Adam Smith observed more than two centuries ago that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices". There will be very little merriment and diversion at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha, Qatar. But amid all the complexities of globalisation - and all the babble of sincerely held views, of Naomi Klein and George Monbiot on one side, of Clare Short and Peter Hain (see page 22) on the other - it is best to hold fast to simple if cynical principles, as Smith did. Most corporate giants and most western governments support trade liberalisation. Most developing countries, and most of the major charities concerned with them, remain deeply suspicious of it. So who do you think stands to gain most? We know, from recent experience in Britain and America, that the more liberalised an economy, the wider the gap between rich and poor. Why should that outcome be reversed on a global scale?

The argument that countries can be catapulted out of poverty by liberalisation and deregulation rests almost entirely on the example of the Asian "tiger economies", such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. This model is misleading. Those countries did not embrace free trade; they sheltered embryonic industries behind high tariff walls and helped them with heavy subsidies. In any case, manufacturing has shrunk as a producer of wealth and jobs over the past quarter-century and will shrink more; it will no longer work as the engine of an economic miracle because it now depends so largely on expensive technology, not cheap labour. And as the developed countries see traditional industries decline, they will become more determined to protect what they have. We have seen that with farming.

Developing countries may reasonably draw two conclusions. First, the west will embrace free trade only when it suits. The failure of the US and the EU to lift tariffs, quotas and subsidies on textiles and agricultural products is a scandal and, given promises made and sermons preached in earlier trade rounds, astonishing hypocrisy. To take just one example, Brazilian exports to the US face tariffs of 56 per cent on orange juice, up to 350 per cent on tobacco and 170 per cent on sugar. Rich countries spend $1bn a day on subsidising their own farmers - six times what they spend on development aid.

Second, the next big trade battles will be fought over services, which already account for half the world's economy. In this sector, the only thing most developing countries have to sell is labour. But again, nearly every western country imposes tariffs and quotas: they are known as immigration restrictions.

One of the objectives of the western negotiators in Doha is to extend free trade to public services, such as healthcare and water supply. Governments will not exactly be forced to privatise - but if they fail to take services off the public budget, they may find (ostensibly in the name of sound finance) that loans and aid dry up. Moreover, if they do privatise, they will have to allow foreign firms to bid and they will not be allowed to renationalise services.

The standard objections to privatisation - that firms will cherry-pick the most affluent and least troublesome consumers and that people end up paying for services that were previously free - apply with particular force in developing countries. The rising cost of water is a major source of unrest in Latin America and Africa; Soweto is in turmoil because privatised electricity prices have risen 400 per cent. And who will want to provide healthcare for impoverished farm workers or disease-ridden, malnourished shanty-town dwellers?

Globalisation, as Mr Hain argues, is not necessarily a bad thing (though a growing trade in goods and services seems, to put it mildly, not very compatible with plans to reduce the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming). Free trade can benefit poorer countries. For example, those with good public health and education systems, such as India and Cuba, can gain from trade in health services, because they have skilled professionals to export and relatively high but cheap standards of medical care to offer foreign consumers. But these countries, better placed than most to benefit from service liberalisation, are precisely those previously excoriated for high public spending and inadequate liberalisation.

In the past half-century, the developing world has been offered two panaceas for its plight: communism and full-blooded market liberalism. Neither has delivered - one need only look at Africa, and much of Asia and Latin America to see that. It is now offered a third: the kind of regulated free trade regime advocated by social democrats (or whatever they are) such as Ms Short and Mr Hain. This had better work, and quickly. Because the fourth solution, of which a version lurks in some Afghan cave, offers nothing but nihilism and murder.

Welcome to the community

Stephen Byers, the Transport Secretary, has been accused by John Robinson, the Railtrack chairman, of betraying the "shareholding community". A betrayal is always bad, but to betray a community is beneath contempt. Though Americans have frogmarched it into a rather threatening -ism, community is a friendly, benign word, often tacked on to other benign-sounding words such as care, singing or service. Once, communities, by definition, were small. They comprised people who knew one another, usually through living in the same locality: the "tight-knit community" was then an oxymoron. Now everybody wants to be in a community, without necessarily being a hippy or a London East Ender. So there is a gay community, a motoring community, a world community (usually, in practice, a conference of leaders of very rich countries). It is right that shareholders should form a community, and quite wrong that anybody should think they were better called a quick buck-making community.

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