LONDON - 10 December 2004 - 7.099 words
Text:
Gordon Brown's Pope Paul VI CAFOD Memorial Lecture
Chancellor of the Exchequer
Gordon Brown gave CAFOD's 2004 Pope Paul VI memorial lecture last
night. The text of his lecture follows below.
To be asked to address you tonight, to be part of this great lecture series in memory of Pope Paul VI is both humbling and challenging.
It was Pope Paul VI who as early as the
1960s alerted the modern world that the old evil of poverty had
to be addressed as an unacceptable scourge of the new global economy.
It was Pope Paul VI who in 1967 in his 'Encyclical Populorum Progressio'
'Development of Peoples' urged upon the richest countries
their sacred duty to help the poorest.
And it was Pope Paul VI who set out, for our generation, the obligations
that we all have a duty to meet: obligations that arise from -
as he said in his own words:
* Our mutual solidarity;
* The claims of social justice;
* And universal charity.
In his book 'The Power of Myth' Joseph
Campbell describes a hero as someone who has given his or her
life to something bigger than him or herself.
And today I want to honour not just the legacy of Pope Paul VI
but all of you here tonight missionaries, aid workers, supporters,
contributors, campaigners - as our modern heroes. For just as
surely as some of our greatest heroes of history, your religious
faith, your moral anger at poverty, your sense of duty, has led
you to fight for great causes, stand for the highest ideals and
do God's work on earth. And let me on your behalf thank Cardinal
Murphy O'Connor whom I and the British people admire so much for
his leadership not just in this country but throughout Europe;
Chris Bain for leading CAFOD and for his crucial, catalytic role
in bringing the 'Make Poverty History' campaign together; and
all members of CAFOD.
The reward you seek, as you have always said, is not recognition nor status nor titles nor money but that the coming generation - who never even knew you - enjoys a better life thanks to your courageous work. And I also want to pay my personal tribute to the work of CAFOD over forty years and your leadership in achieving, by your determined campaigning, what many thought impossible - 100 per cent bilateral debt relief.
You led a coalition whose voices rose to a resounding chorus that echoed outwards to the world from Birmingham, then from Cologne, then from Okinawa - a clarion call to action speaking not for yourselves alone but for the hopes of the whole world.
And you led a coalition that achieved
more standing together for the needs of the poor in one short
year than all the isolated acts of individual governments could
have achieved in one hundred years.
Reminding us that as CAFOD campaigning for justice for the world's
poor you have for forty years:
* Changed the way we think about giving;
* Deepened our commitment to serving others;
* Demonstrated that duty and obligation are more powerful than
selfishness or greed;
And in doing so brought the world closer
together. Now, it is the churches and faith groups that have,
across the world, done more than any others - by precept and by
example - to make us aware of the sheer scale of human suffering
- and our duty to end it. Indeed, when the history of the crusade
against global poverty is written, one of its first and finest
chapters will detail the commitment of the churches in Britain
to help the world's poor.
And my theme tonight is what this generation working together,
each and all of us, can do - that we are not powerless individuals
but, acting together, have the power to shape history.
And each of us, building on the individual causes we cherish -
from work on debt relief to education, from fair trade to clean
water, from blindness to TB, from AIDS to child vaccination -
can together not only make progress for our direct concerns but
also turn globalisation from a force that breeds insecurity to
a force for justice on a global scale.
Today I want to sketch out for you a vision of a new deal that
demands a new accountability from both rich and poor countries.
A new compact between those to whom so much is given and those
who have so little. More than a contract - which is after all
one group tied by legal obligations to another - and nothing less
than what the author of 'The Politics of Hope' called a 'covenant'
- the richest recognising out of duty and a deep moral sense of
responsibility their obligations to the poorest of the world.
