From Africa to Aycliffe

IN the last ten days, Tony Blair has visited ebola-stricken Africa, picked up an award in New York, attended peace negotiations in Cairo and, yesterday, he was in Newton Aycliffe.

He delivered a motivational assembly, stressed to pupils at Woodham Academy of the need to wake each day in a positive frame of mind with a sense of purpose. Settling down afterwards, in the soft but noisy leather chairs in the headteacher's office, it seemed appropriate to discover what drives him out of bed every day.

"My great purpose is to try and make globalisation work," he says. "The world is coming closer together all the time – technology and migration are changing people's lives at a huge rate. You need to spread the benefits of it, tackle the poverty in Africa and get people of different cultures to live together harmoniously.

"How do you make the enormous driving force of globalisation work for everybody, and through my foundations I'm trying to shift policy."

It was because he shifted policy at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, which committed member countries to doubling overseas aid to Africa and to cutting the interest poor countries paid on their debt, that Mr Blair was presented with a Global Legacy Award by Save the Children in New York last week.

"The argument against overseas aid is charity begins at home," he says. "But the effectiveness of aid is far greater today than it was even ten years ago. If they saw how that money was being used, 90 per cent of people criticising it would say that they wouldn't want to stop it. I've seen first hand how aid is providing education and preventing death from disease. We should not be ashamed of it."

Beyond aid, one of his foundations tries to improve how African governments run their countries and react to crises like ebola. Ten days ago, he visited Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, which are struggling with the disease. Band Aid has recently re-recorded its Christmas single for a fourth time to help their struggle, leading Sir Bob Geldof to be accused of perpetually portraying Africa as a victim.

"My view of life nowadays is that you get criticism for just walking out the door so you might as well do what you think is right and carry on with it," says Mr Blair, in a revealing comment, "and I'm sure most people applaud what he is doing and it has a tremendous impact."

The former MP for Sedgefield is also the representative of the Quartet – the UN, the EU, the US and Russia – in the Middle East process where progress is hard to find. "Truthfully, over these past few years, the achievement, if you like, has been preventing the whole thing from collapsing into total chaos," says Mr Blair, who diplomatically avoids talking about domestic British politics. "If you leave a vacuum, as we have done in these last months, the situation goes backwards fast, and so in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem we need stability, we need progress on the ground and we need a political horizon and I'm going to be working hard to try and get us back to that in the next few weeks."

With his Faith Foundation, Mr Blair is trying to tackle Islamist extremism.

"This threat has been growing over 30, 40 years," he says. "It is incubated in education systems, formal and informal, right around the world. We are not going to tackle it by security means. We are going to tackle it by rooting out those education systems, so I'm lobbying for a global charter of educational principles which are designed to root out religious prejudice and promote religious tolerance.

"Let's be clear, there are millions of children every day being educated to an extreme view of the world and that creates the monster that is Isis – but if you can get rid of Isis, you still have Al-Shabaab, Jabhat al-Nusra, Al Qaeda or Boko Haram.

"The thing to understand is that it is not as simple as them hating us, I'm afraid. Some of the things they do are obviously hateful, but they believe that you should be a Muslim, not any type of Muslim but their type of Muslim, and if you are not, it is their duty to change that. We can't get our heads around this, but if you go back in time through centuries in history, Christians thought like that.

"You have to deal with the ideology and not just the extremism, because if you don't deal with the ideology, you will end up with the extremism."

Seventeen years after he was first elected Prime Minister with his famous soundbite which he talked about in the Aycliffe school assembly, he still believes that "education, education, education" is the key to a prosperous and peaceful future.