BOX OFFICE: Dhoom 3 Has Phenomenal Non Holiday Opening

Dhoom 3 has set a new record on it’s opening day as anticipated. The film, starring Aamir Khan,Katrina Kaif, Abhishek Bachchan and Uday Chopra, hit the screens on Friday, December 20, 2013, which was non holiday.

As we reported earlier, certain North Indian territories were suffering heavy winter wave, and in spite of that audiences managed to catch Dhoom 3 on Day 1 itself. Multiplexes, especially in Mumbai, opened to a houseful audience, and the situation was same at single screens across India. At various circuits Dhoom 3 outperformed Chennai Express and Ek Tha Tiger, while in some circuits it couldn’t break the records either of them created previously. But, overall the initial Box Office Day 1 report has been overwhelming.

Dhoom 3 (Hindi version) has collected in the range of Rs 310 million (31 crore) nettapproximately on Day 1. Major earnings for Dhoom 3 came from Mumbai circuit, where it has managed to collect in the range of Rs 100 million (10 crore) nett approximately.

North India circuit, comprising of Punjab, Delhi and UP fetched in the range of Rs 90 million (9 crore) nett approximately. However, as compared to Chennai Express, which performed well in South Indian circuits, Dhoom 3 (Hindi version) didn’t perform well in South Indian circuits.

Dhoom 3 is also released in Tamil and Telugu in South India. The Telugu version performed well, as compared to Tamil. The Day 1 collections of the regional versions of Dhoom 3 are in the range of Rs 29 million (2.9 crore) nett approximately. If this is added to the Hindi version collection, the total Day 1 earnings of Dhoom 3 (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu) are in the range of Rs 339 million (33.9 crore) nett approximately.

This is a new record for a non holiday opening. Dhoom 3 is now set to challenge Chennai Express‘ opening weekend record. Only time will tell if it does it or not.

businessofcinema.com also spoke to few audience members, who had just finished watching Dhoom 3 at various screenings across different cities.

Rachit Damani from Pune said, “It was mind-blowing, loved it. Aamir Khan, Aamir Khan and only Aamir Khan. I will definitely watch it again soon.” Pratham Goswami from Ahmedabad said, “Aamir Khan stole the show. Loved it. It should have been longer.” Swati Oza from Bhavnagar said, “Aamir Khan has done outstanding work. She is really Mr. Perfectionist.” Gunjan Mehta from New Delhi said, “Aamir Khan was good, but I wanted to see more on how the robberies happen, like Hollywood movies they show everything, but didn’t like that part in Dhoom 3. Rest all was good. Action scenes were superb.” Shabnam from Hyderabad said, “Too good, loved the action and Aamir Khan.” Preet Kaur from Chandigarh said, “Total entertainment, loved it for Aamir Khan.”

Out of around three hundred plus audience members we spoke to in various cities, around 80% were full of praises for Aamir Khan. It seems Aamir Khan is the biggest attraction for Dhoom 3.

Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change

• Author: 'I call it the climate-change counter movement'

• Study focuses on groups opposing US political action

A coal fired plant. Photograph: John Giles/PA

Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.

The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change. Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.

“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” said the author of the study, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle. “It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”

Brulle's study, published on Friday in the journal Climatic Change, offers the most definitive exposure to date of the political and financial forcesblocking American action on climate change. Still, there are big gaps.

It was not always possible to separate funds designated strictly for climate-change work from overall budgets, Brulle said. “Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”

Some of the think tanks on Brulle's list – such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – said they had no institutional position on climate change and did not control the output of their scholars. In addition, Brulle acknowledged that he was unable to uncover the full extent of funding sources to the effort to oppose action on climate change. About three-quarters of the funds were routed through trusts or other mechanisms that assure anonymity to donors – a trend Brulle described as disturbing and a threat to democracy.

“This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power,” he said. “They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don't have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.

“That is the bottom line here. These are unaccountable organisations deciding what our politics should be. They put their thumbs on the scale … It is more one dollar one vote than one person one vote.”

Top-tier conservative think tanks

The vast majority of the 91 groups on Brulle's list – 79% – were registered as charitable organisations and enjoyed considerable tax breaks. Those 91 groups included trade organisations, think tanks and campaign groups. The groups collectively received more than $7bn over the eight years of Brulle's study – or about $900m a year from 2003 to 2010. Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups occupied the core of that effort.