And I want suggest that at the same time as developing countries
devising their own poverty reduction plans, we the richest countries
must take three vital steps:
first, agreeing a comprehensive financing programme - that is
we achieve a breakthrough to complete 100 per cent debt relief;
find a way to persuade others to join us in declaring their timetables
on increasing development aid to 0.7 per cent of national income;
and immediately raise an additional $50 billion dollars a year,
doubling aid to halve poverty, through the creation of a new International
Finance Facility;
Second, with this new finance, that we advance to meet the Millennium
Development Goals on health, education and the halving of poverty;
use this unique opportunity to drive forward the internationalisation
of AIDS research and the advance purchase of HIV/AIDS and malaria
vaccines; build the capacity of health and education systems;
and deliver to the 105 million children who do not go to school
today, two thirds of them girls, our promise of primary education
for all;
and third, that we deliver the Doha development round on trade,
and make it the first ever world trade agreement to be in the
interests of the poorest countries.
Indeed, because progress on each of these
is dependent on progress on all of these, we must during 2005
advance all of these causes together.
Exactly five years ago in New York and in a historic declaration
every world leader, every international body, almost every single
country signed up to a shared commitment to right the greatest
wrongs of our time.
* The promise that by 2015 every child would be at school.
* The promise that by 2015 avoidable infant deaths would be prevented.
* The promise that by 2015 poverty would be halved.
This commitment was a bond of trust, perhaps
the greatest bond of trust pledged between rich and poor. But
already, so close to the start of our journey and 20 years
after the problems were first exposed to this generation through
Live Aid - we can see that our destination risks becoming out
of reach, receding into the distance. And at best on present progress
in Sub Saharan Africa:
* primary education for all will be delivered not in 2015 but
2130 - that is 115 years too late;
* the halving of poverty not by 2-0-1-5 but by 2-1-5-0 -- that
is 135 years too late;
* and the elimination of avoidable infant deaths not by 2015 but
by 2165 -- that is 150 years too late.
So when people ask how long, the whole world must reply:
150 years is too long to wait for justice.
150 years is too long to wait when infants are dying in Africa
while the rest of the world has the medicines to heal them.
150 years is too long for people to wait when a promise should
be redeemed, when the bond of trust should be honoured now in
this decade.
Martin Luther King spoke of the American Constitution as a promissory
note.
And yet - for black Americans - the promise of equality for all
had not been redeemed.
He said that the cheque offering justice had been returned with
'insufficient funds' written on it.
He said, 'we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.
And he said the time had come to 'cash this cheque which would
give upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice'.
And in this way he exposed on racial equality the gap between
promises and reality.
But in exactly the same way today's Millennium Goals - a commitment
backed by a timetable are now in danger of being downgraded
from a pledge to just a possibility to just words.
Yet another promissory note, yet another cheque marked 'insufficient
funds'. And the danger we face today is that what began as the
greatest bond between rich and poor for our times is at risk of
ending as the greatest betrayal of the poor by the rich of all
time.
As a global community we are at risk of
being remembered not for what we promised to do but for what we
failed to deliver, another set of broken hopes that break the
trust of the world's people in the world's governments.
And when we know the scale of suffering that has to be addressed,
the problem is not that the promise was wrong, the pledge unrealistic,
the commitments unnecessary but that we have been too slow in
developing the means to honour, fulfil and deliver them.
In the past when we as a global community failed to act we often
blamed our ignorance we said that we did not know.
But now we cannot use ignorance to explain or excuse our inaction.
We can see in front of our TV screens the ravaged faces of too
many of the 30,000 children dying unnecessarily each day.
We cannot blame our inaction on inadequate science - we know that
a quarter of all child deaths can be prevented if children sleep
beneath bed?nets costing only 4 dollars each.
We cannot defend our inaction invoking a lack of medical cures
- for we know that as many as half of all malaria deaths can be
prevented if people have access to diagnosis and drugs that cost
no more than twelve cents.
The world already knows we know enough. But the world knows all
too well that we have not done enough. Because what is lacking
is will.
So if we are to make real progress we must - together from this
meeting room this evening and then from countless other
centres of concern and endeavour, go out into this country and
other countries and show people and politicians alike everywhere
why it is morally and practically imperative that we not only
declare but fight and win a war against poverty; why we must not
only pass resolutions and make demands but move urgently to remove
injustice; why lives in the poorest countries depend upon converting,
in the richest countries, apathy to engagement, sympathy to campaigning,
half hearted concern to wholly committed action.
