BISHOPS in the House of Lords urged the Government to commit itself to long-term overseas-development work — and reiterated calls, made throughout the latter years of the previous government, for the international-aid budget to be restored in line with previous commitments.
In a debate on the UN Sustainable Development Goals last week, the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, said that “with religious differences front and centre” in conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, “it may seem at first glance that religion is an obstacle to achieving” the goals.
He urged the Government to support the efforts of religious groups that sought reconciliation, and referred to, as an example, the South Sudan Council of Churches. That organisation, he said, hasd “played a crucial role in peacebuilding efforts since the outbreak of civil war, serving as a mediator, brokering ceasefires and peace agreements, and providing humanitarian aid”.
Interfaith networks were particularly important in areas affected by sectarian violence, such as parts of the former Yugoslavia, he said.
He queried the previous Government’s assertion that the overseas-aid budget would be returned to 0.7 per cent of gross national income only “when fiscal circumstances allow”. The point of its being pegged to the country’s economy was that “we spend more when our economy is doing better and less when it is under greater strain.”
Later that afternoon, the Bishop of Sheffield, Dr Pete Wilcox, also called for the aid budget to be restored as soon as possible. He was speaking in the context of a debate to mark the 40th anniversary of the Ethiopian famine, although many contributions focused on the current crisis in that country.
Christian Aid now estimated that 21 million people in Ethiopia were in need of immediate humanitarian assistance, Dr Wilcox said.
Reflecting on the Live Aid fund-raising concert of 1984, Dr Wilcox suggested that, in retrospect, the efforts seemed “naïve”. They had, he said, treated the famine “as simply a natural disaster” instead of taking into account the “human factors that contributed to it, including both the global climate emergency — or global warming, as we were just beginning to call it then — and the more local political and military practices”.
In the light of current humanitarian needs in Ethiopia, preventative measures were important, he said, with a focus on reducing the damage from droughts and floods.
Dr Wilcox urged the Government to ensure that the aid budget was spent overseas. Earlier in the year, under the previous government, it emerged that more than one quarter of the aid budget was being spent domestically, on accommodating asylum-seekers (News, 19 April).
He also called on the Government to make East Africa the focus of climate-related finance initiatives, and to prioritise areas of the greatest humanitarian need in the execution of its manifesto promise to tackle unsustainable sovereign debt.