Your building society might then say "OK, just pay half your previous mortgage payments for the time being". With a struggle you can manage, though it means less fresh fruit for the kids, and certainly no new shoes. In effect you would be servicing the debt on pounds 30,000 while the lender set the other half of your loan on one side, where it would accrue extra interest until you got a good job again.But suppose you can't find one? Even if the building society generously announces it will write off the extra accrued interest, what difference does it make to your monthly family budget? Answer: none at all Your paper debt has changed But your real income and outgoings are the same. There would be no more money for more food or shoes for the kids each month.This is what Africa is this week being offered. What makes debt a moral issue is that children are dying directly because of our foot-dragging.

In a village in rural Zambia I came across the parents of an eight-month- old baby who had developed malaria. Once the hospital was free but now it took her parents two days to raise the 3,000 kwacha for hospital fees. Eventually they collected it by going round relatives and friends and then walked for three hours to the hospital. The father raced ahead and was standing at the hospital gate, with a medic, as his wife arrived carrying the tiny baby The child died in her mother's arms at the hospital gate. Three thousand kwacha is 74p.That was one child: another 11,000 die every day from easily preventable poverty-related diseases in the heavily indebted countries. Yet they almost all spend more servicing debt than they do on primary health care and education combined.Nothing will change for Alice so long as financial data are the G8's sole yardsticks. Instead of calibrating "debt-export sustainability thresholds" we should be monitoring the impact of debt on children.

But the sad truth is that the G8 is more concerned with rearranging the books to balance the bottom line in their national budgets.Whatever the politicians' PRs say, Alice will not be better off until money is diverted directly from debt repayments into health and education - with strict conditions to avoid the cash going on arms or into some corrupt leader's bank account.There was something else about Alice. There are many people to blame for the debt - Western monetarists, reckless banks, corrupt African leaders - but the one person not to blame was this ordinary woman in her shabby shanty That is why debt is not a charity issue, but a justice one. Yet despite all this, despite the lamentable way in which her fellow human beings failed Alice, every day she proudly put on her uniform and went to work in a feeding programme for 185 of the area's most malnourished children There was no pay. But just because others had not kept their side of the bargain was no excuse for Alice. She did what was her duty.I thought of Alice last week on Waterloo Bridge.

I thought of her again yesterday outside the G8 meeting in Cologne. And if Tony Blair does not show the same moral indignation and resolve on debt that he showed over the situation in Kosovo, I will carry on thinking of her as I turn up, along with all of the others, to protest somewhere else Alice will not give up And neither will I.. n politics, nothing succeeds like success. If Mr William Hague had announced the names of his new shadow cabinet precisely a week ago, people would have responded as the aged, deaf Duke of Wellington did when Lord Derby told him the names of his new cabinet. They would have said: "Who? Who?" Alternatively they would have remarked, as Sir Julian Critchley doubtless did: "What a shower!" But the lapse of a few days made a great difference to the way Mr Hague's new collection was regarded, in the newspapers at any rate. In that short period the European election had taken place: humiliation for the People's Party, triumph for the Conservatives, justification for Mr Hague. All of a sudden, the politicians around him had acquired a shinier patina.