Malcolm Bruce: Cutting overseas development aid would be unconscionable

Having fought two general elections in quick succession on a pledge to maintain the commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on development assistance for poorer, it is unconscionable that the government is considering dropping this commitment.

That's the argument made by the Liberal Democrat peer and former MP Malcolm Bruce in an article for The Press and Journal today.

He says this policy is not charity: it is both a moral commitment and enlightened self-interest.

'Enlightened self-interest' is a concept I have been fond of since I first came across it in philosophy. 

Malcolm concludes:

The pandemic has convulsed the world. Yet the impact on poorer countries will be calamitous and it is not just about the pandemic and a plethora of health care challenges.

Many are struggling with debt, the impact of climate change and loss of livelihoods. All of this will require a massive international effort.

If the UK walks away now it will be to abandon our world leadership - our soft power pre-eminence and to display a mean-spirited country turning in on itself.

Cutting aid will not make disease, conflict and climate disasters go away. They will come back redoubled to our door.

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"In her eight years in Stormont, she four times introduced a Human Rights Bill, which would have created structures for human rights accountability in Northern Ireland." Nicholas Whyte discovers the remarkable career of Sheelagh Murnaghan.

The third volume of Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher is reviewed by Andrew Marr: "Her biggest failure was her attitude to Germany. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming together of the communist East and capitalist West is today seen as a pivotal moment of joy and hope. She completely misunderstood it. Her anti-Germanism, going back to her childhood, was so strong she couldn’t see past it."

Fiona Dawe looks at the effect of climate change on the United Nations' sustainable development goals.

Caroline Hickman explains why some adults are reacting badly to young climate strikers.

"The Nicolaikirche is now a place of pilgrimage for many Germans of a certain age, and for good reason. It is from here that the 'Monday demonstrations' (Montags Demonstrationen) that grew throughout 1989 and 1990 evolved." Mike Stuchbery on a Leipzig church's part in the fall of the Berlin Wall.

IanVisits takes us to the Hidden London exhibition at the London Transport Museum.

Tributes paid to Paddy Ashdown

A memorial service for Paddy Ashdown took place at St John's Church, Yeovil, yesterday.

Among those who paid tribute to the former Liberal Democrat leader were Val Keitch, the leader of South Somerset District Council, Graham Cole, the former chief executive of Westland Helicopters, and David Laws, who succeeded him as MP for the town.

Somerset Live quotes Laws' words:

"Paddy did some of his best work not just in Yeovil and the United Kingdom, but overseas; in Bosnia; he was a passionate supporter of the European Union and the United Nations. 

“But he was very definitely not the ‘Citizen of Nowhere’ that our current Prime Minister once talked of. 

“He saw no conflict at all in his loyalty to his home village of Norton-sub-Hamdon, his constituency of Yeovil, his county home of Somerset and his country, but also simultaneously to Bosnia, to the European Union, the United Nations, to the children of Africa he fought for in his Unicef role.

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An alternative to conventional overseas aid? USAID, the American foreign aid agency, is conducting a trial that measures the impact when poor people abroad are simply given money with which to decide what’s best for themselves. Marc Gunther reports.

Sophie Scott examines the science behind the UN's laughing reaction to Donald Trump.

"According to the card shop, we are all glitter-loving, cupcake-scoffing prosecco princesses, just waiting for gin o’clock." Olivia Gagan on what greeting cards tell us about society's narrow view of women.

"Underpinning Google’s increasing and seemingly magical ability to predict what you want to search for, when you want to search for it, is an ever-growing pool of data." Mic Wright doesn't want Google to take him on journeys, he just wants it to answer his questions.

Glen Browder and Terri Ann Ognibene investigate the mysterious 'Turks' of South Carolina.

Go on a journey beneath the streets of Shrewsbury with Chris Schurke.

Jeremy Seabrook returns to Blackburn

Embed from Getty Images

Along with Alan Moore and Ray Gosling, Jeremy Seabrook makes up a school of literature: working-class Northampton grammar school boys who found national fame.

