International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, having in the past criticised the delay in bringing forward this legislation, I start by expressing my appreciation to the Government for making time both in another place and in your Lordships’ House to ensure that we can debate and, I hope before the end of this Parliament, agree this important legislation.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, on his outstanding opening speech and on bringing forward the Bill in your Lordships’ House. It is a long time since I heard such a comprehensive and passionate but also evidence-based case for the cause that we are debating today. It was also a great pleasure to hear, with all their years of experience and dedicated commitment, the wise words of the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, and my noble friend Lady Royall on our Front Bench, who stressed the important year in which we make this decision—2015. This is when we will go from the millennium development goals to the new sustainable development goals, which will, I hope, move international development on to a completely new level of quantity as well as quality.

It is with the issue of quantity versus quality that I want to start my contribution today. When we have previously debated in your Lordships’ House the issue that is in front of us today in this Bill, primarily two points have been made. The first is that an increase in spending was happening far too quickly. If that was a legitimate point then—and it was of course legitimate that we debated it—then I say to those who have made the point in the past that the time for that argument has passed. Not only do we now have a consensus among all the major parties in the United Kingdom but also the reality of 0.7% of GNI being the annual budget for international development co-operation.

The second point was about effectiveness, which is where the argument about quality versus quantity comes forward. We have been debating for 45 years—I repeat: 45 years—since UN Resolution 2626 was first carried. It is 40 years since it was meant to have been implemented and we have since then debated the quantity of international aid. Today, we have a chance to move on and to debate in the future only the quality of our international aid and no longer the quantity. I appeal to those who have made this argument in the past to consider that point and to join those of us who have supported 0.7% of GNI in moving forward in the years to come to a debate on the quality and effectiveness of our aid. This is important for many reasons.

The key issue of justice is at its heart. We are not rich because it was predetermined and they are not poor because it was predetermined. We are not smarter than the average African, south-east Asian or Caribbean person. Decades and centuries of exploitation, distortion of international trade, abuse of natural resources and bad governance have been encouraged by us, and not just by those who were in power in the underdeveloped world, the developing world, the Third World—or whatever it has been called from decade to decade. We helped to create that situation and we must now help to resolve it. Justice is absolutely key. That justice did not stop at the end of colonial times. We were quite happy to participate in a cold war in the 1970s and 1980s, in the first 20 years after the UN resolution was passed, when both sides propped up dictatorships and bad governance, and the exploitation of people in the developing world who still suffer today as a result.

Looking forward, there is also the issue of our self-interest. There are great fears in our country and across Europe today of migration, fears about the climate and fears about identity-based conflicts, which many people do not understand and do not know what to do about. Do we really imagine that migration, climate change and conflict will be improved by a reduction in or a halting of international aid? Surely the evidence shows us that if we invest in development co-operation, we can help to tackle those real fears of migration, conflict and climate change.

Finally, it is 45 years since the UN resolution was passed and 40 years since it should have been implemented. Can we just imagine what the world would be like today if 40 years ago the resolution had been implemented in the middle of that decade? What would our global education system have looked like? How many people would be smarter, better educated and better able to cope with the demands of the modern world? How many people would have been vaccinated and how many lives would have been saved? How many democracies would have been built? What great works of culture would have been created? How many scientific inventions might have been forthcoming? How many problems might have been solved? If we can imagine what might have been possible if the right decisions had been made back then, we can imagine what is possible in the 15 years to come when we could end extreme global poverty and build the better world that was imagined in 1970.