Another year, another largely empty mini-initiative on international development from Gordon Brown. The promises of more aid made at the last great leap forward, the 2005 Gleneagles Group of Eight meeting, are being broken all over the place, but the UK prime minister’s endless conveyer belt of new wheezes runs on undaunted.

This year’s cunning plan is for a group of the world’s biggest multinationals to pledge to do more to help the developing world, most of which appears to be continuing to do what they do already: employing people in poor countries, buying things from producers in poor countries and selling things to people in poor countries.