The funding was dispersed to top-tier conservative think tanks in Washington, such as the AEI and Heritage Foundation, which focus on a range of issues, as well as more obscure organisations such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the John Locke Foundation.

Funding also went to groups that took on climate change denial as a core mission – such as the Heartland Institute, which held regular conclaves dedicated to undermining the United Nations climate panel's reports, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which tried and failed to prosecute a climate scientist, Michael Mann, for academic fraud.

AEI was by far the top recipient of such funds, receiving 16% of total funding over the eight years, or $86.7m. Heartland Institute, in contrast, received just 3% of the total, $16.7m. There was also generous support to Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group affiliated with the conservative Koch billionaires, which received $22.7m.

'It won't be going to liberals'

Brulle admits, however, that he was far less successful in uncovering the sources of funding for the counter-climate movement. About 75% of such funding sources remain shrouded in secrecy, with wealthy conservatives routing their donations through a system of trusts which guarantee anonymity.

The leading venue for those underground donations was the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which alone accounted for 25% of funding of the groups opposed to climate action. An investigation by the Guardian last February found that the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund had distributed nearly $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups from 2002-2010. The Donors group has now displaced such previous prominent supporters of the climate denial movement as the Koch-affiliated foundations and corporations like Exxon Mobil, Brulle said.

Other conservative foundations funding climate denial efforts include: the Searle Freedom Trust, the John William Pope Foundation, the Howard Charitable Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which also promote a free-market approach on other issues.

A number of the groups on Brulle's list – both as funders and recipients – refused to comment on his findings or disputed his contention that they were part of a movement to block action on climate change.

Whitney Ball, the president of the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, said the organisation had no say in deciding which projects would receive funding. However, Ball told the Guardian last February that Donors offered funders the assurance their money would never go to Greenpeace. “It won't be going to liberals,” she said at that time.

“We do not otherwise drive the selection of grantees, nor do we conduct in-depth analyses of projects or grantees unless an account holder specifically requests that service,” Ball said in an email. “Neither Donors Trust nor Donors Capital Fund as institutions take positions with respect to any issue advocated by its grantees.”

Recipients of the funds also disputed the assertion they were part of a larger effort to undermine climate science or block action on climate change.

“Each of the scholars that work on any particular issue speaks for his or hers own work,” said Judy Mayka Stecker, director of media relations at AEI, in an email. She went on to write, however, that most of the AEI scholars who have worked on energy and climate change have moved on and would be unavailable to comment.

David Kreutzer, an energy and climate change fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said Brulle was unfairly conflating climate denial with opposition to policies that would require industry reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“We do believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that man-made emissions will lead to some warming,” said David Kreutzer, an energy and climate-change fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “We are opposed to mandatory greenhouse gas emissions cuts.”

He said many conservatives saw a carbon tax, cap-and-trade and other climate policies as a government takeover by stealth.

“What we are not interested in doing is a huge shift of power to the government under the guise of preventing some climate problem,” he said.

The Hoover Institution, which received about $45m, claimed to produce no work on climate change – while displaying on its website an article by a Hoover research fellow on an August 2013 Hoover poll on economic, energy and environmental issues.

"Hoover has no institutional initiatives on climate change,” a spokeswoman, Eryn Witcher, wrote in an email. “Individual Hoover fellows research and write on a wide variety of topics of their own choosing, but we're not aware of any who are working in that field at this time, nor are we aware of any gifts or grants that have been received for that purpose.”

In the article, the Hoover fellow, Jeremy Carl, who works extensively on energy and climate issues, discussed climate change and fracking, concluding: “Many Democrats and liberals are in denial when it comes to reality on energy and climate policy, endorsing both science and political fiction.”

• This headline on this article was amended on 21 December 2013 to reflect that not all the $1bn referred to will have funded climate change work

National intelligence chief declassifies Bush-era documents on NSA programs

Clapper explained in a statement that Bush first authorised the spying just after 9/11. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

The director of national intelligence on Saturday declassified more documents that outline how the National Security Agency was first authorised to start collecting bulk phone and internet records in the hunt for al-Qaida terrorists and how a court eventually gained oversight of the program, after the justice department complied with a federal court order to release its previous legal arguments for keeping the programs secret.

