“it is clearer than ever that the only way to end the gross inequalities that have condemned more than a billion people to linger in poverty is through a massive redistribution of power, assets and opportunities."

 Using your skill and judgement, try and decide which manifesto this aspiration came from, was it:

a)       The Communist Manifesto

b)      The New Labour Manifesto

c)       The Anarchist Manifesto

 However, you chose, you were wrong, that quote come from the ten-year ‘manifesto’ of the international aid charity Oxfam

http://www.oxfam.org.uk:80/applications/blogs/pressoffice/2008/06/new_deal_needed_to_stop_age_of.html

The charity has taken an overtly political stance in favour of a massive programme of socialist redistribution which will take money from countries which it describes as ‘rich’ and haemorrhage that money at the corrupt and useless governments of Africa and Asia.

A recent report for the AAP (Africa Progress Panel) by Tony Blair, who as Prime Minister of England pledged to ‘Heal the scar that is Africa’, has reluctantly admitted that African states  have largely done nothing to meet their commitments for aid as agreed in the Gleneagles summit in 2005.  His solution?  Throw more money at the problem, his report calls for more aid, more food shipments and more irresponsible borrowing to be written off.

http://www.africaprogresspanel.org/pdf/Africa's%20Development%20-%20Promises%20and%20Prospects.pdf

Blair’s old partner in crime, current British PM Gordon Brown lost no time in announcing that the UK’s contribution to the bottomless pit of African Aid is going to increase to £4.6 Billion a year – money taken from UK taxpayers and which is badly needed to repair the roads, improve infrastructure and improve its ailing National Health Service and education systems.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2129312.stm

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/documents/international_issues/international_development/development_aid_budget.cfm

The UN has also pledged to increase its aid spending to US$50 Billion a year – let’s spell that out with the respect it deserves, $50,000,000,000. And all without the slightest evidence that African governments are making any effort to help themselves (i.e. encourage trade, crack down on corruption, create stable democracies).

So who are the AAP anyway?  Apart from discredited politicians such as Tony Blair, this self-appointed watchdog contains such economic luminaries as has-been pop singer and wallet-botherer Bob Geldof and the former president of Nigeria – surely the most corrupt country on the planet. Not content with the billions that are shed on the continent by the West with no palpable effect, they have cooked up a scheme for governments to directly impose ‘Africa’ taxes on its citizens.  Proposals include:

• Currency transaction taxes
• Global environmental taxes
• Air travel taxes
• Freight transport taxes

(Source Guardian Weekly, June 20-26 2008, p1)

This chimes uncannily with both the Oxfam Manifesto and Gordon Brown’s own dour Calvinist form of Christianity, which would see most of people’s wages taken from them by the state, and an allowance paid back to them through ‘credits’.

The insidious belief behind all of this thinking is that despite working hard, our wealth is somehow unearned and that others have an equal claim on it; that despite the blood spilt to preserve democracy in the 20th century, the way we live in the West is the result of luck and circumstance. Worst of all is the increasing assumption that people have no right to choose how to spend the wealth they create with their own labour. The Oxfam ‘Redistribution Manifesto’ is just another symptom of a disturbing trend towards removing people’s right to do what they want with their own money.

Once charities asked for donations, now it appears that they feel entitled to short-circuit the idea of voluntary giving and put their hands in your pockets directly and ‘tax’ you, with both the government and the full sanction of law behind them.