In short we must share the inspiration we have of the power of
the dream of a better world and why it is now more urgent
than ever that people everywhere are awakened to the duties we
owe to people elsewhere whose hopes for life itself depend upon
our help, duties not just to people who are neighbours but to
people who are strangers.
So that even when we know that our sense of empathy diminishes
as we move outwards from the immediate, face to face, person to
person relationships of family outwards to neighbourhood to country
to half a world away, we still feel and ought to feel however
distantly the pain of others - and why it is right to believe
in something bigger than ourselves, bigger even than our own community
as a wide as the world itself.
It has been written that, 'if we answer the question why we can
handle the question how'.
And this evening I am going to put forward three propositions:
* that our dependence upon each other should awaken our conscience
to the needs not just of neighbours but of strangers;
* more than that, that our moral sense should impel us to act
out of duty and not just self interest;
* and that the claims of justice are not at odds with the liberties
of each individual but a modern expression of them that ensures
the dignity of all - and there is such a thing as a moral universe.
First, does not Martin Luther King show
our responsibilities to strangers, to people we have never met
and who will never know our names, when he describes each of us
as strands in an inescapable network of mutuality, together woven
into a single garment of destiny? Indeed just as the industrialisation
of the eighteenth century opened people up to a society which
lay beyond family and village and asked individuals who never
met each other to understand the needs of all throughout their
own country, so too the globalisation we are witnessing asks us
to open our minds to the plight and the pain of millions we will
never meet and are continents away but upon whom, as a result
of the international division of labour, we depend upon for our
food, our clothes, our livelihoods, our security.
I recalled a poem in my Labour conference speech:
'It is the hands of others who grow the food we eat, who sew the
clothes we wear, who build the houses we inhabit; it is the hands
of others who tend us when we're sick and lift us up when we fall;
it is the hands of others who bring us into the world and who
lower us into the earth' When I talked of the hands of others,
I meant our dependence upon each other the nurse, the builder,
the farm worker, the seamstress - not just in our own country
but across the earth. We are in an era of global interdependence,
relying each upon the other a world society of shared needs,
common interests, mutual responsibilities, linked densities, our
international solidarity.
And since September 11th there is an even more immediate reason
for emphasising our interdependence and solidarity. Now more than
ever we rely on each other not just for our sustenance but for
our safety and security.
Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, states: 'What poverty does
do is breed frustration and resentment which ideological entrepreneurs
can turn into support for terrorism in countries that lack the
political rights, the institutions, necessary to guard the society
from terrorists. Countries that are lacking basic freedoms. So
we can't win the war on terrorism unless we get at the roots of
poverty, which are social and political as well as economic in
nature'.
And President Bush said on the eve of the Financing for Development
Conference in Monterrey: 'Poverty doesn't cause terrorism. Being
poor doesn't make you a murderer. Most of the plotters of September
11th were raised in comfort. Yet persistent poverty and oppression
can lead to hopelessness and despair. And when governments fail
to meet the most basic needs of their people, these failed states
can become havens for terror. In Afghanistan, persistent poverty
and war and chaos created conditions that allowed a terrorist
regime to seize power. And in many other states around the world,
poverty prevents governments from controlling their borders, policing
their territory, and enforcing their laws. Development provides
the resources to build hope and prosperity, and security'
So does not everything that we witness across the world today
from discussing global trade to dealing with global terrorism
symbolise just how closely and irrevocably bound together are
the fortunes of the richest persons in the richest country to
the fate of the poorest persons in the poorest country of the
world even when they are strangers and have never met, and that
an injury to one must be seen as an injury to all?
But is not what impels us to act far more than this enlightened
self-interest?
Ought we not to take our case for a war against poverty to its
next stage - from economics to morality, from enlightened self
interest that emphasises our dependence each upon the other to
the true justice that summons us to do our duty - and to see that
every death from hunger and disease is as if it is a death in
the family?
