Gordon Brown speaks at St Paul's Cathedral

Prime Minster Gordon Brown addressed a gathering of religious leaders at St Paul's Cathedral yesterday.

During his speech the Prime Minister said "we must never, ever forget our obligations to the poor," and that St Paul's was the most appropriate place to set out his vision for the upcoming G20 summit.

Mr Brown called for the "values that we celebrate in everyday life" to be brought to the financial markets.

"I believe that unsupervised globalisation of our financial markets did not only cross national boundaries, it crossed moral boundaries too," he said.

Mr Brown also appealed to Sikhs, Jews and Muslims to look out for the poor.

The Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Richard Chartres said: "I think it's very interesting that in advance of the G20, the prime minister has chosen to speak at St Pauls, because it's really his initiative, to come here and set the financial turbulence in a moral and spiritual context.

"We are starting to see that without a coalition of the spiritual forces in the world we are not going to be able to securely build the moral architecture if the free market is going to flourish. If we are to build a more sustainable world order the other side of this financial turbulence it's got to be something that's based very firmly on human flourishing."

Earlier, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Right Revd Rowan Williams, also called for the world's richest nations to put the needs of the poorest at the top of their agenda and to meet the UN's eight millennium development goals by 2015.