International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood (LD)]

My Lords, I am proud of the fact that both the authors of the Bill, in the other place and here, are my constituency successors—Michael Moore in the House of Commons and my noble friend Lord Purvis in the Scottish Parliament. Perhaps there is something about the air in the Scottish Borders that conveys a sense of proportion. I am proud because during all the time when I was the MP there, particularly during the three elections that I was party leader, I emphasised the target of 0.7% and insisted that it went into the party manifesto. However, I simply articulated it, whereas my colleagues have had the satisfaction of not only seeing it happen but now entrenching it in legislation, and I fully support that.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to speak at a dinner in south-east London to raise money for the Ebola crisis. It was a very successful event that raised £30,000. It was in the hall of a mosque. The proceedings began with an imam reading some verses from the Koran, which of course I did not understand. However, when someone got up and gave a translation of it, I was very struck by the similarity between that passage from the Koran and the passage with which we are all familiar from St Matthew’s Gospel, which I was brought up on as a son of the manse, particularly during my father’s time in Kenya. We remember how people asked:

“Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?”,

and received the answer:

“Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”.

The point that I want to make at the start of the Bill is that there is a moral imperative that we are fulfilling today. The verses from the Koran that were read on that occasion were chapter 76, verses 9 and 10:

“And they feed, for love of Him, the poor, the orphan, and the prisoner, Saying, ‘We feed you for Allah’s pleasure only’”.

It is astonishing that, in a world where there is so much conflict between Christian and Muslim in different areas, these passages are the same in the holy books of both religions.

I stress again that there is a moral imperative, but there is also the imperative of enlightened self-interest. It cannot be right that so many people are fleeing from poverty and conflict in different parts of the world to Europe, and we must try to put that right. There is therefore self-interest in ensuring that this target is reached. A year or so ago my noble friend Lord Chidgey and I were in Malawi, working with the DfID representatives there, and we were full of admiration for what they were doing. I know that those same people will be dealing with the flood crisis that has hit that poor country so dramatically in this past week.

Yet, in some places, I have to say that DfID is sometimes accused of being interested only in rather grandiose projects—I have written to the Minister on the subject before. I was very struck by the invention of the community cooker in the Kibera slum in Nairobi; it is not photogenic but it is a wonderful community project that deserves support, yet it has not been given support by DfID. I was delighted to get an e-mail from Nairobi only yesterday saying that, where DfID had failed, the Prince’s Trust had moved in to support a project that involves the burning of rubbish and the provision of hot water and cooking facilities in the shanty towns of that great city.

We all have our own recollections and experience of seeing people working on the ground in poor countries. My own abiding memory is of talking with a woman doctor who was alone in a very poorly equipped hospital in the north of Malawi some years ago. We came to a young boy lying in a cot with a very swollen head, and she said to me, “I’m going to have to operate on this boy tomorrow, and I’ve never done anything like it”. I said, “How do you manage?”. She said, “I phoned a colleague at home who’s a specialist and they told me what I should be doing, but I’m just hoping it will go all right”. The great thing about the Bill is that it sends a message of support and comfort to all those people who work so diligently in most parts of the world, and that is another reason why I think we should support it.