For is there not some impulse even greater than the recognition
of our interdependence that moves human beings even in the most
comfortable places to empathy and to anger at the injustice and
inhumanity that blights the lives not just of neighbours but of
strangers in so many places at so high a cost?
It is not something greater, more noble, more demanding than just
our shared interests that propels us to demand action against
deprivation and despair on behalf of strangers as well as neighbours
- and is it not our shared values?
It is my belief that even if we are strangers in many ways, dispersed
by geography, diverse because of race, differentiated by wealth
and income, divided by partisan beliefs and ideology, even as
we are different diverse and often divided, we are not and we
cannot be moral strangers for there is a shared moral sense common
to us all:
* Call it as Lincoln did - the better angels of our nature;
* Call it as Winstanley did - the light in man;
* Call it as Adam Smith did - the moral sentiment;
* Call it benevolence, as the Victorians did; virtue; the claim
of justice; doing one's duty.
* Or call it as Pope Paul VI did 'The good of each and all'
It is precisely because we believe, in
that moral sense, that we have obligations to others beyond our
front doors and garden gates, responsibilities to others beyond
the city wall, duties to others beyond our national borders as
part of one moral universe - precisely because we have a sense
of what is just and what is fair - that we are called to answer
the hunger of the hungry, the needs of the needy the suffering
of the sick whoever and wherever they are bound together by the
duties we feel we owe each other. We cannot be fully human unless
we care about the dignity of every human being.
* Christians say: do to others what you would have them do to
you.
* Jews say: what is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man.
* Buddhists say: hurt not others in ways that you yourself would
find hurtful.
* Muslims say: no one of you is a believer until he desires for
his brother that which he desires for himself.
* Sikhs say: treat others as you would be treated yourself.
* Hindus say: this is the sum of duty: do not do to others what
would cause pain if done to you.
Faiths that reveal truths not to be found
in economic textbooks or political theory - beliefs now held by
people of all faiths and none - that emphasise our duty to strangers,
our concern for the outsider, the hand of friendship across continents,
that say I am my brother's keeper, that we don't only want injustice
not to happen to us, we don't want injustice to happen to anyone.
Indeed the golden rule runs through every great religion - or
what the Bible calls righteousness or what you and I might call
justice - and the words of Gandhi reinforce this golden rule:
'Whenever you are in doubt apply the following test. Recall the
face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have
seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to
be of any use to him [her]. Then, he said, you will find your
doubts melt away.'
So we are not - morally - speaking in tongues. And while there
are many voices from many parts and many places, expressed in
many languages and many religious faiths, we can and must think
of ourselves coming together as a resounding chorus singing the
same tune - and as a choir achieving a harmony which can move
the world.
So our interdependence leads us to conclude that when some are
poor, our whole society is impoverished. And our moral sense leads
us to conclude, as we have been told, that when there is an injustice
anywhere, it is a threat to justice everywhere. But can we not
also say and this is my third point - that, even when we
are talking about the needs of strangers, the claims of justice
that we should do our duty to ensure the dignity of every
individual - are now more powerful than ever? It is because the
dignity of the individual is at the heart of our concerns about
human beings, that those claims of justice are not as many
once argued - at odds with the requirement for liberty but are
essential for the realisation of liberty in the modern world.
In her recent book Gertrude Himmelfaarb shows that, when the 17th
and 18th centuries brought a revolt against outmoded forms of
hierarchy, there was understandably a preoccupation not with justice
or duty but with liberty. In 1789 'liberty' literally came before
'equality' and 'fraternity'. The call for freedom from outmoded
forms of hierarchical obligations was then the only path to ending
the power of absolute monarchs and repealing old mercantilist
laws.
But although the great Enlightenment philosophers marched under
the banner of liberty, rightly wishing to prevent any ruler invading
the freedom of the citizen, a closer reading of these writers
shows that, for them, the march of individual freedoms did not
release people from their obligations to their fellow citizens
and fulfilling the duties they owed to each other. For them liberty
was not at odds with justice or duty but liberty and duty advanced
together.
