Post-2015 Development Agenda

Debate between Hugh Bayley and Richard Graham

Thursday 21st March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Hugh Bayley]

I agree strongly. If we can win the hearts and minds of young people, we have a future on our side. The bold but right decision made by the Prime Minister and Government to raise our aid spending to 0.7% this year gives the Prime Minister great moral authority when he is involved in discussions with leaders of other countries. If the UK commits increased support to the world’s poor, we are in a position to argue that others should do so as well.

I want the Prime Minister to use that moral authority in the same way that Tony Blair and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), the former Prime Ministers, used their authority. They decided to lead internationally the argument for debt write-offs, to increase aid substantially from 0.29% to 0.53% and to win commitments from other global leaders to do more for the world’s poor. It is particularly important for the Prime Minister to use that moral persuasion in his capacity as co-chair of the United Nations Secretary-General’s high-level panel, and in the G8 summit that he chairs this summer.

I want to talk a little more about the parallel I see with the last time the G8 was in the UK at the Gleneagles summit in 2005. The then Prime Minister Tony Blair put global development and climate change on the agenda. Many Members will recall the Make Poverty History campaign led by NGOs. It mobilised hundreds of thousands of members of the public in support of a demand to increase aid and make aid more effective. The Government’s determination, together with that support from civil society, led to a new partnership for Africa’s development.

On the one hand, donors such as the UK committed to double aid to Africa. That commitment was given by the G8 at Gleneagles and by the EU, which was under the UK presidency that same year, 2005. On the other hand, African leaders—led by Presidents Mkapa of Tanzania, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Obasanjo of Nigeria—gave commitments that, if the donors increased aid, leaders of African countries would do more to use that aid effectively. They established a number of peer review mechanisms—including the African Peer Review Mechanism—in which officials from one African country would audit the effectiveness of government expenditures and economic policies in other countries.

The single most important point I want to make this afternoon is that deals at international summits do not just happen. They do not happen because G8 leaders feel in a benevolent mood on the day and decide to put their hands in their pockets and double aid. It took two or three years of political mobilisation and preparation to deliver the results in the Gleneagles G8 and the British presidency of the European Union. That probably began in 2001—I remember the year well, because that was when Tony Blair sacked me from the Government. Rather nervously, he called me in afterwards to talk to him, and he asked what I intended to do. He had just made a speech about Africa and his commitment to do more to seek to reduce global poverty, and I said that I would like to do some work in that field. That was when, together with support from colleagues from other parties, we created the Africa all-party parliamentary group, and we worked closely with Downing street to identify what the UK could do in policy terms to build a better partnership with Africa.

About 18 months or so before the Gleneagles summit, Blair created the Commission for Africa—a team of eminent persons, the majority of whom were Africans—to write a proposal for improving development in the continent. They had a commission of some 36 people, headed by Myles Wickstead, who currently advises the Select Committee on International Development. They visited most countries in Africa and certainly met, as it says in the introduction to the report, representatives from 49 countries, as well as representatives from every G8 country and every country in the EU. I believe that the report was a turning point in the west’s relationship with Africa. It was soon out of print, because it was in great demand—in capitals—both in donor countries and in Africa, and Penguin Books printed a summary version in much greater quantities.

When the commission was doing its work, the all-party group on Africa sought to work with parliamentarians from other G8 and EU countries to explain what the UK Government intended to do, and to try and persuade our colleagues in the Bundestag, the Assemblée Nationale and Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—to ask questions of their Executive branch about how their country would respond to Blair’s proposals on increasing aid and improving the effectiveness of aid to Africa.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) on securing the debate. He is rightly talking about the importance of spending our aid budget effectively. As he knows, the Prime Minister, who is one of the three co-chairs of the high-level panel on the post-2015 development agenda, has said that his approach in part will be to speak to the issues that poor people themselves think important.

No. 7 of the millennium development goals is to ensure environmental sustainability, and earlier this year, in Bali, the first biodiesel plant in Indonesia—manufactured and installed by the Gloucestershire-based company Green Fuels Ltd on behalf of the Swiss NGO, Caritas—was opened, employing low-skilled workers to reduce the amount of unhealthy and environmentally-unfriendly recycled cooking oil in hotels in Bali. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that would be a great project for the Secretary of State to visit on her trip to Bali shortly? Does he also agree that supporting companies such as Green Fuels would be a powerful way for DFID to help deliver the millennium development goals and help Britain’s environmental businesses?

