The next time the Fairtrade Foundation holds a parliamentary reception, one of the organisations unlikely to be on its invite list is the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) who marked last month’s Fairtrade Fortnight by publishing a report claiming that such products do ‘more harm than good’ to farmers in developing countries.
The report, wittily entitled Unfair Trade, said that Fairtrade’s ‘positive image appears to rely more on public relations than research’. ASI policy director Tom Clougherty had do-gooders all over Stoke Newington choking into their lattes when he claimed that: ‘At best, fair trade is a marketing device that does the poor little good. At worst, it may inadvertently be harming some of the planet’s most vulnerable people.’
The story was picked up by no less a champion of social justice than the Daily Mail which published the findings of ‘the highly respected right-wing think-tank’ alongside a picture of Coldplay singer Chris Martin looking sympathetically at a farmer surrounded by fair trade crops.
The Telegraph’s Janet Daley also seized on the findings, thundering that ‘what developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit’ and prescribing free trade, not fair trade, as a cure.
The Fairtrade Foundation came out fighting with a lengthy rebuttal to the ASI’s claims on its website, describing the report as ‘an insult to the effort and commitment of Fairtrade producers and their supporters in the UK’, adding that: ‘Those of us who have had the privilege of seeing and hearing at first hand the difference that Fairtrade makes to poor communities are not going to be persuaded otherwise by the rehashing of simplistic economic theories.’ Ouch.
The ASI weren’t the only ones to have it in for leftie do-gooders last month, however. Civitas took issue with culture minister Margaret Hodge’s remarks at a lecture to the ippr in which she argued that iconic cultural events such as the Proms did not attract a sufficiently diverse range of folk and that British values should not be articulated in ways that ‘reflect the imperialist traditions of our past where we sought to impose our values on conquered territories’.
‘The present government would have the country believe its imperial past is something of which the nation should be ashamed rather than take pride in,’ thundered a post on the thinktank’s Centre For Social Cohesion blog. ‘I do not see the British Empire in so negative a light.’
However, thinktanks on the left have not been sitting idly by while the right launches its assaults. At a Fabian Society fringe meeting at Labour’s spring conference in Birmingham, work and pensions secretary James Purnell said the party had ‘to absolutely nail the Conservatives on the weasel words they use on child poverty’, claiming the Tories were pretending to have signed up to the government’s child poverty targets.
For the Conservatives, meeting the targets was a mere aspiration, for Labour it was a pledge, said the minister. ‘For the Tories it is a way of trying to decontaminate their brand, and to try to give them permission to talk about reforms like the Wisconsin experiment in the United States, which led to an increase in child poverty while we in the UK were reducing it.’ The gloves are off.