Japan, 3rd July, 2005

With the best of intentions and the hope of being well entertained, hundreds of thousands of people thronged the cities of Western developed nations on Saturday in order to join an extravaganza aimed to highlight the debt crisis in Africa.

In other parts of the globe however, interest in the event was disappointing. In Tokyo, Asia's only G8 member, organizers struggled to half fill a 20,000 capacity arena. Japan itself, showed little interest in the event while in the Middle East, Africa and South America the situation was much the same.

With fragmented TV audiences, due to the advent of cable TV and more media choice, it is unlikely that Live 8 surpassed the global reach of its predecessor Live Aid. It also struggled to find any new "mega acts" for the event, relying instead on well known names of a bygone era.

Prior to the show, many had criticized Live 8 for its first world line up. The artists from Africa were relegated to the Eden project, somewhere in the hinterlands of South West England. Even when Mr. Geldof led a survivor (Birhan Woldu) from a refugee camp on to the stage and Madonna came on, the poor young woman was left alone and bewildered while the show continued. It seemed the organizers had hoped she might chip in with Madonna perhaps. The scene, though moving, struck many as bizarre. The woman had been paraded in front of the world to prove Mr. Geldof's cynics wrong. Ironically, it may have had the opposite effect, revealing to all the two dimensional nature of the event.

This was highlighted even more with the unexpected appearance of Mr. Kofi Annan. Clearly he didn't seize the moment and hadn't prepared anything to announce to 2 billion people around the world. What is up with these people? Entrusted with public office, expected to speak up for the people, poor Mr. Annan was no man for the occasion. With all his good intentions, he is perhaps not the best man for the post of UN Secretary General either.

In focusing attention on the G8 Summit on the 6th July, the event surely was effective. However, it could be said that it worked strongly in the favour of Tony Blair, who has been on the ropes for some time for blatantly lying to the British people about going to war in Iraq and for his unequivocal support for his US counterpart, a person whom most in the UK, and around the world, hold only antipathy towards.

Pundits, commentators and artists all missed a global opportunity to refocus public attention on the wider picture. Suddenly the Middle East is forgotten while the public is whipped up into a frenzy over getting eight men to simply do their job. Did not 2 million people vociferously protest against an illegal war just two years ago in the very same park? Yet not one person uttered the word "Iraq" or "war". It was as if it had been written out of history, as if a clean slate had been made and a consensus reached that Iraq is history. Us good people of the first world need to move on it seems.

Mr. Geldof claimed that the true stars were the G8 leaders. In a very real sense he was right. For sure, these men will walk away from their summit with media halos around their heads having been able to give some ground with regards to African debt. Whether they give the $25 billion that Mr. Geldof expects, and whether that figure is sufficient, is another question altogether. A quick monetary fix will bathe the G8 leaders with praise while shoring up growing doubts in their own respective countries about the current international financial system.

Many left wing analysts will surely be crying foul, for it seems that the concert was a public relations coup d'etat for the world's big financial institutions. Moderate opinion in the developed countries will be assuaged by the Live 8 spectacle and more "radical" opinion, for some time to come, will be further marginalised and considered somewhat extremist.

It doesn't seem like a good idea to delude ourselves that a few dozen singers will persude large financial institutions to write off such collossal sums of cash from their books and forever turn over a new leaf. The system in which these financiers work is brutal, there is no place for charity. For every debt cancellation, you can be sure that the bankers will be compensated in some way. There is no such thing as a free loan.

The real power behind the thrones of the G8 faces, have at their heart, national interests, corporate interests and the interests of the cartel of big financiers who have trillions of dollars at their disposal, swishing from shore to shore disruptting and profiteering on the very economies Live 8 is endeavouring to assist. These individuals are where they are because they put capital and their own interests first and not people. However disheartening this may sound, I fail to see how Live 8 will fundamentally change anything in the long term, other than give Bush and Blair an opportunity to regain public confidence and support after their treachery and lies in the human catastrophe that is continuing to unfold in Iraq today. There is of course a positive note, and that being the cancellation of some of the outrageous debts of developing nations. The Live 8 concert will certainly have an impact on the short term future finances of such developing nations. However, in the long term it seems highly unlikely that there will be the required sustained pressure to reform what is to most, an intangible, unjust and corrupt international financial system.