Millennium Development Goals

Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, and I share the welcome for the high-level panel report. I believe it could be strengthened in two areas. The first area is environmental sustainability. The millennium goals are weak on climate change and the high-level panel report does not make it sufficiently clear that global warming already damages the economies, and therefore the poor, in poorer countries such as Bangladesh. The panel has the laudable aim of eliminating $1.25 a day poverty but that needs to be inextricably linked with a new climate equilibrium, which we are far from attaining. Do Her Majesty’s Government agree that there needs to be a legally binding global climate deal in 2015 in line with the scientific consensus?

Secondly, the emphasis on absolute poverty must not hide the danger of increasing inequality in our world. Income inequality is rife in both richer and poorer countries and is one mark of the increasing power of elites at the expense of those in poverty. I regret that the powerful analysis of Pickett and Wilkinson’s Spirit Level, that less equal societies do worse, has almost disappeared from our political debate. This inequality within and between nations is exacerbated by the failure of tax justice so far to ensure that multinationals pay a proper proportion of tax and that this is paid in the countries where their profits are made.

Will the Government support a post-2015 agenda which focuses on inequality as well as eradicating extreme poverty; and how could a new set of goals ensure a more equitable distribution of power and resources, both within and between nation states?