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Not strangers but neighbours
Since Jubilee 2000 organised a human chain calling for the cancellation of Third World debt ten years ago, what has been achieved? Rebecca Paveley put the question to the Prime Minister
 Moral imperative: Gordon Brown in Downing Street PA |
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GORDON BROWN’s commitment to eradicating Third World debt is rarely questioned even by his critics, and has been described as his passion since his party was in opposition. Perhaps if it were not, our interview, marking the tenth anniversary of the 70,000-strong “human chain” for debt relief, would itself have been cancelled. A few days after Labour’s devastating results in the local elections, Mr Brown looks tense and exhausted, having come straight from Prime Minister’s Questions. Despite this, and his tendency to drop statistics into the conversation at an alarming rate, the subject still seems to stir up that passion, as it does occasional moments of warmth. He smiles as he recalls his own first attempt at campaigning on world poverty — taking part in the “Freedom from Hunger” Oxfam campaign of the 1960s. “My brother and I made a newspaper that we sold, like a news-sheet. I must have been less than ten years old. It was my older brother’s idea, really: I was his assistant. The terrible irony is that we are having to run another campaign now, all these years later, because of the food crisis in parts of the world.” I ask him whether he hopes his own children — John, aged four, and Fraser, aged one — will follow in his footsteps and come up with enterprising campaigns to raise money for good causes. He sidesteps neatly: “Lots of children have a sense of what is fair and right,” he says.Famously, he was brought up as a “son of the manse” in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, where his father was a Church of Scotland minister. He is one of three boys, all of whom have gone on to be high achievers. |
 Jubilee 2000 campaigners outside the Treasury in July 2000, when Mr Brown was Chancellor |
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Mr Brown has made much of his Christian upbringing and the influence it has had on him — he uses the word “moral” many times in the interview. I ask if he finds time now to go to church. “I try to, I try to,” he says.
His involvement and interest in eradicating the debts of the developing world goes back at least to the time when the Jubilee 2000 coalition — made up of Churches, aid agencies, and trade unions — was beginning to form in the early 1990s, and he wrote a paper on the subject.
“It became for me an understanding that the burden of past mistakes, of past problems, were weighing down the prospects of the generation that was coming up,” he says.
“Developing countries couldn’t build schools, or hospitals, or develop their economy, or give the investment that was needed to the infrastructure of schools and hospitals, as long as so much of the national income was being paid in debt, and debt interest payments. And it was a problem that was never going to be solved. That is why the idea of Jubilee emerged, and I have been fortunate to be involved at the beginning.”
The concept of Jubilee is scriptural: Leviticus describes the 50th year, the Jubilee Year, as one when those enslaved because of debts are freed, lands lost because of debt are returned, and a community torn by inequality is restored. Jubilee 2000 called for the cancellation of world debt by the Millennium.
In the past decade, a great deal has been done to wipe out debts, and the UK has been at the forefront; but more could be done. The Prime Minister agrees, although he defends fiercely the achievements of the past decade. |
 Ten years: part of the chain-of-debt rally outside the G8 in Birmingham in 1998 PA |
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“$100 billion or more of debt has been written off, and there is the prospect of a lot more to be written off. . . This is a big figure. And 35 million more kids have gone into school, and that might not have happened without debt relief. The improvements on infant mortality, which mean that two million children are saved every year who might otherwise have died — a lot of that is due to debt relief.
“From Kenya, to Tanzania, to Mozambique, to where I’ve been recently, Uganda, the increased involvement of children in education has only been possible because debt relief, combined with aid, has made it possible. So it has achieved an enormous amount, but obviously there is more to do — there is always more to do.”
THE PROGRESS may seem all the more remarkable for the response the subject first received when he brought it up at a conference of finance ministers in 1997.
“I raised debt relief, and nobody wanted to talk about it; they said they had dealt with it. That was called HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries). I then worked out and told them that only one country of all the 37 countries that were affected had any chance of getting debt relief under their proposals.”
The HIPC initiative, which is administered by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has come in for strong criticism from campaigners for the many conditions it imposes on countries before they can qualify for debt relief.
Mr Brown is said to be keen to cut down the conditions, but he supports conditionality in principle. “Most of the conditions are a means by which we avoid countries getting into problems later on. They are also about transparency, to ensure money does go to poverty reduction. The biggest thing for me is that debt-reduction money must go to poverty reduction.”
