Since last Friday I’ve been trying to work out what is more perverse: that our parliamentary procedures are so archaic that one MP anonymously shouting ‘object’ can kill a bill designed to protect poor countries from ‘debt vultures’, or that anyone would actually want to make use of it.
Sadly both are as unbelievable as they are true, and as well as demonstrating the nonsensical nature of our parliamentary system, they open up some real questions about the depth of support for international development among Conservative MPs and their stomach to tackle vested interests.
The debt relief (developing countries) bill was a private members bill put forward by Andrew Gwynne MP to prevent shady companies – often known as ‘vulture funds’ – from buying up a poor country’s debt at a knock-down price and taking the country to court to claim repayment at huge profit.
Most famously this occurred in Zambia, when offshore company Donegal Holdings bought for £3 million a 20-year old debt, which Zambia was in the process of clearing with Romania, then promptly claimed repayment of £55 million in the courts, eventually being awarded £15 million. Unbelievable, but not unique – Jubilee Debt Campaign estimate that there are about 40 such lawsuits in the most world’s indebted poor countries.
Now my reading of the Bible had the Good Samaritan helping the man who had been beaten and robbed, not shaking him down for any remaining pennies. Did anyone else read it differently ?
Perhaps some. As the bill came for its final reading before going to the Lords, three Conservative MPs got into a huddle. One – now thought to be Christopher Cope – shouted ‘object’, and in a parliamentary procedure as inexplicable as Black Rod’s tights, out went the bill and the potential protections it offered.
In short, a bill to protect the poorest countries from corporate exploitation – one supported by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Africa’s first female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf – was thrown out by an MP whose greatest contributions to social justice appear to have been leading the selling of social housing and seeking to abolish the minimum wage.
Chope may just be a rogue MP on a wrecking mission, but the bigger question is why he was allowed to do so by the party’s high command, whose official line was to support the bill. If you say you want to tackle poverty, you have to mean it. And if we are to believe the Conservatives have changed when it comes to development, we’re going to have see a lot better than this.
Steve Cockburn is an anti-poverty campaigner and member of Labour Campaign for International Development. For more information visit www.lcid.org.uk
To press Cameron for an answer, please sign the letter from secretary of state for international development, Douglas Alexander
For more on ‘vulture funds’ visit www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk
By their works shall you know them.
It’s only too believable for Tories to behave like this.
If the government had given parliamentary time to this bill, it would have been secure in the prospect of a discussion on the merits (if, that is, the House of Commons does any such thing….). But they did not. If the religion of socialism is the language of priorities (Nye Bevan) then we must assume that our movement regards the wacko ‘revenge for the miners’ notion for a bill that half-banned some sorts of hunting foxes, and increased the likelihood of a painful death for many foxes as far far more than 100 times as important than the launching of an unprovoked aggression against a country whose head of state had already offered to exile himself in order to prevent the war on which Blair and Bush were fanatically determined. For far more parliamentary time was spent on this piece of”class war” (turn in your grave, Karl Marx) than on reviewing the alleged need to ‘support’ the UN by flouting its procedures. (shades of Eden at Suez)…Destroying what infrastructure the 12 years’ sanctions had left, and putting to death as many Iraqis as the 500,000 Iraqi children Madeleine Allbright boasted of starving to death – if this is the sort of ‘internatinal development’ comrade Cockburn is seeking, then frankly Tory neglect would be far better for pooer coutnries than his malignant and triumphalist imperialism.
So Terry Daniels etc will be well pleased with Harriet Harman in her refusal to give government time to this measure…. can Progress exist without systematic double-standards-mongery? Do Tory propensities towards neglecting the Third World really do as much damage as wanton aggression….a specialism of the Labour government since 1997?