Brendan Carlin
The Telegraph
June 10, 2005
Less than 48 hours after both Tony Blair and George W. Bush insisted that corrupt regimes had to be tackled to ensure that aid was not wasted, the Live 8 organiser told them to “get off the corruption thing” and deliver the promised help.

Speaking at the launch in London of the paperback edition of the Government-sponsored Commission for Africa report, Geldof indicated that Africans could not wait for corrupt regimes to be cleaned up. “Africans are simply too poor to stay alive,” he said.

Geldof also repeated his controversial request for hundreds of thousands of people to head for Scotland to put pressure on the G8 summit of the world’s biggest economies, to be held in Gleneagles next month.

With Britain currently holding the G8 presidency, Mr Blair is determined to use the summit to cement a hugely-ambitious programme of aid for Africa, akin to the United States-sponsored Marshall Plan, which restored Europe after the Second World War.

Anti-capitalist protesters who wanted 30,000 people to march through Auchterarder to the gates of Gleneagles Hotel on July 6, the first day of the meeting of world leaders at the G8 summit, have had their plan turned down by the local authority.