UN High-level Meetings in 2023

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) on securing the debate. I recognise his long-standing commitment to international development issues, universal healthcare and global justice, demonstrated in today’s debate, in his co-chairmanship of the all-party parliamentary group on global tuberculosis and in his work on other important issues.

The first debate that I led in Westminster Hall, in June 2015, was on the negotiation and implementation of the sustainable development goals. That debate reflected the general tone of consensus and optimism that there was at the time about the future in the UK and at a multilateral level. Progress had been made toward the millennium development goals; there was a sense of the kinds of intervention that were really making a difference to driving down poverty, improving water and food security and boosting access to health and education; and appropriate funding was starting to be leveraged, not least as a result of UK leadership and the cross-party consensus around meeting the ODA spending target of 0.7% of GNI. Eight years later, however, things are very different indeed.

The UN high-level meetings in September this year must focus minds and galvanise political will if we are to have any hope of meeting the SDGs or of reversing the decline that has begun to happen in some areas. As other hon. Members have said, the sequence of high-level meetings around the UN General Assembly in September indicates at the very least that there is a recognition by world Governments that more action is urgently needed to end tuberculosis, deliver universal healthcare and improve prevention, preparedness and response to pandemics. We have all just lived through one of the greatest global healthcare challenges of recent decades, and we are still living with the ongoing impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on our health services, on the ability of the international community to respond to such crises, and on our response to other diseases and health challenges.

As the points that have been made in this debate suggest, the spread of tuberculosis is perhaps the largest of those challenges, not least because it encapsulates so many aspects of the other two areas of focus for the high-level meetings. TB has overtaken covid to become, once again, the deadliest of all infectious diseases. That is, at least in part, a factor of the lack of access to basic healthcare and sanitary provision in so many parts of the world. The rise of drug-resistant TB raises the prospect of widespread infections, perhaps even to epidemic, pandemic or endemic proportions.

None of the solutions to these challenges is rocket science. If we were prepared to spend political and financial capital, we would be able to address the challenges and make more rapid progress towards all the sustainable development goals. Key interventions at a community level, ideally community-led, in developing countries and here at home can make some of the biggest impacts.

As the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) rightly says, access to water, sanitation and hygiene is a basic human right that ought to be respected. It is demonstrably effective in reducing the spread of disease and therefore reducing reliance on antibiotics and the growth of antimicrobial resistance in relation to TB and a range of other diseases. I fully endorse the report that she highlighted, and I congratulate all those involved in producing it.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

There has been a consensus in this debate that resources need to be directed at trying to prevent pandemics and get rid of as many diseases as we can. One of the proposals to be considered at the high-level talks is transferring some decision making—the declaration of pandemics, for instance—from nation states to the World Health Organisation. I think that that would be a huge loss of sovereignty and a mistake, particularly as the World Health Organisation is dominated by China and has a huge amount of funding from Bill Gates. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that transferring sovereignty to the World Health Organisation would be a mistake?

[Patrick Grady]

With the greatest respect to the hon. Member, I think that that is a point more usefully directed at the Minister, because it is the Government who represent the United Kingdom at the World Health Organisation. I am a believer in popular sovereignty; I would like Scotland to be an independent member of all those international, multilateral institutions, ensuring that the voice of the people of Scotland is heard in those negotiations. There has to be accountability within international mechanisms, and countries that sign up to international treaties ought to do so on the basis of consensus. They should be prepared to implement their commitments. If more Governments were living up to their commitments, perhaps we would not find ourselves in this position.

I understand that the issue that the hon. Member raises is of concern to a number of constituents; I have heard similar concerns myself. It is important that the Government are able to respond to those concerns, and that when international treaties are entered into, full transparency and accountability are built in.

There are interventions that we already know work, without having to reinvent the wheel: access to water and sanitation is one of them; food security is another. Driven by small and sustainable farmers, food security improves nutrition, which improves educational outcomes and boosts gender equality. That helps societies to grow and develop overall, and ultimately generates tax receipts that can be invested back into health and other social services. In all that, there are important lessons to be learned in the way that the world has sought to tackle other challenges, not least HIV/AIDS. Indeed, the ongoing fight against HIV should not be forgotten in these meetings.

At a higher level, investment in research and development and new technologies can help to combat and control the spread of disease. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) spoke about the work that institutions do in his constituency; similar work is going on at the University of Glasgow, and all the institutions work together on many of these issues. Regrettably, we still live in a world where more money is invested in treating hay fever and male pattern baldness—I have some experience of both—than the diseases that affect the poorest and most vulnerable around the world. Global Justice Now points out that between 1945 and 1965, when TB was a significant problem in western countries such as ours, eight different anti-TB drugs were discovered, but once TB was no longer a significant problem in the global north, development stalled, and no new anti-TB drugs were developed between 1965 and 2012. Even today, just 4% of newly approved pharmaceutical products are for neglected diseases that affect low and middle-income countries. That has to start to change, and perhaps there is also a role in that for the WHO and other multilateral organisations.

From today’s contributions, it is clear that none of the actions or outcomes needed from the high-level meetings is particularly novel or surprising. Various Members have made a good case for the levels of funding that are needed, and the Government, rather than yawning, need to listen to them. There was a habit, especially among the Government’s predecessors, to announce money—£100 million for this, £1 billion for that—but those were just nice round figures. United Nations agencies and international stakeholders have analysed what is actually needed to meet the research goals, meet the delivery objectives and set targets for the amounts to be funded. That is what the Government ought to focus on. The question at all these meetings is whether world leaders will step up; for us here today, that means whether the UK Government are prepared to step up.

Of course, the Government would be stepping up, regrettably, from a lower standing than back in 2015, when the SDGs were first negotiated. Indeed, the UK helped to lead the negotiation process, but it has now taken a back seat. By the admission of the Minister for Development, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), the UK is no longer the development superpower that it used to be, and it is trying to stretch a significantly reduced aid budget that has been further diminished by the smash-and-grab raid on FCDO resources perpetrated by the Home Office to fund its failing and unlawful anti-asylum policies.

That is the first big and clear ask for the Minister today: the Government simply need to put more money into the system and get back on track to 0.7% as quickly as possible. Within that, they have to prioritise the most effective interventions. They have to recognise the importance of the multilateral system and the effectiveness of initiatives such as Gavi and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, especially where work is delivered at a community level and with community empowerment and involvement in decision making. The Government have to be committed to a genuinely universal rights-based approach to the provision of healthcare and pandemic preparedness. Flexibility has to be built into trade and intellectual property, for example, so that profit never comes before people and the planet. There must also be a recognition of digital rights, privacy and the security of individuals’ data. In all of that, there has to be political leadership. Like every other Member who has spoken today, I would be grateful if the Minister could suggest who the Government will send to the meetings. Will it be a Secretary of State, or at the very least the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield, who speaks on development issues in Cabinet?

Finally, I am always encouraged by the number of constituents who raise global justice, access to healthcare, tackling poverty and the sustainable development goals with me. People in Glasgow North and across Scotland want to play their part in building a world where everyone has the opportunity to flourish free from hunger and disease, and right now they do not see the UK Government stepping up to help to make that vision a reality. That is why more and more of them are realising that an independent Scotland would have its own representation at these high-level meetings, and that it could set 0.7% as a floor, not a ceiling, for aid spending. Perhaps they will conclude that the best way for Scotland to play its part will be to take its own place as an independent member of a community of nations.