[Hugh Bayley]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. It is probably for the Minister, rather than me, to comment on what will be in the Secretary of State’s diary during her visit to Indonesia. I do not know about that particular project, but I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman e-mailed me some details. I know that there is controversy over whether land in developing countries should be used for producing food or for producing biofuels, and whether it should be used for producing food for export or food for domestic consumption. If the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) were to catch your eye at some point in the debate, Mr Walker, he might well wish to say a few things about that. We need to get the balance right.

The last thing I want to say about the period leading up to the publication of the Commission for Africa’s report is that on one of my lobbying forays I was in South Africa, and I spoke to a man called Abdul Minty, who I have known for many years through the work of the anti-apartheid movement—the London-based solidarity movement—that sought the overthrow of apartheid. By that stage, he had been appointed deputy director general—that is to say, deputy permanent secretary—of the South African Foreign Minister, and he was the foreign policy adviser and speechwriter on foreign affairs for the then President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki.

Abdul Minty said to me, “You really must take this message back to Tony Blair. In order for the report to make a difference, simply publishing it and hoping that all will turn out okay on the day is not good enough. You have got to build a political campaign to win support from world leaders, north and south, to ensure that it changes international policy. You have got, for example, to get the Germans to pledge something on 1 February, so that you can go to the French and say, ‘Surely you can match that or top it.’ You have to programme a series of steps so that when you get to Gleneagles, people know what the issues are. They will have talked with their Finance Ministers, their Development Ministers—if they have them—or their Foreign Affairs Ministers and will be in a position to make the sort of commitment that you seek. Think of it like one of our anti-apartheid campaigns. You do not get Barclays to disinvest from South Africa by writing a good report suggesting that that is what they should do. You have to organise a series of steps at shareholder meetings or on the street, getting media coverage, in order to get the change of policy that you seek.”

I had a conversation with Blair afterwards, and I hope that that was one reason why there was a choreographed political process that sought to move global leaders in the G8 and in the EU from a position of lack of commitment to a position of commitment on doing more for Africa’s development.

I believe that the high-level panel has the potential to be a turning point in international development that is just as significant as the Gleneagles summit eight years ago. Whether that happens depends on whether the key leaders of the panel, including the three co-chairs—our Prime Minister, and the Presidents of Indonesia and Liberia—see their task not only as writing a brilliant report, like the Commission for Africa report, which I am sure they will do, but as ensuring that a political process is put in train to make sure that the report makes a difference. Many people can write good reports—people at the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme can, as can academics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London School of Economics or Oxford university—but what politicians can do is change international policy.

I know that at next week’s meeting, the UK will be represented not by the Prime Minister, but by the Secretary of State for International Development. She will be a powerful representative and I have every confidence in her, but in delegating that task, the Prime Minister should not delegate the rest of the task. When it comes to getting on the phone to President Obama or François Hollande and saying, “What commitment are you going to make to the proposals in the high-level panel report?” there is no substitute for that being on the basis of national leader to national leader, President to President, or Prime Minister to Prime Minister. Of course, the Secretary of State will have to do most of the heavy lifting directly with the Foreign Affairs Ministries of the other countries, but the top-level talks will have to be led by the Prime Minister.

Because of time constraints, I shall not describe in detail the goals that the International Development Committee proposed in its recent report, to which the Government have just responded. We strongly support the Prime Minister’s proposal to eliminate extreme poverty as one of the goals; to incorporate issues of environmental sustainability, as the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) proposed; to set global goals but to accept that individual countries will need to adapt them and set national targets and indicators that are relevant to their own level of development; to ensure that there are robust processes for monitoring progress; to emphasise the importance of good governance, as our Prime Minister does with his argument about the “golden thread”; and to make job creation one of the development goals, because young people without work will not commit to and benefit from development.

Whatever goals appear in the high-level panel’s report when it is published in May, the thing that will make the most difference is not the language of a report or even the choice of one goal over another; it is political will. Can the high-level panel win the hearts and minds of world leaders north and south? That depends more than anything else on the work that the co-chairs do after they publish their report. I am talking about their getting on the road, meeting other Presidents and Prime Ministers, calling them up on the telephone, badgering them and saying, “This is an issue that won’t go away.” I think that if our Prime Minister does that, he will find his place in history as someone who has created the paradigm for development for the decade ahead, much as Blair did 10 years ago. I want him to do that, and I hope that will be the message that goes out from this debate today.