they're calling it g-hate...

...I can't imagine why. It's almost as if the world is shocked to realise that there are some people who are genuinely furious about the way the world is, rather than just mildly peeved. Paul Kingsnorth wrote a very good book called 'One No, Many Yeses'.

"The weather is no harbinger of what is about to happen... It is July 2001 and here in the ancient port city of Genoa, 300,000 people have gathered to stake a claim to the future. By the end of the day, everything will have changed. We don't know it yet but we are about to undergo a baptism of fire. Fire and tear gas and blood and bullets. And one of us is about to die."

'Hey everybody!' said Geldof, in full swing, 'I want to see a million people in Edinburgh this July!'

Far be it from me to call an ageing pop-star naive, but is he stupid? I think some people seem to believe that they're the only people ever to get a stick up their arses about the G8. Corporate and political abuse has been going on far longer than Make Poverty History bands have been selling in the shops. A lot of people are pissed off. Very pissed off. And they were on their way to Edinburgh long before Geldof told the rest of the world to show up.

Personally I'm against violent protest. Hate only breeds hate. But it's not hate that's the problem today, it's emotional apathy, it's plain not giving a shit about what happens to the world around you. It's not that the G8 leaders hate African children, it's just that it's a whole lot less hassle to just ignore them. And that's the danger. I'd always meet blind hatred with love, but that callousness, that complete lack of empathy - I can't help but hate that. A lot of people can't help but hate that.

And a lot of people, unlike my pussy self, don't think twice about showing that hate. Acting on it. People seem surprised that this week's events have descended into violence but I don't understand why. Haven't we been paying attention? Is this the first G8 summit that's actually registered on our public consciousness? Kingsnorth's account of the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa gives an idea of the depth of feeling that these protests contain. I don't think Geldof and his contingent realised that it's not just peace-loving white band wearers that will be strutting their stuff in Gleneagles. The bad guys might show up too, the anarchists and the 'hooligans'.

Don't get me wrong, I think that protest needs a healthy injection of hippy-peace love. I can understand the hate that people have, but I don't endorse it, I never will. The fact that millions of people are willing to buy the band and do their bit is fantastic. But it's not enough. We have to understand things before we can change them. People clicking their fingers is a shocking illustration of the scale of poverty and death in Africa, but it's not magic. Clicking fingers won't stop it from happening.

How can we help a country that we know nothing about? How can we plead with the G8 when we can't even name the eight men sitting by that fireside? Are we so lazy that we'll let popstars speak for us, blindly trusting in their slick soundbites because, lord knows, they play good music and that's gotta be enough, right?

It all comes down to ignorance, the pompous air with which megastars come waltzing in, as if they've just discovered this incredibly obvious truth that the rest of the world haven't got yet (blinded as we are by our humdrum, fame-less existences).

Listen guys, people don't have to die of starvation. The world doesn't have to be this way. If we tell our politicians to fix it then they have to because we live in a democracy!

And the millions of people who have dedicated their lives to working with the poor, to campaigning against corporate abuse, to actually doing something about the state of the world say:

Well that's great, good on yer for getting the public mobilised but it's not really as simple as just having a big concert -

-before they get drowned out by the squeal of tires from Bono's limo.

In the meantime, the Black Bloc keep kicking the crap out of anyone who'll stand still long enough, the anarchists keep... being anarchic, the politicians keep arguing, the Africans continue to be denied the right to actually, you know, have self-respect and, like, live, or whatever, and all the complications keep being ignored.

It's so difficult not to just write off the whole thing. We must believe that making poverty history is possible or the public emotion that Live8 has shown will just dissipate. But if we don't stop buying into the Politics Lite solution to poverty, the simplified to the point of being irrelevant view of world injustice, the people are going to get bored and forget (because that's what people do) and in a couple of months, the only people fighting are going to the ones who've been fighting for years. We do nothing. We learn nothing.

Nothing will change.