Seabrook is a beautiful writer who was first known for his Hoggartian analysis of working-class culture and its decline. He later moved on to write about poverty in developing countries.

In 1971 Seabrook wrote a book about Blackburn - City Close-Up. He has been back there for the New Statesman, and here is his conclusion:

Arbitrary withdrawal of benefits has driven people to food banks, evicted families and forced many young people to sleep on other people’s sofas and floors, while casual labour and zero-hours contracts have made semi-dependants of mature adults. In the 1960s vulnerable people could expect the attention of social workers; now the best they can expect is “debt counsellors”. 

The Labour council has conspicuously improved the physical aspect of the town and sought to safeguard services against government cuts; and is even-handed in dealing with majority and minority communities. But the town – like so many others – is still a place in transition to a future frequently foretold but never realised. 

The question remains: what happens to human settlements that lose their reason for being? In these places scars linger, both in the psyche of people brought six generations ago from the countryside, and in the memory of those fetched, three generations later, from the villages of south Asia to service mills, many of which have now relocated to the very places from which they were recruited. 

The suggestion that robotics and artificial intelligence will enable the making of garments to be “reshored” to Lancashire is a slender consolation when vital threads have been broken and fabric has frayed in a sometime cotton town, no longer at the centre of the British economy, but on the periphery of an indifferent globalism.

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"I will be pushing as hard as I can for reform of our large aid agencies but I will defend what they do and the work of all decent aid workers with everything I’ve got." Peter Kyle talks sense on the Oxfam scandal.

Polly MacKenzie calls for an end to despair about British politics and for positive action instead.

"Once upon a time, I was a member of the Lib Dem's federal policy committee. I used to irritate Danny Alexander and other luminaries by claiming that Liberals had made no contribution to economic debate since John Maynard Keynes had breathed his last in 1946." David Boyle did - I heard him - but now he thinks things may be changing, if not in Britain.

Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein on the two years that shook Facebook: "the company ... realises now that it bears some of the responsibilities that a publisher does: for the care of its readers, and for the care of the truth."

"On the ground, the shockwaves of the mines were felt far more than heard, there was no bang, either on the Somme or in England as was claimed much later; but 8,000 feet above the battlefield the sound waves reached a pilot who had been warned to keep clear of La Boisselle but turned his machine to observe the detonations of Lochnagar and Y Sap." Simon Jones on the battle beneath no man's land in World War I.

Cinephilia & Beyond revisits David Lynch's dark masterpiece Blue Velvet.

James Fox and Richard Ayoade

As a senior member of a theatrical dynasty, James Fox has an unofficial role as father-in-law to the stars - Billie Piper for a while and Richard Ayoade.

The other day I found this film that Fox and Ayoade made for a development charity. It shows Fox sending himself up admirably.

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Nick Barlow says those hoping for a British Macron have failed to grasp the fundamental differences between French and British politics.

The further away the problem, the easier it feels to resolve the ethics." Matthew Spencer discusses what the environment and development communities can learn from each other when it comes to achieving political impact,

Isabelle Fraser, daughter of the documentary maker Nick Fraser, on his stroke and accepting a special Bafta on his behalf.

David Butterfield offers 10 commandments for the public house. He is right about most things and "the handled glass and its quaint dimples" is an abomination.

"It was a surprise to find, when visiting Marion Park in Charlton where much of the film’s famous park sequences were shot, that Antonioni and his sound recordist, Robin Gregory, had merely emphasised something that was already there." Adam Scovell in the importance of sound in Blow-Up.

In the Middle Ages there was a superstition that the king of England must not enter Lincoln. Caitlin Green examines its origins. She mentions that Leicester had the same superstition. As Richard III discovered, it was well founded.

Welcome to the new Liberal Democrat bloggers

Two blogs were added to the LibDemBlogs aggregator in June. Thanks as ever to Ryan Cullen for sending me this information.

