International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Baroness Flather Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Flather (CB)]

My Lords, this is an unusual debate, because a lot of the speeches have filled me with a warm glow—we do not get that very often. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed. He made a wonderful speech, which made clear what we were aiming for. I felt proud, and many noble Lords have already said that they felt proud today. It is a cause for pride that we are the only country among the G8 countries that has accepted this 0.7% target for aid, and the only one that has met it. I think that we need to be proud.

There has been some talk about tying ourselves up, but surely every Act of Parliament ties Parliament up in some way—and, if we do not like it, another time we can change it. I thought that that was normal practice. It does not mean that you do not do something because you are tying the future of the country; you are not tying the country's future because, if it is not working and if we get very poor, no doubt we will come here again and say, “We can’t do it”. So let us not go down that route at all.

I shall say a very few things. First, people have said that aid should be spent properly. Well, naturally it should be spent properly—and, if it is not spent properly, we should change the people who are in charge. This is almost not necessary to say, that aid should be properly directed and targeted and spent. That goes without saying.

Quite a lot of things are being said about India, which is my country of origin. I go there every year and I see what is going on. Yes, things have improved for some people. Even those who are not now starving are really not in a very good place. People who have, say, a salary of 10,000 or 12,000 rupees a month find it very difficult to keep a family because of inflation. So let us not get carried away and say that a huge number of people are doing very well. In fact, half of India is on the poverty line—and I do not know where people draw the poverty line, but in India it is pretty low.

When Christine Lagarde gave her Richard Dimbleby lecture, she said that Indian billionaires could wipe out India’s poverty just like that, if they wanted to. One of the most upsetting and hurtful things to me is that they do not give. India has now passed a law that 2% of net profits of a company must be put into corporate social responsibility. What is going to happen? A lot of Indian companies will create something, and then it will disappear or be for their own benefit. This has been going on for a long time. For tax reasons, they have created foundations from which they redraw the money for themselves. It is really appalling.

We have mentioned corruption—well, corruption is endemic in India and Africa. One of the biggest problems that they face is corruption, because nothing can get done if three-quarters or more of the people—everybody who has the opportunity—take something out. That is something to be watched. Something else that needs to be watched is the Commonwealth. We talk about it as if it was some kind of a dream, because it is not real. The two things that are most important are having no corruption and having rule of law. No country can have democracy or do well without the rule of law, and almost every country now has judges who are under the control of the Government. That is an extremely serious and worrying aspect and, if we can do anything about it, we should do it.

Quite a lot has been said about women, yet not enough. Women are half of the world’s population and they are certainly the poorest of the poor. Why? It is because men hold all that is going—they have control of money and over the bodies and lives of women. It is not as though the women are individual human beings, as we imagine. They are not; they are part of a man’s chattel. That has not changed, and we need to do far more than we are doing for women. And we need to do far more for that elephant in the room—I know that that is a cliché but it fits in this case—family planning. The world is drowning under the increase in population. However much aid we give, however is it going to meet the needs of the increasing population? Unless we do something about it, we are not going to reach any targets.

My Nigerian friend says that, since men are so lazy, if it had been only a little more difficult to create a baby, they would not have done it. But, unfortunately, it is ever so easy. They will have children and they are proud of it. They say, “I am father of 10 children”. “Do you ever feed them?” No, they do not feed them —they just create them.