They sail on, content to have said the right things at the right time for the benefit of the cameras. For them, after all, the words are what matter; the words are on the record. Who can claim that Tony Blair doesn’t care about global poverty? Check the speeches.

Last week, the UN was berating all of the rich, developed countries who have promised aid to the victims of the Asian earthquake. Tens of millions of dollars have been “pledged”. Yet of these theoretical sums only a fraction has emerged from virtual political reality to pay for help where it is actually needed. If the UN is to be believed, the bigger economies such as Japan and America are doing much less than they could. Others, such as France and Germany, have done nothing at all in financial terms. Not a single euro.

The UN and the aid agencies should be used to this by now. It has, after all, been going on for decades. It is one of the reasons why victims of disasters tend to remain victims, living in squalor, years after the event. Nobody can legislate for acts of God, of course, though the rich can put right some of the deity’s worst errors, should they choose. But at the heart of the Gleneagles rhetoric was a commitment to end global poverty, nothing less, and to help less-developed countries to fend for themselves in the future. Unfortunately, you can’t eat rhetoric.

Since Gleneagles the hypocrisy has been rank. No change there; but this time around the stench seems even greater, if that is possible, than before. The cynicism has been total and a lot of people who ought to have known better seem to have been taken in by it. Duped, willingly or other wise, might be a better way of describing their situation.

Compare and contrast. After the G8, one well-known figure said that “a great justice has been done … On aid, 10 out of 10; on debt, eight out of 10 … Mission accomplished frankly.” That was Bob Geldof, who has just been named Man Of Peace by winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, and who last week described the Live8 concerts as “the greatest cultural event of the 21st century so far”. Previously, at the Labour Party conference, Geldof’s friend, fellow Irishman and saviour Bono, had lauded Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They were, he said, “the Lennon and McCartney” – whatever that meant – of poverty reduction. Strange, then, that the World Development Movement has described the Gleneagles agreement as “a disaster for the world’s poor”. Someone is seriously misinformed.

Gordon Brown knows the score. No sooner had the world’s most powerful men packed up and left Scotland than he was making a confession. As it turns out, the aid package the G8 leaders had promised “includes the numbers for debt relief”. The money promised for extra aid and the sums pledged for the relief of debt were, in other words, the same pounds, greenbacks and euros. The trouble with that kind of money is that you can’t spend it twice. As for trade justice, viewed by some non-governmental organisations as central to the relationship between the rich world and the poor, that was always a non-starter. In that arena, as ActionAid has noted, the G8 “completely failed”. The G8 didn’t even try.

These were no doubt among the reasons causing Oxfam to observe that the world leaders meeting at Gleneagles had grasped neither “the necessary sense of urgency nor the historic potential” of their summit. On the other hand, some NGOs within the 450-strong Make Poverty History (MPH) coalition have been looking askance lately at Oxfam’s own closeness to new Labour.

It amounts to an argument over tactics in a very high-stakes game. On the one side there are those like Geldof, Bono and Oxfam who believe – or did believe until Gleneagles – that it made more sense to try to work with and persuade governments. As Geldof made plain in Edinburgh, he regarded the confrontations favoured by some protesters as merely stupid. He didn’t say how clever it was for Bono to praise George Bush, that great humanitarian, or for he himself to end up on first name terms with Tony Blair. In the contest for the top sucker prize, it would be a close-run thing.

As the limited promises of Gleneagles are broken one by one, as ambassador John Bolton emerges from his attempt to impose America’s 750 destructive amendments on the UN’s latest document restating the millennium development goals on health, education and poverty relief, members of MPH, with Oxfam as one of the biggest, must ask themselves a few questions. What profit is there in attempting to “work with” politicians whose chief interest is publicity, who then lie and cheat to ensure that the bulk of aid pledges never actually materialise?

Co-option is a risk for any charity or campaigner. For a while, Geldof seemed to understand how politicians behave. He seemed to believe, nevertheless, that he could use them as much as they were trying to use him for a share of the limelight. In the process, he persuaded many millions of his view that the Bushs and Blairs should be praised when they did the right thing and attacked only when it seemed they were no longer trying. The singer, his fame these days largely dependent on his sincerity and his ability to be streetwise, now seems merely naive.

But then, so do any of us who believed that something, anything, of substance, might be squeezed out of Gleneagles. That would include NGOs with a great deal of experience in dealing with governments. In reality, the real concession made by the G8 was a simple one: they would talk about poverty. That was it, more or less. Trade, where the real money is made in the recycling of Third World debt to the West, was on the table in name only.

Surely, though, responsible organisations have to talk to governments? Surely, given the scale of state power, NGOs and any other campaigners have to talk to governments as often and as constructively as possible? If you are a charity containing staff past and present who are part of a network of relationships with new Labour, conversation becomes difficult to avoid, in any case.

But what if it turns out that you are being used as the merest cover? Or if it happens, as it inevitably does, that smart politicians will be knocking people down in the rush to share a stage with Saint Bob or Saint Bono, all the while having no intention of allowing the sanctified ones to make policy? Picture yourself as one of those shifty looking actors who turn up in party political broadcasts: that’s how it must feel.

The only truly plausible way to begin to make things happen is to mobilise voters. It is, as they say, the only language politicians understand, but it isn’t easy. For one thing, electorates these days have the attention spans of butterflies. Show them footage of a famine and they will dab a tear and donate a few pounds. Ask them to help in making famine prevention an issue of political permanence and you will have the job of a lifetime.

It can be done, though, slowly, with difficulty. Not so very long ago, “the environment” troubled only a tiny handful of people. Now most people have some awareness of the issues involved and that awareness is growing. In Europe, at least, the European Union and state governments have policies, directives and laws. Inch by inch, year by year, public consciousness is being raised. A similar process is the only real hope for those grappling with global poverty.

The irony is, of course, that Geldof has probably done more than any single individual to raise consciousness. The messages of the Live8 concerts may not have gone very deep, but they must have lodged in some minds. But that is precisely why the wilful failures of Gleneagles mocked Geldof, his trust and his fans. The politicians saw the Irishman coming.

Doubtless, he believes he did as much as any human being could do. It is equally possible that Oxfam believes, on balance and across the breadth of its work, that compromise is necessary, indeed unavoidable. The gulf between the hope invested in the G8 and the outcome remains vast, nevertheless. We did get fooled again.

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