Rebel with a capital cause Noreena Hertz has been dubbed the British Naomi Klein. Speaking in Edinburgh before the G8, the capitalist-turnedpeople's champion is urging protesters not to accept spin in place of action on poverty. By Douglas Fraser

She returns from her Cambridge base to face a very different audience in 10 days, as one of the speakers addressing the vast Make Poverty History rally planned for Edinburgh's Meadows.

Having written punchy, popular economics on multi-national corporations and their damaging impact on democracy, and last year her book, IOU: the debt threat and why we must defuse it, she is realist enough to know the world's problems are not going to be sorted out round a Gleneagles dinner table. Or, if the G8 leaders emerge to say they have been, Hertz will be checking the small print, just as she hotly disputes the spin placed on the G7 finance ministers' pledges of debt relief earlier this month.

The so-called Long Walk to Justice is only one in a series of events she dates back to protests around summits in Seattle, Genoa, Prague, Gothenburg and Nice. It went quiet after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but now Edinburgh is the focus, with New York's United Nations summit in September and the next world trade talks scheduled for December in Hong Kong.

"All the people who are converging on Edinburgh and Gleneagles next month need to articulate that they don't accept injustice and they want to be part of a march to justice that started in Seattle, " she says.

It's not about disruption and violence, and nor is it political action as a psychological prop, adds the Londoner: "People shouldn't be going out on the streets just to feel good about themselves, but with a real political aim which is to be a physical body standing there so that elected leaders recognise and understand how serious their citizenry is about these issues."

Hertz concedes that protest can be incoherent and a babble, but claims that the current campaign follows the noble protest path trod by the campaign to end slavery, the Green breakthrough in continental Europe in the 1970s and even the women's temperance movement that secured prohibition in the United States.

"This long walk to justice isn't going to end in Gleneagles.

That's going to be one of the major challenges. We have a critical mass of people aware of these issues in Britain in a way they haven't been before - debt relief, trade and aid have entered the public consciousness."

As someone who globe-trots, trading monetary theory with prime ministers and the Live8 aristos of rock politics, she reports that the same public mood holds true in Canada and Germany.

And while America lags, even the evangelicals credited with returning George Bush to the White House are alert to the messages of both justice and selfinterest. They respond quickly to her portrayal of poverty as a fertile breeding ground for the next generation of terrorists.

So Dr Hertz is something of a people's champion, with an international pedigree and a touch of glamour which has her variously described as Britain's answer to Naomi Klein, another campaigner against corporate clout, or even "the Nigella Lawson of economics".

She shrugs off a little light sexism, if it helps get attention for her message. Her parents were born under the British mandate in Palestine and met after they emigrated to London as teenagers.

Her late mother, Leah, was a clothes designer and leading campaigner to get more women into politics. Expectations of her daughter were high: "It was a political home, full of social activism, " remembers Noreena.

"We always had refugees staying, " she says. "My background helps me feel very much a global citizen and influences strongly my feeling that everybody, wherever they are, should be accorded rights."

Studying economics in the 1980s, followed by a business masters at Wharton in the US, she regrets being taught with little critique of the prevailing ethos: "This was the era when the market would be able to deliver, that the tide would raise all boats. I didn't start to question it until I went to Russia and had first-hand experience of what we were doing wrong."

Part of the problem was that economics, "the dismal science", has been in crisis: "It has become so divorced from the political issues of our time. It's so reductionist to economic models with two or three dimensions."

Graduating at 19, the subsequent Russian experience put Noreena Hertz in the tidal race of world events, where she has chosen to keep herself anchored.

With the communist shackles coming off Russia, she went to Leningrad (St Petersburg) and was part of the team that set up its first stockmarket, then being recruited by an arm of the World Bank to drive through the country's privatisation programme.

"Because I was so young and junior, I was sent out to the factories to feed information back to Washington. Everyone who has spent any time in Russia would have seen very quickly that the push to privatise factories was going to be fatally flawed. It was not just that loads of people would lose their jobs, but they also provided hospitals, sanatoriums, kindergartens, homes for old people. But when I raised that, I was told that wasn't the issue: the issue was to take these assets out of state hands, so that communism couldn't return, and the market would sort out the people who lost their jobs.

"I knew the market wasn't going to be capable of doing that.

It was so predictable that power would be consolidated in the hands of a few people. I became very critical of the dominant, arrogant mindset and it made me want to do economics in a very different way."

On a recent return visit, her fears had been realised.

HERTZ HAS STOPPED SOME WAY short of embracing the anti-capitalist, anti-globalising arm of the protest movement. The management consultant in her prefers to offerworkable solutions to international debt, that go with the capitalist, free-trade grain and would, for instance, use financial trusts with dual controls with which to manage injections of aid into Africa.

That approach gives her a foot in the doorwith Tony Blair, perhaps especially after today's lecture, when she will lambast his neighbour, the chancellor, for over-selling the G7 finance ministers' debt write-off.

"There was no historic deal, " she argues. "Only 18 out of 63 countries that need their debt removed are to get it, and that is conditional on economic conditions, privatisation of industries, etc, despite it now being accepted that the conditions can have devastating effects."

Many of those that don't qualify are burdened with loans given to long-gone, rotten, corrupt regimes. That leaves Sierra Leone spending more on debt than on healthcare and the Congo spending a third of its revenues on debt stacked up by Mobuto, the deposed tyrant.

She doesn't just talk of slashed government spending required as a condition of debt write-off, but of the investment in sanitation that is therefore held back, leaving women to walk miles for water. She talks of electricity, water, roads, railways and banks being forced into privatisation, but at "fire-sale prices" and with the few buyers in the marketplace able to set their own conditions.

The first such condition is usually an absence of the tight regulation, with upgrade and expansion of services, that is expected with most European privatisations.

Hertz is amazed at how Gordon Brown oversold this package:

"It was a step forward, but it was a small, flawed and faltering step.

It's important for people taking part in the G8 events that the wool isn't pulled over their eyes and they're not applauding and celebrating too early."

And if they don't push further on cancelling debt when the finance ministers' bosses meet at Gleneagles? Dr Hertz paints an African apocalypse: "Not only will we have the deaths of millions of people on our hands, because countries in sub-Saharan Africa can't afford healthcare or education, or to invest in sanitation or water because they're using scarce resources to repay the debt, but our own security and stability will be at risk because of the way poverty bears upon environment and disease and security.

"So if we do nothing, people will die, children won't go to school, there will be inadequate investment in development and we'll be risking a much less safe, much less secure, much more diseased and eventually much more degraded world."

Don't say she didn't warn you.