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On the side of the poor
Douglas Alexander
AS EVIDENCE that Gordon Brown is genuine in his commitment to tackling poverty worldwide, last year he strengthened the Department for International Development (DfID) with two extra ministers and put one of his brightest protégés — “Gordon’s golden boy”, The Guardian called him — at its head. His first, brief career was as a solicitor, but he gave it up in November 1997 when he won the parliamentary seat of Paisley South in a by-election. “To be a lawyer for me was always a job,” he has said. “To be a Member of Parliament is far more than a job.” The law, he explained, “if I’m honest, was intellectually fulfilling and challenging, but nothing like as self-actualising for me as the opportunity to try to make a difference through politics”. 
His promotion thereafter was rapid. In 1999, Tony Blair appointed him, aged only 32, to co-ordinate Labour’s national-election campaign alongside Mr Brown and Peter Mandelson. He entered the Government in 2001 — skipping the usual bottom rung of the ladder, the unpaid job of parliamentary private secretary — to become minister for e-commerce and competitiveness. The following year, Mr Blair moved him into the Cabinet Office to oversee the Government’s powerful Strategy Unit.
By 2004, Mr Alexander was working at both the Department of Trade and Industry and the Foreign Office as Minister for Trade, Investment and Foreign Affairs. A few months later, he was appointed a Privy Counsellor and began sitting in on Cabinet meetings as Minister for Europe. Another year, and he had his own seat at the table as Secretary of State for both Transport and Scotland. Finally, the day after Mr Brown entered Number 10, in June 2007, he took over the DfID.
It is often observed that Mr Brown’s Cabinet is short of “big beasts” and long on brainy (but perhaps slightly colourless) young men. When I meet him at DfID HQ in Palace Street, in a room less grand than the waiting room, he seems to fit the pattern.
Clearly, he has the blessing of the Prime Minister in his efforts to tackle global poverty with a canny mixture of aid and trade. Does he also have the blessing of the country at large? Mr Alexander has in the past made the ritual observation that the British public is enormously generous, but is that true? Supposedly, our finest hour was after the Asian tsunami of 2004, when we gave £400 million to relief funds. But that is less than a tenner per adult head, which is hardly sacrificial giving at Christmas time.
“I think the British have the capacity to be moved by what they witness on their television screens,” he replies carefully. “But I think one of the most hopeful signs for development has been the journey that people in Britain have been on over the 23 years since Live Aid. I think there is a recognition now that these are issues not simply about compassion and charity, but also about justice and what it is to be human.
“There has been an extraordinary turnaround in sentiment. In the 1980s and 1990s, over 18 years the development budget was cut in half, and British aid was being used to support commercial contracts for the arms industry.”
He describes the present cross-party consensus on aid as “hard-won and fragile”, and says that we need to continue to make the case to the British public that we have “a collective interest as well as a moral obligation” to continue on this path.
Can he elaborate? “Our world is characterised not only by extremes of poverty and wealth but also by an interdependence that even two generations ago was not so apparent. Whether it’s in relation to climate change, or security, or migration, there isn’t really an ‘over here’ and an ‘over there’ any more. We’re in this together and we need to find shared solutions.
“But I think also we have a moral obligation not to pass by on the other side and to recognise that we are bound together by not simply mutual concerns, but reciprocal relations.”
Britain is now “on a trajectory”, he says, to meet the target the United Nations first set in 1970, that the richer countries should give 0.7 per cent of their gross national income to overseas aid. We should hit that figure in 2013. This will be a year after Belgium and Spain, and a full 38 years after Sweden and the Netherlands; but the point is that at least — at last — a British government has made a definite date.
Mr Alexander is quick to praise the “honourable part” that the Churches and NGOs have played in this movement.
“I think the fact that Britain has assumed such a leadership role in recent years reflects not just the values, the instincts, the convictions of the politicians in government, like the Prime Minister and indeed the last prime minister, but also the fact that we have a vibrant, active shared community of concern in Britain which is not replicated even in other European countries or in North America.
