Park of the clutter of temporary buildings which have begun to look ominously permanent, that will be an ambition worth fulfilling.
Not for profit
Recognition for my railway correspondent, I.K. Gricer. He has taken his place among the hundred directors of Network Rail (Railtrack Mark II) who are there to represent the public interest. They have hastened, he tells me, to bone up on the boardroom codes from Cadbury to Higgs, forming themselves into committees and taskforces for social, ethical and environmental issues and the work–life balance. (British Telecom has won the Queen's Award for this.) On my advice, my correspondent has ducked out of the audit committee but has become the senior non-executive director. The Higgs code makes clear that this is the boardroom equivalent of the Cave of Adullam, where (as John Bright said) he can call about him every one that is in distress and every one that is discontented. I ask whether he and his colleagues will have any time to make the business prosper, which was once regarded as a director's first duty, but he tells me that this is no problem, since Network Rail is not supposed to make a profit. We agree that this will be the least of his worries.
Gricer, q.v.
Readers sometimes inquire about my correspondent's unusual name: can he, they ask me, be one of the Somerset Gricers? It is perhaps not surprising that an apprentice at Swindon in the glorious twilight of steam should have been christened Isambard Kingdom, but light on his surname appears to be cast by the Wordsworth Railway Dictionary: `Gricer: the most fanatical and extreme type of railway enthusiast, intent on travelling over all existing railway track, seeing all existing locos, etc. Often used in a derogatory sense. Origins obscure.' The verb 'to grice' is a back-formation. When I put this to my correspondent, he says that it is just a coincidence.
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