UK Foreign Aid Programme

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, we are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for this debate. He stands like Prometheus after defying the gods and surviving the Woolsack. Unbound, he has come to bring fire to humankind, and we are in his debt. The successes in the field of our aid and development programme have been well rehearsed in the course of this debate. They are incontestable, and we can and should be proud of them—but those very successes stand as a reproach to those who are now trying to cut them back. Global Britain should show what being global really means, but the Government’s rhetoric in so many ways leaves much to be desired, and logic is frequently absent.

We should also enter this debate against the background of Black Lives Matter. We can leave the statues—Colston, Rhodes and all the rest of them—exactly where they are, just as long as we have an educational programme that teaches our children how the statues stand for a world where a small number of wealthy nations sucked the souls and asset-stripped the economies of poorer countries in our recent history. Our aid and development programme, where we get rid of the idea of donors and recipients, should be seen as a way of servicing the debt we owe to the poorer nations of this world. We should make it a priority at all times.