One of the greatest tribunes of liberty, John Stuart Mill, stated
categorically that 'there are many positive acts to the benefit
of others which anyone may rightfully be obliged to perform'.
And Rousseau wrote that 'as soon as men ceased to consider public
service as the principle duty of citizens we may pronounce the
state to be on the verge of ruin'.
And as Adam Smith - often wrongly seen
as the patron of free market capitalism without a conscience -
put it: the philosophy of 'all for ourselves and nothing for other
people' was a 'vile maxim'. 'Perfection of human nature was to
feel much for others and little for ourselves, to restrain our
selfish and indulge benevolent affections'. And in that spirit
and as he died Smith, not just the writer about the 'invisible
hand' but about the 'helping hand', was writing a new chapter
for his 'Theory of Moral Sentiments' entitled 'On the Corruption
of our Moral Sentiments' which is occasioned by 'the disposition
to admire the rich and great and to despise or neglect persons
of poor and mean condition'.
So the great apostle of freedom believed passionately in justice
and in duty to others and saw no contradiction in saying so. And
in our century this should be our focus. We should be asking not
just what rights you can enforce on others but asking what duties
we can discharge for others.
Gordon Brown with Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor at the Pope Paul VI memorial lecture Selbourne says duties without rights makes people slaves but rights without duties makes them strangers.
Moral strangers demand rights without
duties.
Moral neighbours say that every time one person's dignity is diminished
or taken away through no fault of their own it is an offence against
justice.
And if the dignity of a child or adult is diminished by poverty,
or debt, or unfair trade, we are all diminished.
Enlightened self interest may lead us to propose a contract between
rich and poor founded upon our mutual responsibilities because
of our interdependence. But it is our strong sense of what is
just that demands a covenant between rich and poor founded on
our moral responsibility to each other that even if it was
not in our narrow self interest to do so it would still be right
for every citizen to do ones duty and meet the needs, and enhance
the dignity, of strangers.
My father used to tell me we can all leave
our mark for good or ill and he quoted Martin Luther King
saying everyone from the poorest to the richest can be great because
everyone can serve.
That all of us, no matter how weak or frail, or at times inadequate,
can make a difference for good is emphasised by a story told by
Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writing of the film 'About Schmidt'.
Schmidt played by Jack Nicholson - describes a futile life
of family estrangement ending in an equally meaningless retirement
endured with an overriding sense of failure.
In the film Schmidt says: 'I know we're all pretty small in the
big scheme of things what in the world is better because of me?
I am weak and I am a failure there's just no getting around itsoon
I will die maybe in twenty years, maybe tomorrow, it doesn't matter
when everyone who knew me dies too, it will be as though I never
even existed what difference has my life made to anyone? None
that I can think of none at all.
But then he receives a letter from the teacher of a six year old
in Tanzania whom in a small charitable gesture Schmidt has been
paying for schooling and health care. The young boy cannot yet
write, the teacher says, but he has sent Schmidt a drawing instead.
It shows two little line figures, one large and one small, obviously
the boy and Schmidt. And the drawing shows them holding hands
together as the sun shines down upon their friendship.
And so the film ends with Jack Nicholson's character slowly grasping
that he has done one good deed in his life for a stranger
a young child far away whom he has never met.
The duty to others done by Schmidt giving his life meaning.
Proving that one generous act can redeem a life.
So we do live in one interdependent world.
We are indeed part of one moral universe.
Even the meanest of us possesses a moral sense.
What really matters is the compassion we show to the weak.
And you value your society not for its wealth and power over others
but by how it can empower the poor and powerless.
Now that moral sense may not, be 'a strong
beacon light radiating outward at all times to illuminate in sharp
outline all it touches' as James Q Wilson describes 'The Moral
Sense' so brilliantly. Rather the moral sense is like 'a small
candle flame flickering and spluttering in the strong winds of
passion and power, greed and ideology'. As Wilson says 'brought
close to the heart and cupped in ones hand it dispels the darkness
and warms the soul'. And even when it burns as a flicker it is
still a flame and a flame that can never be extinguished.
