Sorry, but I have to take a very hard line on the G8 summit. I say sorry because normally I don’t like to be a hardliner. When Blair adopted Africa, and Brown pulled off his debt cancellation coup - which will presumably be endorsed at the summit - you couldn’t help softening up just a little. At last, after all that loss of trust over Iraq, Labour leaders seemed to be turning their hands to the kind of task that best justifies their salaries - and our respect.

Wonderful news. They even seemed to be giving a new international meaning to the century-old, once respected party name. They had become once again the party of labour - of the women, for example, labouring in chilli pepper warehouses in Andra Pradesh, and as they do so developing a lung disease uncommonly like miners’ silicosis; of the field labourers in every continent, mass-producing chillies, coffee, or carnations at rock-bottom prices; of the coltan miners labouring in the eastern Congo, mining the carcinogenic stuff that mobile phones need. At last the leaders of a major power would begin to turn the global banking system into a tool for getting people - in Ted Honderich’s phrase - out of bad lives.

But alas, it’s not as simple as that. Brown’s deal, in particular, really doesn’t do what it says on the label.

We can get an idea of the size of the package by noting that its cost to the G8 countries will be no more than $2 billion a year, compared with their current annual expenditure of $350 billion on farming subsidies and $700 billion on the military.

The amount of debt actually written off will be a very small percentage of the total debt of the poor world to the rich; only 5% of the total population of the developing world will benefit. And the debt written off is public debt only; it leaves poor countries still massively indebted to unregulated private lenders: for example, 35% of Ivory Coast’s external debt is to private lenders.

Then we must read the small print - as no doubt many in the poor world already have. Neo-liberal conditions are attached, including further privatisation of essential public services. Consequences of this ‘restructuring’ frequently include the imposition of school fees, steep increases in water charges, and new charges for health services which had formerly been free. So-called ‘structural adjustments’ of this kind have already been imposed, and their effects felt, as part of earlier debt relief initiatives. For example, school attendance in Uganda fell catastrophically in the 90s, until the Uganda government was forced to defy structural adjustment policies and make schooling free again. But the corporate lobby lets very little stand in its way. The relentless expansion of the unfettered market is an imperative that no politician can resist, not even Gordon Brown.

Sorry, but the good news begins to pall. It begins to look more spin than substance.

Some commentators on the left see the whole thing as gesture politics. Blair and Brown are playing along; they want to turn the Edinburgh protest into a spectacle; they want it to seem, if not quite a demonstration of popular support, then at least a protest that has had the wind taken out of its sails. Here’s the World Development Movement calling for debt relief. But we’re doing debt relief! We’re all on the same side! Here’s Friends of the Earth calling for action on climate change. We’re doing that too!

This is over-simplified. Not wholly untrue, but simplistic. Of course it’s not simply a matter of the men in power saying this protest movement is getting a bit above itself, let’s pull a couple of rabbits out of the hat. They’re not that preoccupied with out-manoeuvring the popular opposition. Clearly they wouldn’t be sorry to see the grass-roots protest movement wither away. But their first concern is to manage to world economy, largely to the advantage of the G8 countries, but not necessarily excluding the developing world - which the developed world needs.

There’s a good deal in the assertion that it’s gesture politics; but we’re not talking so much about gestures towards a few - or even a million - protesters. The more urgent gestures that the G8 countries need to make are towards the developing world, to forestall a new and potentially very powerful idea, which for a long time has been strenuously advocated by Jubilee South, and is starting to catch on with South governments. An idea that strikes, if not quite terror, then unease at the very least, into the hearts of rich-world leaders. What is proposed is the formation of a Debtors’ Alliance, probably led by the more influential South countries such as Brazil, India and Nigeria, together with as many of the smaller heavily indebted countries as possible. As soon as formed, the Alliance would inform the G8 and world banking institutions that all member countries would cease debt repayments unilaterally, unless the rich world met certain conditions. Unilateral debt repudiation by South countries looms quite large; anyone with Gordon Brown’s undoubted foresight knows it would be wise to forestall it now.

Whether it’s the global justice movement they’re dealing with, or a potential alliance of heavily indebted countries, Blair, Brown and most other rich-world leaders well understand that there is a defusing job to be done. If a gesture is all it takes, so much the better.

Maybe that’s the way politics always works. Those in power see a ‘democratic threat’, that is a threat to their power from those who have less power or no power at all. So the powers that be make a gesture. If one gesture isn’t enough, there’s more pressure, the needle goes into the red, and another gesture has to be made. That’s pretty much how the universal franchise was established. Through a dialectic of protest, civil disobedience, even riot on the one hand and concessions by government on the other, at long last, at very long last, these sporadic, reactive gestures made by power elites start to add up to something. In the long term they may even amount to real social change.

After all this hard-lining, we still have to say in all fairness that if Blair and Brown - and their successors perhaps for the next few decades - continue along the road they now appear to have chosen, it’s unlikely it will prove to have been a wrong turning. Their motives may include a wish to neutralise the grass-roots movement that began in Seattle, and nip co-ordinated debt repudiation in the bud. What they do may be done more in the interests of power than in the interests of the poor. But even if motives are mixed, the outcome will be somewhat more positive than negative. Perhaps a tiny minority of ‘bad lives’ will become a little more viable.

Even so, when you see the conditions in which so many people have to live, when you consider the urgency of people’s need for clean water, generic medicines, and rewards for their labour that are somewhere above rock-bottom, it all seems piddling stuff. The mountain is in labour yet again; by early July, another little mouse will have come into the world. Our leaders can do a great deal better than this.