Viscount Chandos
Main Page: Viscount Chandos (Labour - Life peer)
Viscount Chandos (Lab)
My Lords, in thanking and congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on his hugely welcome initiation of today’s debate, I declare an interest and a connection. As disclosed in the register, I chair the Thomson Foundation, which trains journalists and develops sustainable media, principally in countries scoring poorly in the World Press Freedom Index. Some of our projects receive funding from the aid programme, though rather more from FCDO funds. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, was the transformational chair preceding me.
While I recognise the many pressing demands on the aid budget in all circumstances, I urge the Government at least to maintain sustainable media development funding from the FCDO budgets as a whole. Sustainable free media can be critical in leveraging the effectiveness of other development programmes.
I strongly endorse the calls of so many noble Lords to allow Parliament to vote on the proposed cut—I am confident that such a vote would reverse it. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, rightly said that this is not a red-wall or a blue-wall issue, but the Government, no doubt playing to polling and focus group findings, have been disingenuous in the reasons that they have given for the cut. “The pandemic means that cuts have to be made”, they say, without acknowledging that the linkage to GNI does that automatically, without any change to the percentage.
Support for Covid vaccination programmes in low-income countries is, as Sir Jeremy Farrar has repeatedly emphasised, not just principled and fair but in our urgent national interest, in defeating the global pandemic. That principle surely applies to aid spending generally: it is enlightened long-term self-interest, not just altruism.