James Clapper explained in a statement on Saturday that President George W Bush first authorised the spying in October 2001, as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, just after the 9/11 attacks. Bush disclosed the program in 2005.

The Terrorist Surveillance Program, which had to be extended every 30-60 days by presidential order, was eventually replaced by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that requires a secret court to authorise the bulk collection.

The US president, Barack Obama, hinted on Friday that he would consider some changes to the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records to address the public's concerns about privacy. His comments came in a week in which a federal judge declared the NSA's collection program "unconstitutional," and a presidential advisory panel suggested 46 changes to NSA operations. Those recommendations included forcing the NSA to go to the court for every search of the phone records database and keeping that database in the hands of a third party, not the government.

The judge said there was little evidence any terror plot had been thwarted by the program, known as Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

The panel recommended continuing the program but seeking a court order for each NSA records search. Obama said he would announce his decisions in January.

"There has never been a comprehensive government release ... that wove the whole story together: the timeline of authorizing the programs and the gradual transition to (court) oversight," said Mark Rumold, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group suing the NSA to reveal more about the bulk records programs. "Everybody knew that happened, but this is the first time I've seen the government confirm those twin aspects."

That unexpected windfall of disclosures early on Saturday came with the release of documents outlining why issuing the information would damage national security. The US district court in the northern district of California in the fall had ordered the Obama administration to make public the documents, known as state secrets declarations.

The justice department issued the declarations late on Friday in two ongoing class action cases: Shubert v Bush, now known as Shubert v Obama, on behalf of Verizon customers; and Jewel v NSA, on behalf of AT&T customers.

Calls to the justice department and the director of national intelligence's office were not answered.

"In September, the federal court in the northern district of California ... ordered the government to go back through all the secret ex parte declarations and declassify and release as much as they could, in light of the Snowden revelations and government confirmations," Rumold said. "So what was released late last night was in response to that court order."

In one such legal argument, former national intelligence director Dennis Blair told the court in 2009 that revealing information – including how information was collected, whether specific individuals were being spied upon and what the programs had revealed about al-Qaida – could damage the hunt for terrorists.

"To do so would obviously disclose to our adversaries that we know of their plans and how we may be obtaining information," Blair said. Much of his 27-page response is redacted.

Covert CIA program helped Colombia kill rebel leaders

The multi-billion dollar program had the NSA provide 'substantial eavesdropping help' to the Colombian government

The Farc rebels took up arms in 1964. Photograph: Christian Escobar Mora /Corbis

A covert CIA program has helped Colombia's government kill at least two dozen leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the rebel insurgency also known as Farc, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

The National Security Agency has also provided "substantial eavesdropping help" to the Colombian government, according to the Post. And the US provided Colombia with GPS equipment that can be used to transform regular munitions into "smart bombs" that can accurately home in on specific targets, even if they are located in dense jungles.

In March 2008, Colombian forces killed a top Farc commander, Raul Reyes, in one of several jungle camps the rebels operated in Ecuador, just across the border. The Post report Saturday said Colombia used US-made smart bombs in the operation.

The report is based on interviews with more than 30 former and current US and Colombian officials, who the Post said spoke on condition of anonymity because the program is classified and ongoing.

The CIA would not comment on the Post report. Without going into detail, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos told the Post that the CIA has been "of help," providing Colombian forces with "better training and knowledge."

The multibillion-dollar program was funded secretly and separately from $9bn in aid that the US has openly provided to Colombia, mostly in military assistance. It was authorized by President George W Bush and has continued under President Barack Obama, the newspaper reported.

Colombia's government and Farc have been engaged in peace talks in Havana since late 2012, but there has been no ceasefire between the two sides. Earlier this month Santos blamed the rebels for an attack on a police post that killed nine people, including civilians, military and a police officer.

The Farc rebels took up arms in 1964. The US-backed military buildup has reduced Farc's ranks to about 9,000 fighters and killed several top commanders, though the rebels insist they are still a potent force.

Developing countries lose $1tn a year from 'illicit financial flows'

Children in the Makoko slum of Lagos, Nigeria. There is increasing concern about the impact that financial corruption has on populations across Africa. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP

Developing countries are losing more than $1tn (£614bn) a year in "illicit financial flows", stemming from crime and corruption, according to estimates. This fast-rising figure is already 10 times the total amount of foreign aid these countries are receiving.

