Vanities and values:
A new world order?

Trading power: finding a voice in an unfair world
Tuesday 2nd June

As Executive Director of Fairtrade, Harriet Lamb is the leading voice in international ethical marketing. Under her stewardship, Fairtrade has grown from a special interest pressure group to a flourishing grassroots social movement enabling some 7.5 million farmers and workers across the world to find economic stability.

Formerly Head of Campaigns at the World Development Movement, Lamb is the acclaimed author of Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles. “Our movement is ambitious,” she says. “We want to open new horizons, to shift expectations of what is economically and socially acceptable in trade. At the end of the day, I am a mother who wants mothers the world over to realise the same dreams for their children as mine.”

Primrose Hill prophet: Friedrich Engels and the costs of capitalism
Wednesday 10th June

Tristram Hunt is a prominent historian, writer and broadcaster. A former research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy, he lectures in British history at St Mary, University of London.

Hunt’s latest book, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels presents the co-founder of international communism (and former resident of Primrose Hill) as one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century, whose treatise The Condition of The Working Class in England, remains one of the most haunting and brutal indictments of the human costs of capitalism. A profound thinker in his own right – on warfare, feminism, urbanism, Darwinism – technology and colonialism, with fierce prescience, Engels predicted the social effects of today’s freemarket fundamentalism and unstoppable globalization.

Why the world will never be the same again
Wednesday 17th June

Lord ‘Paddy’ Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon is one of Britain’s most distinguished political figures. A former Special Boat Commando and diplomat, he was leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 to 1999 before taking up the government post of High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Equally skilled in foreign and domestic policy, Lord Ashdown argues for a fresh, globallycoordinated approach to world politics. “We are reaching the end of the period of hegemony of Western values in international affairs,” he warns. “We will have to start accepting new governmental concepts if we are able to have a rule-based global system.”

Taming Mammon: the moral dimension of money
Wednesday 24th June

Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs International Investment Bank, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach has written and lectured extensively on economics and the relationship of faith to politics and business. A former Director of the Bank of England and Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher, he was a chief architect of the government’s privatisation and deregulation programmes. He also chaired the 2004 “Griffiths report’ which warned of the ‘time bomb’ of UK consumer debt.

Lord Griffiths is a committed Anglican and chairman of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth Trust. He argues that in dealing with the present crisis it’s not enough to look for purely technical solutions. “What interests me are the ethical, moral and spiritual dimensions of money”.

Popes, punks, presidents and political change for the poorest
Wednesday 1st July

Jamie Drummond is the driving force behind the Make Poverty History campaign, co-founder of DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade in Africa) and Executive Director of ONE.org. Working in partnership with Bono and Bob Geldof, he lobbies world leaders, corporations and individuals to address world poverty and has played a key role in the cancellation of 50 million dollars of African debt.

Drummond believes that aid to emerging economies is only effective where there is “democracy, accountability and transparency.” Since 2000, his mission to “connect the person who buys the wristband and the policy outcome” has resulted in 29 million more children in school across Africa and the supply of antiretroviral drugs to more than 2 million AIDS sufferers. “If you thought that the cancellation of debt had no effect,” he says, “think again.”