Two years on from Make Poverty History and Live 8, despite important and life-saving progress, the majority of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people continue to face the challenges of extreme poverty, conflict and human rights abuses. All of this in a world which has the ability to end it.
It is clear that the struggle against these challenges will be a marathon, not a sprint. The new prime minister’s pragmatic but deeply optimistic comment that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend towards justice’, aptly illustrates the scope of the challenge facing him as he takes office. Oxfam would urge him to stick with this optimism and hope for progress: lives depend on it.
There is cause for hope. Increased aid and debt relief since 2005 has meant that the Tanzanian government has been able to make primary school free. The Global Fund to fight HIV and AIDS, TB and Malaria has been able to distribute over 18 million mosquito nets to protect families from malaria.
Here in Britain, there has been a discernible shift in the attitudes and beliefs of the public. Over half a million people raised their ‘voice against poverty’ in the run up to this year’s G8 Summit in Germany, adding to the millions who wore a white band in 2005. Tens of thousands have said ‘I count’ as part of the Stop Climate Chaos campaign. And in a recent Oxfam poll, despite Iraq, over two-thirds of British people still believe that that the UK should not be afraid to intervene to stop mass killings and genocide. Indeed, how many would have predicted even a few years ago that the Conservative party would now be putting global poverty high up its list of challenges?
This can only be sustained by continued leadership. Moral courage from our political leaders can create a ‘virtuous circle’, which generates further support for those aims. We believe that the new prime minister can sustain and deepen that ‘virtuous circle’ by showing courage in his first 100 days. He should put the needs of the poorest at the centre of the government’s climate change policy and he should establish a just foreign policy that prioritises the protection of people threatened by genocide, conflict and human rights abuses. While these three key principles should frame Britain’s international agenda for the duration of this parliament, they also present a number of immediate opportunities.
The UK must keep its aid promises and lead international efforts to get access to health and education for all. This can be achieved in two ways: first, by definitively committing to our pledge to deliver 0.7 per cent of national income as aid by 2012-13, as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review; and second, by launching a worldwide campaign to deliver access to health and education for all, especially women and children. Oxfam estimates that achieving universal access to health services will require the recruitment of an extra 4.25 million health workers, $21bn in new financing and a global body to coordinate action on health service strengthening. Continued effort will also be needed to persuade others to meet the immediate $13bn gap in funding for the ‘Education For All’ initiative.
At the same time, Brown must take large steps to tackle climate change and help the poorest countries to adapt. The current public concern about climate change is reflective of the same moral urgency and desire for justice, widened and deepened because of the likely impacts on Britain and future generations. The new prime minister should seize this unique coherence of domestic and international concern, and commit the UK to making its full share of efforts to tackle climate change. Britain must also provide its fair share of funding – estimated at $2.65bn per year – to enable poor countries to cope with the effects of climate change, on top of existing aid for poverty reduction.
It is also important that Brown pushes Europe to make trade fair for poor countries. Trade that is fair still provides the potential for some of the world’s poorest countries to tackle poverty. However, that aim will not be achieved by the current state of world trade talks and by attempts to push through trade deals that do not have the interests of poor countries at their heart. The new prime minister should convene an emergency session of like-minded governments across Europe to ensure that WTO and other negotiations deliver an end to the dumping of surplus agricultural produce, stop prising open developing country markets and roll back patent rules that deny poor people access to affordable medicines.
Regarding trade deals between Europe and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, Brown should declare, and ask each EU member state to do likewise, that the UK will not impose higher tariffs on 1 January 2008 and that exports will continue until fair agreements for the poor are reached.
Furthermore, Brown must set a just and fair direction for UK foreign policy. This could be achieved in a number of ways. First by making the tackling of the crisis in Darfur and Chad a top and public priority for UK foreign policy, and ensuring the delivery of a cross-governmental strategy to implement the UN agreed ‘Responsibility to Protect’. Second by re-establishing direct assistance to the Palestinian Authority to tackle the immediate humanitarian crisis, as well as engaging all parties in a re-energised Middle East peace process with economic justice at its heart. Third, by taking action on arms by announcing that the UK will ban the use of all cluster bombs by 2008 and personally driving forward the efforts to deliver an international arms trade treaty by 2010.
Finally, the new prime minister should launch a drive to make British people even more responsible global citizens. He should ensure that education for global citizenship in our schools is fully implemented as a core part of the education curriculum by announcing the immediate allocation of extra resources (at least an extra £5m in England alone) for training and resourcing teachers, and changing inspection and assessment regimes. The current public enthusiasm for fair trade and ethical consumerism should be met by delivering £10m for scaling up the fair trade sector and by announcing a review of government guidelines on public procurement to create a more enabling environment for ethical trading.
To deliver this agenda will require deep resolve and Brown should listen closely to the message of his hero Robert Kennedy, who in saying, ‘It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped’ delivered a vision of hope in courage and individual leadership to overcome immense challenges. And we should all take heed of what his brother JFK cautioned in his inaugural address: ‘All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration… But let us begin.’