Between 2002 and 2011, governments in the developing world are thought to have lost a total of almost $6tn, largely due to poorgovernance and lax regulation, according to Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington-based watchdog. Included in its estimates are ill-gotten wealth from purposefully incorrect trade invoices, the use of shell companies and tax havens and other accounting gimmicks.

"This gives further evidence to the notion that illicit financial flows are the most devastating economic issue impacting the global South," Raymond W Baker, GFI's president, stated in the introduction to the report released Wednesday, calling the numbers a "wake-up call to world leaders on the urgency with which illicit financial flows must be addressed".

Particularly worrying is the fact that the rate at which these outward flows have been growing appears to be increasing substantially.

In 2002, for instance, the earliest year that GFI's researchers have examined, illicit financial flows are thought to have been around $270.3bn. By 2011, the latest year for which estimates are available, that figure had grown to $946.7bn, and has likely increased since then.

When adjusted for inflation, this translates into an average growth of more than 10% a year, while the 2011 number constituted a 13.7% increase on the previous year.

"Outflows have certainly been increasing," Dev Kar, GFI's chief economist and a co-author of the report, told IPS. "During the economic crisis both imports and exports declined, but as economic activity has recovered so too have these outflows."

Kar also cautioned that the GFI estimates are conservative. They include neither unofficial financial flows nor large-scale cash transactions, and as such are unable to offer a glimpse of broader underworld economies, including drug or human trafficking.

Asia is seen as having the most significant problems, accounting for around 40% of all illicit outflows from developing countries. While Africa's share was only around 7% in 2011, the continent did have the highest ratio of average illicit flows to gross domestic product, at around 5.7%.

With Africa also the world's most aid-dependent region, an increasing concern for many is how to staunch the flow of some of this illicit capital so it can be ploughed back into public sector spending such as on health, education and public infrastructure.

Shadow systems

Major development institutions have started paying attention to such discrepancies. The humanitarian group Oxfam estimates that some 32 trillion dollars are currently sitting in tax havens around the world, for instance, and suggests that taxes on this sum could raise nearly 190 billion dollars a year.

"Governments should agree to end global hunger by 2025 and an end to tax havens, which could help pay for this and much more," Stephen Hale, advocacy head for Oxfam, said in a statement. "Tax-dodging effectively takes food from hungry mouths."

The past year has actually seen notable moves by the international community to close down certain avenues used to hide or shield unreported wealth from prying states. Major multilateral groupings including the Group of Eight (G8) rich countries and the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised countries, for instance, have put tax abuse at the top of their list of priorities.

This summer, a high-level United Nations panel negotiating the next phase of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), for which the deadline is 2015, stated that one of its highest priorities would be tackling the abuse of offshore tax havens and illicit financial flows.

The following month, nearly a dozen EU members agreed to the world's first multilateral system of tax information exchange, based on similar bilateral US requirements passed three years ago.

"The fact that illicit financial flows are being mentioned in the G20 and other international organisations – that didn't exist before," Brian LeBlanc, a junior economist with GFI and a co-author of the new report, told IPS. "Earlier, these issues were seen solely as a developing country problem but now we're seeing developed countries taking action. So we're making some progress."

Yet transparency advocates urge that far more needs to be done, and GFI's Kar says that he expects the moves that have been taken so far will have little impact on illicit financial flows in the near term.

"The G20 has basically not tackled the shadow financial system, which remains largely intact – there have been no moves to improve transparency, not much has been done on tax havens or blind trusts," he says.

"Importantly, much of the conversation currently focuses on developed rather than developing countries. We believe that governance are the main engines of illicit flows, and in the major countries governance is simply not improving – in fact, it's deteriorating in many countries."

GFI has published research on illicit financial flows for several years in a row. Yet Kar says the startling estimates presented appear to have made little impact on government officials in many developing countries, even as state coffers in those countries struggle in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

"In most countries it's had almost zero impact, with government officials refusing even to acknowledge that this is a problem. Malaysia, for example, will only say that our estimates are overstated," Kar says, noting that Malaysia ranked fourth on GFI's list of the largest exporters of illicit capital.

"There remains a powerful, corrupt nexus between politicians and business, covering the financing of elections, non-transparency of business conduct, kickbacks in government contracting," Kar added.