John Anderson has just joined the Liberal Democrats after previously resisting joining any party. Here he takes a random walk through the rubble of Brexit:

The single biggest value-added employers in the country -  the investment banks - are deserting the ship like rats. One could make an argument that Brexit is simply giving them an excuse to pull the trigger on drastic restructurings. 

Maybe, maybe not. But the reality is those jobs which pay well above the national average will no longer be on offer unless you want to move to New York, Frankfurt or Singapore.

...in pursuit of nuance... is written by Lucy Salek, who has just joined the Lib Dems too. (She is already a member of the Women's Equality Party.) Here she writes on her experience of attending the World Humanitarian Summit:

It was only when I began work for Islamic Relief on understanding how Islam provides a basis for humanitarian action, development, focusing particularly Islamic understandings on conflict and peace, that I began to experience first-hand the separation (and occasional hostility) to the role of religion and faith communities in the humanitarian world. Over the past three years, I am glad to say I have seen this changing.

If you have a blog you would like to appear here next month, please add it to LibDemBlogs.

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Jay Rayner on the uncharacteristic silence of Keith Vaz.

"Boosting economies and vindicating the human rights of women and girls is the very real impact of aid in developing countries. The UK being the first G7 power to enshrine in law a commitment to spend 0.7% of its gross national income (GNI) on aid every year is something of which the British people should be justifiably proud." Jenny Tonge celebrates overseas aid.

Did Nick Clegg drop two clangers yesterday? Keynesian Liberal thinks so.

"Adolf Hitler said: 'I have sent my Death’s Head units to the east with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language ... Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' Giles Fraser asks why the government is so afraid to speak of the Armenian genocide.

Frank Furedi rehearses his familiar (and correct) argument that modern society curbs children's freedom to a ridiculous extent.

Duncan Weldon examines the economics and politics of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Social Good Summit 2013

Three years ago Oxfam sent me to New York to blog about the Millennium Development Goals Summit and the Social Good Summit.

You too can share in this year's Social Good Summit (without the per diem expenses, obviously) via its website.

And there will be a lot of good stuff there:

The Social Good Summit is a three-day conference where big ideas meet new media to create innovative solutions. Held during UN Week from September 22-24, the Social Good Summit unites a dynamic community of global leaders to discuss a big idea: the power of innovative thinking and technology to solve our greatest challenges. 

The most innovative technologists, influential minds and passionate activists will come together with one shared goal: to unlock the potential of new media and technology to make the world a better place, and then to translate that potential into action.

1 in 3: A WaterAid film for World Toilet Day

The reshuffle made the Lib Dems feel less like a party of government

We know Nick Clegg's ambition is for the Liberal Democrats to become "not ... the third party, but ... one of three parties of government".

Yet one of the reasons I was depressed by the summer's reshuffle (as I blogged when discussing John Kampfner's more optimistic take on it) is that we now seem further from fulfilling this ambition.

I share Nick Harvey's disappointment that we no longer have ministers at Defence or the Foreign Office. And I am not convinced by the posts we have taken instead.

Lynne Featherstone will do a good job at Overseas Development if she is allowed. But it may well be that moving Andrew Mitchell away from the department was a prelude to a Cameron decision to drop his pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on overseas aid. There are no signs of it so far, but it would be in line with his strategy of moving right to please his back-benches and core voters.

And, much as I like David Heath, I fear that becoming the public face of the badger cull will do him or his party no favours.

But then Nick came out in favour of a cull as long ago as June 2008. As I blogged at the time, I was puzzled by the politics of this:

I do not know if culling badgers to prevent bovine TB is good science, but I am sure that it is bad politics. It may play well go down well in a few rural constituencies, but it will go down very badly in many more urban and suburban seats. Like Sheffield Hallam, for instance. 

This feels very much like a return to the 1970s, when the old Liberal Party's fortunes depended on clinging on to a handful of seats where the farming interest was strong. I thought we had all moved on since then.

Given that the Liberal Party I joined in the late seventies combined that pragmatic defence of local farming interests with high-minded statements about poverty, the changes in the reshuffle feel very much like a case of back to the future.

