Dominic Lawson: We should be applauding the World Bank for its stand on corruption, not berating it

When I was a child, my mother really did tell me to "imagine what the poor people in Africa would think" if I showed little appetite for what was on my plate. Being literally-minded, I used to reply that I was happy for the food to be sent by parcel to them, if that would do any good.

Now I can't help wondering what the poor people of Africa would make of events in Whitehall yesterday afternoon: a march there organised by Christian Aid called on the Government to suspend all its contributions to the World Bank, the body which dispenses cut-price loans to what are sometimes optimistically called "developing countries".

I found it hard to imagine that the poor people of Africa would cheer if Britain did cancel the £1.3bn it has pledged to the World Bank for the next three years.

Nonetheless, the Cabinet minister responsible for our overseas aid budget was obviously anxious about the Christian Aid march on Whitehall. Hours before it started, Hilary Benn went on the BBC's Today programme to declare that he would hold back £50 of Britain's contributions to the World Bank budget.

If you didn't hear the interview, you might be wondering why Christian Aid is so determined that we should withdraw our billions, and why Mr Benn is sympathetic to their protests. Was it because they were sick and tired of the way in which monies sent to the Third World were still ending up in the pockets of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats?

No, it was not. In fact, the reverse is the case. Christian Aid and Mr Benn are outraged at the way in which the recently appointed President of the World Bank has declared that loans must be made more and not less conditional on the eradication of corruption in benefiting countries. Their principled stand against the eradication of corruption in the Third World becomes less surprising when you recall the identity of the new World Bank President: Paul Wolfowitz.

As deputy secretary at the US defense department, Wolfowitz was the intellectual architect of the plan to destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein. Even his colleagues described him as "not so much a hawk, more a velociraptor" over Iraq. So when the Bush administration signalled last year that it was minded to nominate "Wolfie" to be the President of the World Bank, it caused complete conniptions in what is sometimes termed "the foreign aid community".

Christian Aid described the very idea as "appalling". Less predictably, even Blair's people expressed their unease through the usual channels. This, however, may have been because they had rather hoped that Gordon Brown might get the job, which would have given the Prime Minister his first good night's sleep for almost a decade.

As soon as Wolfowitz took over at the World Bank 15 months ago, he made it clear that too many loans were continuing to be made without sufficient preconditions: above all it was still a scandal that the biggest local beneficiaries were often not the intended recipients, but the government officials who negotiated the deals. That in part is why Wolfowitz has also stressed the need for recipients to remove the state from control of their industries: Christian Aid and Mr Benn are united in condemning this as privatisation imposed from without.

It is quite understandable why a fundamentally socialist organisation such as Christian Aid should be so opposed to Wolfowitz - in a recent pamphlet it described free trade as a global disaster fit to be grouped with the tsunami and HIV/Aids. But those on the left need to look more closely at the life and career of Paul Dundes Wolfowitz.

The son of a Jewish refugee from Central Europe, his political life started on the left: as a student he joined Martin Luther King's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. His first job in government was in the Carter administration: he was very much in sympathy with the Georgian peanut farmer's insistence that morality and foreign policy had to go hand in hand.

But he stayed in government when Ronald Reagan took over, and was thought to have been influential in persuading Reagan to describe the Soviet Union as "an evil empire." Wolfowitz was a lone voice in those Republican administrations in arguing for a policy of opposition to Saddam Hussein. While Donald Rumsfeld was encouraging Saddam as a bulwark against the revolutionary Islamists of Iran, Wolfowitz expressed his revulsion at doing deals with such a brutal dictator. He also opposed the sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia, on the grounds that it was an oppressive regime not fit to receive military hardware which it might use against its own citizens.

Wolfowitz, in other words, is an archetypal neo-con; which is to say a muscular moralist deeply opposed to the cynical conservative pragmatism of a Henry Kissinger, or, for that matter, of a Dick Cheney.

Seen in that context, Wolfowitz's morally-driven determination to use the World Bank as a means to eradicate corruption in the Third World is exactly what you would have expected. His aides told the The New York Times yesterday that he had suspended debt relief talks with Congo because he was appalled by the audits of its state oil company and had also "expressed indignation over the extravagant hotel bills incurred by Congo's president during the UN General Assembly meetings in New York last September."

Clearly Hilary Benn regards this sort of behaviour as unconscionable US imperialism, while doubtless David Cameron would see it as "simplistic" neo-con arrogance. Wolfowitz, a former academic, has never stood for office; but I suspect his views on cheap loans to the likes of Congo are much closer to those of the general public - who, after all, pay for the World Bank - than elected politicians such as Benn and Cameron.

Wolfowitz is also politically savvy enough to point out to the New York Times - no fan of his - that the bank's lending under his leadership actually rose last year, to almost £23bn, adding: "It's a myth that combating fraud is somehow at odds with development or an excuse not to provide assistance."

Nothing Wolfowitz says will appease his political opponents, which include not just Christian Aid but also its Catholic brother-in-sanctimony, Cafod. George Gelber, Cafod's head of policy, commented yesterday that "the World Bank's obsession with corruption risks undermining any chance the people have of holding their governments to account."

What chance is there of that, precisely? Mr Gelber's analysis, unlike Wolfowitz's, seems stunningly complacent in the light of the dreadful history of post-colonial Africa. I wonder: what on earth would the poor people of that benighted continent think of the behaviour of their Christian well-wishers?

d.lawson@independent.co.uk