The conditions are also a defence in the continual argument with those who maintain that there is no point in cancelling debt and increasing aid in countries where there is political instability or evidence of corruption. This is particularly argued by many who are dismissive of Mr Brown’s work on debt cancellation. |
 Bob Geldof, organiser of Live Aid and Live 8, speaking at a Jubilee 2000 event |
| In answer to them, he says: “That is why openness and transparency is so important. You can’t condone a situation where money is given and wasted, but you can justify a situation where money is being given, and you can see the good that is coming from it. The good thing about investing in education through debt relief is you can see whether there are more children in classes or not.” But, while some debts are being cancelled, more are being taken on by struggling countries in the developing world. The latest figures provided by the Jubilee Debt Campaign, the successor to Jubilee 2000, suggest that $400 billion is still owed in debt by the world’s poorest 100 countries; and for every $1 they receive from rich countries in aid, the developing world still returns $5 in debt-service payments. Mr Brown insists that the UK will continue to lead the way on debt relief, at least under his government. With the tenth anniversary of the G8 human chain this weekend — an event that some have seen as marking the rebirth of Christian mass-protest in this country — campaigners are fighting hard to keep the issue at the forefront of public awareness. The Prime Minister is keen to praise the part played by churches and faith communities in the campaign for debt cancellation. “I feel privileged to have worked with the huge number of people who have made a difference. Without the work of churches and faith communities, we would not have been able to achieve so much. “I do applaud the way churches have made this a test of being a good neighbour. People are helping people they will never know or meet; these people ought to recognise they have helped to transform opportunities for people all around the world.” I ASK whether this work is likely to be his legacy — although it will perhaps not win him many votes. For a moment, the exhaustion disappears. “What matters is that it is right to do it,” he says; and he refers again — implicitly — to the parable of the Good Samaritan. “It is about the text, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ It is about a world in which people recognise that a neighbour is not simply [the person] who is geographically next door, but people who are in every part of the world, whose lives now affect ours, and for whom we feel some moral responsibility. We are not moral strangers to each other; the more we can find a common ground — people sharing the same moral sense around the world — the more we will be able to achieve a future in making the world a safer place. |
 A Jubilee 2000 protest outside the London offices of the World Bank |
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“We must understand that globalisation cannot work unless we can find a way of including everybody in the benefits of global change. One of the ways we can help people understand they have responsibilities to each other is not simply that what happens in one place can happen in another — like economic change or terrorism — but also that we share similar values, and we share similar beliefs that compel us or impel us to make big social changes.” This is evidence that Mr Brown at least believes that he is practising what his father preached from that Kirkcaldy pulpit. Poverty reduction Some of the effects of debt relief attributed to debt cancellation so far: • Teacher numbers have doubled in three years in Tanzania: more than 62,000 teachers have been recruited or retrained • Primary-school fees have been abolished in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and in rural areas of Benin • In a free childhood immunisation programme in Mozambique, almost a million children were vaccinated by the end of 2004 • User fees have been abolished at rural healthcare clinics in Zambia • New roads have been built in Burkina Faso, particularly in rural areas, Source: Unfinished Business, Jubilee Debt Campaign, 2008History of the debt campaign 1996 Jubilee 2000 was formed, with the aim of cancelling the debt of the world’s poorest nations by the Millennium. It built on years of campaigning by the Debt Crisis Network and groups in the Global South. The International Monetary Fund also launched HIPCI (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative), which was formed to give poor countries relief from the debt burdens largely formed in the 1970s. 1998 Birmingham: 70,000 people formed a human chain to urge G8 leaders to take action on world debt. It was one of the biggest demonstrations the UK had seen, and was widely seen as the tipping point for the debt-relief cause. 1999 Cologne: G8 leaders committed themselves to granting $100 billion of debt relief to 42 heavily indebted poor countries. HIPC was also enhanced as a result of pressure to make more countries eligible for debt relief more quickly. 2001 The Jubilee Debt Campaign replaced Jubilee 2000. 2005 Gleneagles: the UK held the presidency of G8, and great things were expected: 250,000 people attended a rally as part of Make Poverty History, and Live8 concerts were held around the world. Debt relief was the foundation of Make Poverty History, which grew out of Jubilee’s work. The G8 announced the Multilateral Debt Relief initiative, which politicians hailed as 100-per-cent debt cancellation, although campaigners said it was only 100 per cent for some debts for some countries. 2008 Birmingham: ten years on from the drop-the-debt human chain, campaigners will return to celebrate what has been achieved and demand further, faster debt cancellation. An estimated $400 billion of debt is still owed by 100 of the poorest countries, which are paying more than $100 million a day in debt payments. Campaigners want the UK to extend its multilateral debt relief to 65, at least, of the poorest countries.Source: Unfinished Business, Jubilee Debt Campaign, 2008 |
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