Leicester's Lord Mayor: I'm being pursued for the crimes of another

Last week I blogged about a lawsuit being brought on behalf of eight teenage boys who say they were sexually abused in India. It is being brought following the conviction of Derek Slade for offences against boys in England.

The claims are against the charity Help a Poor Child, Abdul Osman (the Lord Mayor of Leicester) and Derek Sawyer (the former leader of Islington Borough Council).

In that post I quoted a statement by Help a Poor Child, as quoted by the East Anglian Daily Times:

“The charity has never had any involvement in the ownership or running of Anglo-Kutchi Medium School in India. 

“Furthermore, the charity had no role in the appointment of Derek Slade to a tuition position at that school."

The charity's position was endorsed by the Raving Pikey blog, which has been keeping a close eye on the Slade case and its aftermath.

On Thursday the Leicester Mercury had an article about Abdul Osman, quoting his denial of any culpability:

"We raised money but that was it. I did not appoint Slade and I did not run the school. 

"If the acts are proved to have taken place, I condemn them absolutely. 

"I don't know why they are coming after me. I am being pursued for someone else's crimes.

And the Burton Mail tells us that:

Derek Sawyer’s solicitor issued a statement which said Mr Sawyer ‘had no management responsibilities at the school and did not employ Mr Slade’ and that ‘he had no knowledge of any sexual abuse allegations at the relevant time, and obviously he utterly condemns any such behaviour’.

Lawsuit involving a Lord Mayor, and a former council leader, follows headmaster's conviction

Two years ago Derek Slade was sentenced to a total of 21 years in prison for the sexual and physical abuse of boys in his care.

Yesterday the East Anglian Daily Times reported new developments:

Pannone Solicitors in London has been instructed by the Official Solicitor to pursue compensation claims on behalf of eight teenage boys who say they were sexually abused in Gujarat, India. 

The claims are against Derek Sawyer, former leader of Islington Borough Council and former chairman of the London Regional Courts Board, Abdul Osman, the Lord Mayor of Leicester and the Help a Poor Child charity. 

The eight boys allege that they were sexually abused by Slade their headmaster at the Anglo-Kutchi Medium School where they boarded and supposedly received an English education. 

The claim the Official Solicitor is bringing is to obtain compensation from the three defendants because it is the victims’ case that the defendants between them “ran” the school, and employed Slade. 

The claim is brought on the basis that the three defendants owed the boys a duty of care and that meant keeping them safe from harm. It is alleged that this obligation was breached each time the boys were abused by Slade.

The report goes on to quote a statement from Help a Poor Child:

“The charity has never had any involvement in the ownership or running of Anglo-Kutchi Medium School in India. 

“Furthermore, the charity had no role in the appointment of Derek Slade to a tuition position at that school. 

“All material facts were made known to the police prior to the BBC’s first programme about Mr Slade. It was accepted by the police that the charity had not conducted itself in any manner as to merit the slightest criticism. That remains the position to this day notwithstanding unsubstantiated allegations made by Pannone Solicitors in its quest to recover damages and costs in a civil action it is contemplating on behalf of a client.”

It also says that Mr Sawyer and Mr Osman could not be contacted for comment.

Later. This story is also on the BBC News website.

Even later. I have blogged about this case again, giving the responses from Abdul Osman and Derek Sawyer. You can read more in the original press release from the Indian boys' solicitors Pannone.

Nick Clegg on the Rio+20 Summit

The Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister has written a guest blog on next week's Rio+20 Summit - held two decades after the original Earth Summit for the RSPB:

First, national governments must move beyond a narrow understanding of wealth. Right now we judge how well a country is doing by looking almost exclusively at the money it makes. But to fully judge success we need a kind of ‘GDP+’, which takes into account the state of assets like forests or coastal areas – vital natural capital. 

We’re reforming the UK’s national accounts so that, by 2020, they also reflect our natural wealth. In Brazil I’ll be pressing our international partners to follow suit.