So we do not wipe out the debt of the poorest countries simply
because these debts are not easily paid.
We do so because people weighed down by the burden of debts imposed
by the last generation on this cannot even begin to build for
the next generation.
To insist on the payment of these debts offends human dignity
- and is therefore unjust.
What is morally wrong cannot be economically right.
In the words of Isaiah we must 'undo the heavy burdens and
let the oppressed go free'.
So let me set out the agenda that flows from our moral sense.
In 1997 just one country was going to receive debt relief.
Now 27 countries are benefiting with $70 billion dollars of unpayable
debt being written off.
And it is thanks to your campaigning on debt relief that:
* with debt relief in Uganda, 4 million more children now go to
primary school;
* with debt relief in Tanzania, 31,000 new classrooms have been
built and 18,000 new teachers recruited;
* with debt relief in Mozambique, half a million children are
now being vaccinated against tetanus, whopping cough and diphtheria.
But like me, I know you are less interested
in what we've done than in what is still to do. And when many
countries are still being forced to choose between servicing their
debts and making the investments in health, education and infrastructure
that would allow them to achieve the Millennium Development Goals,
we know we must do more. That is why in 2005 we must break new
ground, go much further than we have gone before, and why, having
heard the proposals you put to us, we are proposing a new set
of principles to govern the next stage in debt relief. First,
that the richest countries match bilateral debt relief of up to
100 per cent with multilateral debt relief of up to 100 per cent
so that all debts are covered. Second, that the cancellation of
debts owed to the International Monetary Fund should be financed
by using IMF gold. Third, that instead of running down the resources
available internationally for development donor countries make
a unique declaration that they will cover their share of the World
Bank and the African Development Bank's debts on behalf of eligible
developing countries.
And so that is why Britain has announced that we will relieve
those countries still under the burden of this debt to these banks
by unilaterally paying our share - 10 per cent - of payments to
the World Bank and African Development Bank as we urge other countries
to do so.
Next, to put our duties to each other at the centre of policy,
we also insist on a progressive approach to trade.
And fair trade is not just about the financial gains, its also
about giving people dignity - enabling people to stand on their
own two feet and using trade is a springboard out of poverty.
You know the damage that rich countries protectionism has done
to entrench the poverty of the poorest countries.
We spend as much subsidising agriculture in the European Union
as the whole income of all the 689 million people in Sub Saharan
Africa taken together.
The money that the US spends just in subsidising 25,000 cotton
farmers dwarfs the total income of Burkino Faso where 2 million
people are dependent on cotton for their livelihoods.
And for every dollar given to poor countries in aid, two dollars
are lost because of unfair trade.
So 2005 is the time to send a signal and to agree a new policy.
First, it is time for the richest countries to agree to end the
hypocrisy of developed country protectionism by opening our markets,
removing trade-distorting subsidies and in particular, doing more
to urgently tackle the scandal and waste of the Common Agricultural
Policy shows we believe in fair trade.
Second, it is time to move beyond the old Washington consensus
of the 1980s and recognise that while bringing down unjust tariffs
and barriers can make a difference, developing countries must
also be allowed to carefully design and sequence trade reform
into their own Poverty Reduction Strategies.
And third, because it is not enough to say 'you're on your own,
simply compete' we have to say 'we will help you build the capacity
you need to trade' - not just opening the door but helping you
gain the strength to cross the threshold. We have to recognise
that developing countries will need additional resources from
the richest countries both to build the economic and infrastructure
- capacity they need to take advantage of trading opportunities
- and to prevent their most vulnerable people from falling further
into poverty.
And our discussion of debt relief and trade leads to the essential
challenge of 2005, that our new deal with the developing countries
must involve a transfer of resources.
Not aid as compensation for being poor but aid as investment in
the future. And so like debt and trade this is about enhancing
the dignity and potential of each individual.
