There has been a considerable amount of noise about the new directions for international development under the coalition government – not least the keenness it has shown in ringfencing the GDP aid target as part of keeping up its ethical and progressive image, and the enthusiasm it has seemingly shown in pushing for fairer trade practices within the context of the Doha round of negotiations. Last night, in a policy-focused speech to a packed Sheikh Zayed Theatre at the LSE, the new Minister for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, laid out his vision for poverty reduction through mechanisms of growth and wealth creation, which would be driven through the encouragement of the private sector in the context of pursuing the Millennium Development Goals.  This policy would be centred around a re-orientation towards private-sector driven growth and enterprise, through which the poorest in developing countries could ‘lift themselves out of poverty’.

He began, as many speeches do at the LSE, with an aphorism attributed to George Bernard Shaw: “The greatest of evils and worst of crimes is poverty”, a phrase dripping with urgent moral responsibility and irreproachable purpose, before going on to promise that the new government’s international development strategy would be ‘non-ideological’ and committed to ‘what works’ in poverty reduction. It is a very great shame, however, that he did not begin with some basic definitions of poverty, since this would have clearly exposed the intellectual, and ultimately political, black hole at the centre of a poverty reduction strategy based primarily on growth. Continue reading →