The Secretary of State for International Development is nothing if not ambitious. Tomorrow, Clare Short is publishing a White Paper on how globalisation can be made to work for the world's poor. She wants everyone to read it - and then say: 'For God's sake get on with it.'
'I have set out to change the language of the international system,' she reproached me when I interviewed her and started by asking about poverty alleviation. 'Hardly anyone talks about "alleviation" any more because it is not conceptually right. It is kind of softening the impact of poverty and not getting rid of it.' Sharpen up, Will Hutton!
She wants to get on with shaping the current world system to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, to ensure that every child goes to primary school and that the mother of every baby has proper health care - and all by 2015. She is impressed by the way the Asian Tigers have managed to use access to world markets, investment in education, controlled capitalism and energetic government to lever themselves towards Western living standards in less than a generation. The task now, she believes, is to ensure that the countries of South Asia and Africa repeat the Tigers' lead.
Her mission is to save development from those who think it is 'pictures of African children with flies on their faces that moves their heart, they put some money in the charity box and feel depressed.' Instead, she wants to offer a programme 'that is practical and achievable; that removes the cause of their suffering'. This, she hopes, will generate demands for action and a transformation of how we think about the world's poor.
Clare Short in full sail has always been formidable, whether she is decrying page three girls or the illiberalism of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts.
Now her commitment to capitalism in the service of poverty elimination has made her the scourge of anti-free trade protesters and environmentalists alike. The Secretary of State is trying to bring Third Way politics into an area where it seems least likely to succeed and, at the same time, to make it understandable and controversial.
For, as street protests at the European Summit in Nice this weekend follow those at the IMF and World Bank annual general meeting in Prague in September and, famously, in Seattle at the abortive World Trade Organisation meeting, globalisation has not got many popular champions.
The onward march of transnational corporations and world money markets dismantles icons such as national community and democracy, has enfeebled governments and provoked universal disquiet. From British euro-scepticism, to Islamic fundamentalism or the re-emergence of the Austrian far right - all have similar roots in locally grounded disquiet that what really matters to people no longer has legitimacy. Clare Short is taking on this movement head to head. She believes this reaction is wrong-headed, hypocritical and selfish.
What the poor want, she says, and what she wants for them, is a chance to enjoy Western living standards by joining in the same capitalism that delivers the goods for us.
Her main concern is Africa: conflict- ridden, devastated by Aids and home to the majority of the world's extreme poor. She sees the success of Mozambique and Uganda in winning inward investment and sustaining Asian Tiger-type economic growth rates that allows them to keep ahead of population growth - albeit from a desperately low base - as a model for the rest of the continent.
But although she praises free trade and private inward investment, Short still carries 'the white woman's burden' - the belief that the rich countries must take responsibility. A Western country like Britain has to get stuck in and help, especially in providing health and education and also to stop corrupt governments, she believes. Good governments must uphold rigorous standards in both the private and public sectors - and above all in their 'unreliable' African banks which ship out of Africa proportionally 10 times more savings than happens in Asia.
One of Short's intended plans is to help governments recover money illicitly salted away in London by their predecessors.
The big story, though, is to embrace the market. She talks enthusiastically about how Africa must develop by using its abundant land to grow agricultural goods for world markets with higher added-value - from coffee to flowers - and process the products in Africa.
I put it to her that this is diametrically opposed to the arguments from green campaigners like Vandana Shiva who has her own farm in South India where she grows organic food using traditional methods in order to maximise local employment - and who is sharply critical of Short's approach because it creates inequality and environmental depredation.
Short returns the fire: 'I would like to go to her house. I'll bet she's got things that come from all over the world. If you want to lock Africa and the poorest of South Asia out of that world, you're locking them into marginalisation and growing poverty. It is intolerable.'
She has the same contempt for the anti-trade protesters. 'I don't see how burning down McDonald's helps anyone anywhere in the world. I think it is self-indulgent. Actually breaking up the World Trade Organisation would put us backwards. We would then have big rich governments and companies setting the rules for trade. Small and poor countries wouldn't have any say in it.'
Nor should the rules-based trading system she defends have a rule against the use of child labour; it is only a reflection of extreme poverty and if we stop it we only condemn children to worse - beggary and prostitution.
'The Americans argued in Seattle that there should be a rule in the WTO that says any country that has child labour has barriers against its trade. But that would punish every single poor country in the world,' she says.
Her free trade instincts do not extend to free financial markets, which she thinks can be a menace. She favours the Tobin tax, taxing foreign exchange speculation, but only if it can be made to be practical and thinks that countries have to be careful how to decontrol their banks and foreign exchange markets. Governments may have to step in to stop capital stampeding out of a country in panic with capital controls.
Short is right about the World Trade Organisation, right about the potential benefits from globalisation and right about the priorities for Third World governments. Her difficulty is that capitalism isn't fair, and that the development she advocates will necessarily throw up vicious inequalities with scant means of closing them.
She is a staunch advocate of increasing the aid budget towards the United Nations target of 0.7 per cent of GDP, and of allowing the recipients to spend it as they choose.
She says: 'As long as I am around it has to go up year on year', a veiled threat to Gordon Brown and Tony Blair that if they don't see her right she'll be on the back benches. Her progressive and considered White Paper is probably the best we can hope for in the circumstances.
The question is whether we should be aiming to change the circumstances.