The charity is also inviting questions for Nick. It will put the best 20 to him on his return from Brazil.

Be Outraged: Austerity isn't working

Austerity and growth, of course, are not opposites. We need a good dose of both. But, with European opinion moving against the former and in favour of the latter, Oxfam has chosen a good moment to publish this short book written by eleven eminent economists and social scientists. You can download Be Outraged: Austerity isn't working as a PDF from the Oxfam website.

So, before we forget altogether, let's pause a moment to remember some of the good things about austerity and  bad things about growth.

In the early days of the environmental movement it was widely believed that there were environmental limits to economic growth - that belief was practically what defined the environmental movement in the face of post-war social democracy. The idea that we would one day run out of vital resources was always a little fanciful, but we have seen in oil that the need for new discoveries has led to more hazardous operations - think of the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, Canadian oil sands - and more environmental damage. I know that both sides have agreed to call for 'green growth', but the lack of argument here feels more like wishful thinking than a conceptual breakthrough.

Those who oppose austerity want to see more public spending and want to see it financed, not by higher taxation, but by borrowing. But it has always seemed odd to me that the left are so set upon a policy that puts the country in thrall to the people they despise most: international financiers. I suppose it flows from putting ever-growing levels of public services at the centre of your politics and then lacking the courage to raise the taxes to pay for them.

And, of course, borrowing has a cost. Be Outraged is quick to remind us that the analogy between household and national borrowing can be misleading:

John Maynard Keynes famously pointed out the dangers of treating national debt like household debt. Robert Skidelsky, Keynes biographer, has summarised the reasons why this is so: governments, unlike private individuals, do not have to “repay” their debt: they have their own Central Bank and their own currency and they can continue to borrow.

But national debt still has to be serviced: we have to pay interest on it. So with the current UK national debt being somewhere in the region of £1.046 - I make that a 13-digit number - there are good arguments for trying to keep that interest down. And the rate is determined by the markets set by our old friends the international financiers.

So that is the case against growth - or at least in favour of austerity. And perhaps it is because of it that I find the best two chapters in Be Outraged to be those that have least to do with the austerity vs growth debate.

Chapter 6 makes a powerful case for decreasing inequalities in calling for "a recovery for all, not just the few":

The richest 1% (61 million individuals) had the same amount of income as the poorest 3.5 billion (56% of the world’s population). At the bottom end, two in five of the world’s population, live below the international poverty line of US$2 a day; of those, one billion people live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $1.25 a day.

And chapter 7 discusses "Transforming the financial sector from bad master to good servant":

When the financial sector has been well regulated and controlled, and when well-run public banks have played an important role, the financial sector has played a positive role to support and not undermine the real economy. Examples are post WWII USA and Europe, and many developing countries (like Brazil and India) then and today. The positive experience is clear for public institutions in Europe, such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) at a regional level, and German KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau) at a national level, and in developing countries, such as the BNDES (Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social) in Brazil.

All good stuff, but it was just as valid five years ago when the economy was booming. But then one of the weaknesses of Keynesian economics is that people love the idea of stimulus when things are going badly but are deaf to calls for restraint when the economy is booming.

But Be Outraged, which was inspired by Indignez-vous, a multi-million best-seller written by Stephane Hessel, former member of the French resistance, will interest anyone looking for ways out of our current morass. So why not download a copy for yourself?

WaterAid celebrates World Water Day 2012

International Women's Day: How water and sanitation impact women

From the WaterAid Facebook page:

International Women’s Day on March 8 makes us reflect on the extent to which the global water and sanitation crisis is a women’s issue. Women bear the brunt of water collection, suffer the most from the indignity of lacking access to sanitation, and as primary caregivers are impacted the most when children fall sick with water-related diseases. 

Fully involving women in community water and sanitation programs, as WaterAid does, ensures the programs meet their needs. It also helps equip women with the skills and confidence they need to tackle other development challenges in their community.

The shorter Ruth Lea

Don't give money to the poor in Africa: give it to the rich in the West.