"These are huge issues, and we expect a long process before countries come to accept the fact that illicit flows are a problem – and then to move to implement policies to deal with the situation.

Outdated US food regulations delay critical aid to Typhoon Haiyan victims

Rules from the 1950s tie up US food aid in red tape. Congress should waive them when they cost taxpayer dollars and lives

Filipino soldiers and residents look at the devastation of Tacloban city after Typhoon Haiyan from a military aid supplies distribution truck. Photograph: Edgar Su/Reuters

As a Filipino-American, I have reeled in shock and helplessness as thousands of Filipinos in Typhoon Haiyan-decimated Tacloban City were shown every day sitting, wandering, crying, with nowhere to go, without food, water, shelter, and medical attention. After six days and reports of no aid arriving yet, I wrote 17 friends in Manila seeking answers as to why more aid had not reached those devastated by this natural disaster. They felt the same despair I did, often telling me: "not enough aid reached the people in a timely manner".

Like many others, I am thankful for the generosity of my fellow Americans, many of whom have already donated millions to the relief effort. But I could never have imagined that red-tape and outdated ruleswritten by the US Congress in the 1950s could delay urgently needed relief from reaching the millions of people who desperately need humanitarian assistance in my native land.

These regulations require the vast majority of US food aid to be shipped from preferred growers in the US on preferred US ships. Food has to be shipped more than 11,000 nautical miles across the ocean, even though there is ample food available much closer to the crisis, in unaffected areas of the Philippines and in countries like Thailand and Vietnam – at a lower price for taxpayers. The rules prevent aid agencies like the World Food Program from purchasing food from the closest and most cost-effective sellers. Delays in delivering food because of red tape doesn't just cost tax dollars, it can cost lives.

It is unconscionable that red tape is delaying food from reaching people whose lives have already been destroyed by Haiyan. Since I started a petition to exempt Typhoon relief from outdated regulations, tens of thousands of Americans signed on to let the US Congress know they care about the issue. Their message is loud and clear: fix the broken food aid system. Haiyan is a perfect example of why reform is so desperately needed, both now and for future disasters.

It is now more than a month since super-typhoon Haiyan devastated the central region of the Visayas in the Philippines. We now know that 14 million were impacted, 4 million were displaced and are without homes. The Philippine government said weeks ago that they were feeding 1.4 million people a day, and the government is being blamed for not doing more. Yet as the WHO Director of Emergency Risk Management andHumanitarian Response said on NPR:

the complexity of the disaster is not only its magnitude, but the enormous geographic spread of the impact of the cyclone over 600 km or a 400 mile swath over different islands.

The logistics of aiding disaster survivors in the Philippines are further complicated by the fact that it is made up of 7,107 islands. 

The reality on the ground in such disasters is so complex that it is indefensible for US food aid regulations to hinder our humanitarian response simply to enforce antiquated rules. We could start reaching more people at no extra cost to taxpayers almost immediately, because Congress has the power to waive these regulations. Please join me and thousands of others in calling on Congress to save lives now by exempting the emergency response from FDA food regulations, so humanitarian aid can reach suffering people when they need it most.

It has been said that 90% of all giving happens within 90 days of an event. When 8 February 2014 comes around, the world may have forgotten how hard super-typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines. But if we achieve this small change in policy, we can be proud of helping to empower the Philippines to walk strong on the long road to recovery and rebuilding

John Hilary: UK charities have lost their radical soul

War on Want's executive director explains his sharp critique of NGOs in his new book The Poverty of Capitalism

John Hilary says UK NGOs have become overly professionalised and too focused on technical, incremental change. Photograph: War On Want

John Hilary is not afraid of the big questions. As the executive director ofWar on Want, widely considered one of Britain's most radical charities, he often speaks out on issues – from what he calls apartheid Palestine to the nature of global capitalism – that few other UK NGOs will touch. His new book, The Poverty of Capitalism, carries in its title conscious references to works by Karl Marx (The Poverty of Philosophy) and socialist historian EP Thompson (The Poverty of Theory).

Published last month, the book tracks what Hilary condemns as the failures of corporate globalisation and the rise of popular resistance movements worldwide. In what could seem a deliberate attempt to set himself even further apart from other NGO bosses, it also presents a sharp critique of mainstream British charities, which Hilary condemns for choosing to cosy up to corporations and governments, rather than align with grassroots movements such as La Via Campesina, the international federation of peasants' groups.