Since the 1980s aid to Africa, which was $33 per person ten years
ago, had halved to just $19 per person now. So we need a new financing
programme.
Thanks to your campaigning, we are the first UK Government to
be able to announce a timetable for 0.7 per cent. And over the
next year we plan to ask other countries to join us and nine others
in becoming countries which have set a timetable towards 0.7.
But the truth is that the scale of the resources needed immediately
to tackle disease, illiteracy and global poverty is far beyond
what traditional funding can offer today.
That is why the UK Government as part of the financing package
to reach the Millennium Development Goals has put forward its
proposal for stable, predictable, long-term funds frontloaded
to tackle today's problems of poverty, disease and illiteracy
through the bold initiative of a new global finance facility.
The International Finance Facility is in the tradition of the
Marshall Plan of 1948, when to finance the development of a ravaged
post war Europe, the richest country in the world - the USA -
agreed to transfer one per cent of their national income each
and every year for four years a transfer in total of the
equivalent in today's money of $75 billion a year.
And it is modelled on the founding principles
of the World Bank in 1945 where nations provided resources to
an international institution that then borrowed on the international
capital markets. Let me explain what the IFF could achieve for
the world's poor.
The IFF is founded upon long-term, binding donor commitments from
the richest countries like ourselves.
It builds upon the additional $16 billion dollars already pledged
at Monterrey.
And on the basis of these commitments and more it leverages in
additional money from the international capital markets to raise
the amount of development aid for the years to 2015.
By locking in commitments from a wide range of donors, the IFF
would enable us to front load aid for investment in development,
enabling a critical mass of predictable, stable and coordinated
aid as investment to be deployed over the next few years when
it will have the most impact in achieving the Millennium Development
Goals - saving lives today that would otherwise be lost.
The IFF would enable us to invest simultaneously across sectors
in education and health, trade capacity and economic development
- so that instead of having to choose between urgent emergency
disaster relief and long term investment the impact of extra resources
in one area reinforces the investment in another.
And the IFF will allow us to attack the root causes of poverty
not just the symptoms - focusing on developing the capacity and
the dignity people need to help themselves.
And let me just explain the scale of what I am proposing.
In all our campaigns taken together we have managed to raise international
aid from 50 billion dollars a year to 60 billion.
Our proposal is to raise development aid immediately not from
60 billion to 65 billion or even 70 billion but effectively a
doubling of aid to over 100 billion dollars per year.
With one bold stroke: to double development aid to halve poverty.
An extra 50 billion that will allow us to attack the root causes
of poverty not just the symptoms, and to meet the Millennium Development
Goals.
The aim of the International Finance Facility is to bridge the
gap between promises and reality.
Between hopes raised and hopes dashed.
Between an opportunity seized and an opportunity squandered.
Of course we will continue to look at
other means - international taxes, more resources direct to development
banks, the IMF and the World Bank but the practical benefits of
the IFF are:
* we provide the support poor countries need immediately to invest
in infrastructure, education and health systems, and economic
development so they can benefit from access to our markets;
* we provide grants to help ensure a sustainable exit from debt;
* we make primary schooling for all not just a distant dream but
a practical reality - meeting these needs and rights now and not
deferring them to an uncertain future;
* and we meet our global goals of cutting infant mortality and
maternal mortality, eliminating malaria and TB and treating millions
more people who are suffering from HIV/AIDS.
I thank the Holy See and the growing number
of countries who have indicated support for the IFF including,
of the G7, France and last week Italy.
And let me give an example of what we can do today and now if
we work together.
Let me give an illustration of what - because of the IFF model
- is already possible.
The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation who have
immunised over the last five years not a few children but a total
of 50 million children round the world - is interested in applying
the principles of the IFF to the immunisation sector - donors
making long term commitments that can be securitised in order
to frontload the funding available to tackle disease.
If, by these means, GAVI could increase the funding for its immunisation
programme by an additional $4 billion over ten years, then it
would be possible that their work could save the lives of an additional
5 million people between now and 2015.