“The fact that you’ve got church leaders, you’ve got active organisations like Christian Aid and Oxfam, you’ve got the capacity to mobilise very large numbers of people — that creates a different context for the British Government to act than is the case when the French government, the German government, the Italian government are acting in the European context, or indeed the governments of the US and Canada and elsewhere are acting in the context of the G8. So, I think Gordon was right to recognise — partly again because of his own longstanding understanding of the Church’s commitment to these issues — that the Church’s active engagement with the common life of society over these issues has itself had a profound impact on our public debate and our public discourse — and ultimately on our public policy.”
The admiration is mutual — up to a point. At present, several development agencies are urging church people to give him a piece of their mind. Christian Aid’s website pressureworks.org (“campaigning action for the wired and fired up”) is telling its younger supporters: “The World Bank — funded by your taxes — attaches damaging strings to loans it gives poor countries. Contact the International Development Secretary to demand Britain stops paying for poverty!”
I ask him whether it’s true that this kind of pressure works. Could “demands” from the “fired up” ever sway him? He is fond of remarking that politics is about both leading and listening, but has also been quoted as saying, “There is a difference between listening and capitulating.”
One suspects that the doors some NGOs are asking their supporters to bang on are either open already, or are firmly locked. All he will say is that it is good to write to your constituency MP on development issues.
He shows a hint of irritation when I mention that some NGOs have compared him unfavourably to his predecessor. Hilary Benn won approval from development agencies in 2005 by withholding £50 million of Britain’s contribution to the World Bank until it had satisfied him that it had abandoned its policy of making grants to poor countries conditional on their adoption of certain neo-liberal economic policies. Mr Alexander, by contrast, has just committed Britain to increasing its funding to the Bank to more than £2 billion over three years.
The answer, I am told, is “very straightforward”. The bank has a new President, Robert Zoellick, and that has changed everything. And not only has Mr Alexander discussed the issue of conditionality at length with him, and “sought and received a range of assurances”, but “in this very room within the last couple of weeks I invited all the NGOs to come and meet with him.”
Was there a showdown? “Fifty-six minutes into an hour-long meeting, I gently suggested to them that, given they had the opportunity to speak directly with the President of the World Bank, they might want to raise the issue of economic-policy conditionality.”
What happened? “I think he gave pretty convincing answers to all of their questions.”
He has little more patience when I mention that NGOs are urging supporters to lobby him to make sure that Britain uses its influence to oppose the Economic Partnership Agreements that the European Commission is seeking to impose on many poor countries in Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, and which they consider unfair.
“We would be taking that action anyway, because it reflects the longstanding position of the British Government,” he insists. “We have worked tirelessly to influence the Commission on issues like reciprocity and duty-free access — we can go through the detail if you like — and we are already in contact with NGOs and (even more importantly) the 35 developing countries that have already signed agreements to discuss with them what further action they would ask us to take.”
He does concede that activists are not wasting their stamps in writing letters. “It does assist us in that endeavour when I am able to sit down with the Trade Commissioner and say, ‘This is not simply a matter of concern to me. It’s also a matter of very deep concern amongst the British public.’ In that sense, I welcome the engagement of organisations on the issue of trade policy, although I recognise that it’s difficult at times to communicate in simple campaigning terms some of the complexities as to where the decision-making authority actually lies.”
In future, however, he would like to see British NGOs apply effective pressure elsewhere.
“We have an opportunity to change the way we campaign on these issues in the years ahead, and it’s a conversation I’m already engaged in with the NGOs like Christian Aid and Oxfam, because, candidly, on an issue like trade policy, where we are working very hard at the moment to try to realise the potential of the Doha development round for developing countries, it is not sufficient to convince the British Government of the need for change towards a fairer trade system. For us to be able to effect that change, we have to secure the support of partners in Europe, and then more broadly the multilateral system.
“With the advent of the internet, with the capacity of the Church — maybe civilisation’s first multinational organisation — to work across borders, I think there are huge new opportunities for campaign-
ing organisations, and for the Churches, not simply to comfort themselves with exerting influence on the British Government, but working in partnership with Churches in Europe and North America to influence their governments.”
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