I arrived with a fractionally open mind. Obviously this event was always going to involve a certain amount of book-plugging. But if said books, and the promised controversy that was going to sell them, were actually to raise some awareness or shed some light along the way, I’d settle for that.

The Daily Information Office Dictionary, bless it, was compiled in 1933 and last revised in 1964. It doesn’t contain the word globalisation. Which is a shame, because, as was mentioned more than once during the evening, it’s a word in need of some definition. One imagines one knows what it means, but, if pressed, one comes out with something on the lines of “Companies, you know, international, um.. global village, er.. bigger, YOU KNOW”.

My definition would be roughly this : “The increasing tendency for the manufacturing and distribution of goods to be organised on a scale such that it can ignore international boundaries and the laws of any given country in the pursuit of increased profit.”

Now I am not entirely against multinationals. Like any halfway sentient being, I utterly deplore the ongoing destruction of the planet’s plants and animals and the pollution of its air, water and soil, and despair at the way in which this is facilitated and accelerated by every new piece of deregulation. I still insist, however, that the corporate structure, with thousands of people in different countries all pulling together for a common goal, is potentially a wonderful way to get things done, and can become so just as soon as its current tawdry obsession with making and selling things is overcome.

Which is close to, but at the same time, utterly different from, the view expressed by one of the evening’s two speakers, Steve Hilton. (Greg Palast, the intended third speaker, was off investigating the facts behind the recent Venezuelan coup. Results to appear on Newsnight in due course.) Steve suggests that we shouldn’t hate and fear multinationals since, because of their pervasiveness and efficiency, they can help solve world problems far better than government bodies, if given the appropriate commercial motivation.

To laughter from the floor he attempted to suggest that both Shell and BP were well on the way to becoming forces for the general good, while ignoring the fact that this is simply not possible while they continue to take oil out of the ground to be burned rather than making any serious attempt to develop less suicidal technologies.

Will Hutton, for his part, was concerned with contrasting unilateral American conservative capitalism and multilateral European liberal capitalism (or something). He claimed that George Bush wishes to invade Iraq with a quarter of a million ground troops early next year, with 25,000 of said troops being British, and that whether or not we go along with such insanity will effectively determine whether or not Europe can combine as a force for good to oppose American excesses.

Nobody saw fit to state explicitly that multinationals are only powerful, and the planet is only despoiled, to exactly the extent that we, the supposedly disenfranchised individuals, make and buy the damn products. Nobody suggested that each human individual might care to take a long look in the mirror to see exactly what defect or lack makes them think they need so much stuff.

Maybe I’ve missed something, but I see it as follows. Every time a human buys a product, that product will eventually, if not immediately, be used up or discarded, at which point it becomes rubbish. Not all of this rubbish is usefully recycled. Therefore we have a process going on which converts natural resources into rubbish. (Some of this rubbish just sits there and thus is actually called rubbish, some swims or flies and is called pollution.) Give this process enough time on a globe of finite size, and all natural resources will be converted to rubbish, and we’ll all die. As now, 5% of us will be very rich and will die last.

The real difficulty with the global perspective is that each individual can see the scale of the problem and feels that their own contribution will be tiny and useless. But no solution short of each and every person on this earth changing the way they behave is going to save us from the stampede of capitalism. We have no right to complain about the evil machinations of external forces until we take personal responsibility for EVERYTHING we buy and use. If we don’t, then this amazing blue-green planet will be ruined and this potentially excellent human species will be destroyed regardless of how many well-intentioned books are sold in Oxford.

Ian Threadgill