So in one fund, with one initiative, we can glimpse the possibilities
open to us if we act together. If we could do the same for health,
for schools, for debt, for the capacity to trade, for research
and advance purchasing of drugs to cure malaria and HIV/AIDS,
think of the better world we can achieve.
So with next year 2005 the year of the UK's G8 Presidency,
the push for G8 progress starts now.
You have set a challenge for 2005, with 2005 a make or break year
for development, a moment of opportunity for development and debt
relief, a challenge Tony Blair, Hilary Benn and I know we must,
for the sake of the world's poorest, not squander but must seize.
An opportunity to make a breakthrough on debt relief and development,
on tackling disease and on delivering the Doha development round
on trade.
We must rise to the challenge and we accept that we will be judged
by what we achieve.
So the task for Government now is to replace talk by action, initiatives
by results and rise to the challenge - pledging to strive for
urgent progress both on the priorities of finance for development
and trade. And as you take forward your 2005 campaigns, I know
you will hold us accountable as you have done so far, that you
will challenge us, be the conscience of the world, be the voice
that guides as at this crucial crossroads.
Toni Morrison said that 'courage is to recognise and identify
evil but never fear or stand in awe of it'.
And let that be our inspiration as we
think of Africa.
30,000 children will die needlessly today.
If this happened in our country we would act now immediately together.
We would indeed conclude it should never be allowed to happen
anywhere.
Yet today 30,000 children will die.
Each child a unique personality.
Each child precious.
Each one loved, almost every one who could live if the medicines
and treatments available here were available there.
But each one of those 30,000 children will struggle for breath
- and for life - and tragically and painfully lose that fight.
And I know what you are thinking.
If I could this day help one single child who might otherwise
die live.
If I could today and tonight prevent one avoidable death.
If I could prevent a single child from needless suffering.
If I could turn the despair of a mother worried about her child
from desolation to hope.
Then it would make everything I do worthwhile.
But if we could together by our actions help thousands, hundreds
of thousands and millions.
And if we could with all the power at our command, working together,
collectively change the common sense of the age so that people
saw that poverty was preventable, should be prevented and then
had to be prevented, so that we met the Millennium development
Goals not in 2150 but in 2015, then all else we do in our lives
would pale into insignificance and every effort would be worth
it.
As Bono has said It's not enough to describe Everest. We
have to climb it. And it's not enough to picture the New Jerusalem.
We must build it.
But when people say debt relief, trade justice and finance for
health and education is an impossible dream, I say:
* people thought the original plans for the World Bank were the
work of dreamers;
* people thought that the Marshall Plan unattainable;
* even in 1997 when we came to power people thought debt relief
was an impossible aspiration and yet already with your support
we are wiping out up to $100 billion dollars of debt;
* people thought no more countries would sign up to a timetable
for 0.7 per cent in Overseas Development Aid and yet year this
year alone five countries have done so.
So when the need is even more urgent and
our responsibilities even more clear; and even when the path ahead
difficult hard and long, let us not lose hope but have the courage
in our shared resolve to find the will to act.
Let us hear the words of Isaiah 'Though you were wearied by the
length of your way, you did not say it was hopeless - you found
new life in your strength'.
And let us answer with Isaiah also as our motto for 2005: that
we shall indeed 'renew our strength, rise up with wings as eagles,
walk and not faint, run and not be weary'.
A few weeks ago I cited a famous saying of more than one hundred
years old - that the arc of the moral universe is long but it
does bend towards justice. This was not an appeal to some iron
law of history but to remind people that by our own actions we
can and do change the world for good.
And I believe that:
* with the scale of the challenge revealed;
* with the growth of public pressure you have started in Britain
and in other countries;
* and if there is a determination among world leaders to be bold;
building upon our moral sense, the arc of the moral universe while indeed long will bend towards justice in the months and years to come.
© Independent Catholic
News 2004
Contact Independent
Catholic News
tel/fax: +44 (0)20 7267 3616 or email
Homepage • Saint
of the day • Chaplain •
Latest news • Archive • Listings • Pictures •