"I think this is a particularly British problem," says Hilary, sitting in the basement of the refurbished London warehouse that serves as War on Want's head office. UK NGOs have become very strong and very powerful, but the sector, he says, is today overly professionalised and too focused on technical, incremental change. It has "lost its political analysis, its transformative ambition, and any radical soul", Hilary adds.

Instead of challenging the UK government, which Hilary characterises as increasingly regressive and reductive in its approach to global development, charities are giving it "such an easy ride" and appear to have been "seduced by power".

War On Want protesters outside of the flagship Adidas store in Oxford Street, central London, during the 2012 London Olympics. Photograph: War On Want

It was not always like this, he says, pointing to the 1980s when mainstream UK NGOs joined global movements such as those against apartheid in South Africa. At that time, Oxfam and Christian Aid were, along with War on Want, challenged by the Charity Commission for having positioned themselves politically in what Hilary describes as active solidarity with groups on the ground. "Liberation struggles were once meat and drink to the international NGO community," he adds.

Today, big NGOs are increasingly taking a seat at the table alongside government and business. Development-speak is littered with references to partnerships and multi-stakeholder initiatives. Hilary refuses to accept this as evidence of progress and argues instead that even the most positive of such initiatives eventually give sway to the demands of the most powerful.

The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) is one of the boldest experiments in this area, bringing NGOs and farmers organisations to sit alongside diplomats and company representatives to try to hammer out consensus on how to tackle food and farming challenges. While praised by many as the most inclusive global governance forum, there was palpable anxiety among some civil society delegates at the CFS summit in Rome last month that the very vocabulary of partnerships and stakeholders can gloss over and even tacitly accept the stark power imbalances between those at the table. After a week of negotiations, civil society groups refused to endorse the committee's final recommendations on biofuels, saying the result defended the interests of industry rather than the needs of small farmers in poor countries.

Hilary has complained about mainstream UK NGOs before, and particularly around the IF campaign launched before the 2013 G8 summit, which War on Want said had been stitched up with the UK government and therefore refused to join. In The Poverty of Capitalism, which Hilary insists is not a theoretical book, he puts these complaints into context and charts how numerous attempts in recent decades to regulate and hold to account transnational corporations have given way to voluntary initiatives and corporate social responsibility projects instead.

The high water mark of voluntarism came with the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro which "affirmed the principle of voluntary self-regulation as the dominant model in place of corporate accountability", he writes. This "wholesale abdication of responsibility", according to Hilary, has helped turn the issue of corporate accountability into little more than a public relations exercise.

Hilary winces at the suggestion his book will further isolate him from other UK NGOs. While often brought on to panels and called into debates to give the alternative view, Hilary is not the only one unhappy with the state of British development work. A group called the Progressive Development Forum, for example, of which Hilary is a member, brings together those working in the sector to debate how to reframe conversations away from aid, charity and philanthropy and instead revive narratives of global justice and the need to tackle structural drivers of poverty and inequality.

"The way the British public is being taught to think about international development is still through the prism of the Live Aid generation, the idea of the generous giver and the grateful receiver," says Hilary. "As NGOs, we have a responsibility to look at how we are framing that story, and if we continue to reaffirm that basic charitable framing, of aid, philanthropy, generosity, then we will continue to reproduce supporters and donors who expect that."

Recent campaigns on tax, for which some large UK charities have taken a leading role, are a potential exception, says Hilary. "Tax campaigning is an important example of the sort of structural campaigning that used to be absolutely normal. Think about the 1980s, and all the stuff that was being done on debt, linking up the debt crises in Latin America with the high street banks here, all the stuff that was done on trade and investment campaigning."

But while tax also offers an important opportunity to link struggles in developed and developing countries, the focus has to go beyond tinkering with the system, Hilary insists. "It's absolutely the right direction, but it needs to be more ambitious."

If big UK charities can seem defensive, resistant to criticism and careful to stay on message with glossy pamphlets, billboards, and armies of press and PR officers, Hilary is quick to argue that, at least within organisations and NGO meetings, people do speak very openly about these issues. "Within a lot of these bigger agencies, these debates are raging. That's what gives me hope."