26 June 2006
A new panel of world leaders is being set up to help keep the Gleneagles promises on tackling poverty, Tony Blair has said.
After the speech, at King’s College London, he took part in a Q and A with guests.
Parts of this transcript may have been edited
Read the speech in full
Tony Blair:
Thank you very much Patricia, thank you Rick for that interesting address. Can I say what a self-evidently wise decision it was to nominate you as Principal of the College, and thank you for making sure that I am still in situ when I give the oration.
Actually you were extraordinarily modest about your own achievements. As well as being a very distinguished Principal here, you did I think give one of these commemoration orations at an earlier stage which I thought was somewhat bravely entitled ‘What Are Universities For?" A question that many of us have been seeking to answer over a long period of time. (Laughter) But actually what you have managed to do in this period of time as Principal of King’s is considerable for the College, and I think we are very lucky to have you here. And Philadelphia’s loss is our gain, so thank you.
I would also like in advance to give my thanks to Mathew. This is probably a bit unwise actually, since he is giving the vote of thanks, to give thanks to him in advance since I haven’t the faintest idea what he is going to say. But all I can say is he confirms my view, yet again, that students seem to look a lot more respectable than they did in my day.
And you are absolutely right of course that there have been Labour Prime Ministers that have given this oration, and I hadn’t realised in fact until I was due to give the lecture this evening, that the Duke of Wellington had in fact been the person who was most engaged with the founding of the College. But the Duke of Wellington, as you rightly indicated, was better known for his battles outside of parliament than inside parliament. But he kept and later published a diary of his time as Prime Minister, and he has a very amusing account of his first Cabinet meeting. Obviously being the Duke of Wellington he was used to a lifetime’s military service, and giving orders and expecting them to be obeyed, and his diary entry for his first Cabinet meeting read something like: ‘It was an odd affair. Gave them their orders and dang me if they didn’t sit around discussing them for the next couple of years.’
And also it is a tremendous pleasure obviously to be speaking after Desmond Tutu. You were telling me before I came in that apparently you also managed to name a night-club after him here.
Chairman:
That is right.
Tony Blair:
I doubt I am going to get that honour. Blair’s is not quite the same as Tutu’s, is it?
And you are right. What I want to do tonight is to talk about Africa and climate change, and I want to do that in the context of the G8 Summit at Gleneagles last July, since this is a year on. And we achieved at Gleneagles more than all, I think, but those with the most rose tinted spectacles, thought was possible. The issues before then were not high up the political agenda in the UK, let alone internationally, and now they are. That they are is in no small part down to the efforts of millions of people, mobilised by the Make Poverty History campaign and Live 8, which played quite an extraordinary and magnificent part in mobilising civic society. But just because these issues are at the top of the agenda now doesn’t mean that they can’t easily slip down again. I will do everything I can to ensure that they don’t, but the purpose of my oration tonight is to hope that you will do everything too.
Let me recap what we actually achieved at Gleneagles. Six months before that summit, at the annual UN talks on climate change in Buenos Aires, the European Union and the United States were at loggerheads simply about whether we could even talk about tackling climate change after 2012 when the first stage of Kyoto expires. In fact it is an amazing thing to think that at the world summit on sustainable development in 2003 in South Africa, despite its title, climate change was not on the agenda.
By making climate change a priority for Gleneagles I wanted to re-start a more meaningful, more practical conversation between the key international players - the G8 plus the 5 other emerging economies. The aim was to get consensus that we needed urgent action to address climate change - a consensus lacking up to then - to agree on at least some practical actions we could take now, working with business and consumers to reduce emissions, and most important of all to establish an ongoing dialogue with the key countries for a strong international framework after that 2012 date.
We achieved all three of these objectives. We established a new consensus on the need for action which set the foundation for much more successful UN talks on climate change at the end of 2005 in Montreal, compared to the talks a year before in Buenos Aires. The G8 agreed a wide ranging practical plan of action on measures we could take now to clean up the way we produce, and the way we all use energy, and how to fund in particular developing countries to be able to access this clean technology too. And we established the Gleneagles Climate Change dialogue with 20 of the biggest energy-using countries that between them cover most of the emissions in the world. The next meeting of this group is to take place in Mexico in October to drive forward further the Gleneagles Action Plan, and in particular to discuss the elements of a future international framework and the outcomes of the Stern Review on the economics of climate change.
In addition there was some practical action. The International Energy Agency has developed four groups of practical energy efficiency proposals that we are going to discuss at St Petersburg at the next G8 in a few weeks time. The World Bank has taken forward planning for an investment framework to lever billions of dollars to help poor countries to get access to clean technology. And the European Union, under the British Presidency, agreed to help build a demonstration clean coal power station with China, which, if it works and is developed, will make a major difference on how coal can be used more cleanly. And we also agreed - the European Union - a new initiative with India on renewable technology.
On Africa I have learnt two key lessons in the last ten years in Sierra Leone, in Rwanda, in Ethiopia, and now in Sudan. Firstly, that everything is connected, there is no single solution. There is no point in providing healthcare if there is no clean water. People with an education also want skilled jobs. There is no point in having resources like oil if it only fuels corruption, so we need a comprehensive approach, that is the first thing. And secondly, I have seen that if there is real commitment by African governments to progress, then their people are well capable of doing the rest. And that is why, no matter how desperate the situation looks, or how insurmountable the obstacles appear, we have to maintain the optimistic belief that hope is indeed possible.
I recall when I visited in Ethiopia a year and a half ago a project in a village just outside Addis Ababa, called Debre Zeit, which helped children orphaned by Aids. And it was clear, just talking to those people in that village in a very simple setting - but it has been so every single time I have visited Africa - that people every time, in no matter how small a way, if they are given the chance of improving their future, they take it. And therefore the second thing that I learnt was that this process of change in Africa has to be a partnership, a deal between developed countries and African governments, not simply something handed down from the wealthy world to the poorer world.
So those two issues were building up before Gleneagles and I wanted Gleneagles to bring the G8 and African leaders together to agree a detailed and comprehensive plan that addressed the multiple causes of poverty together and effectively. That is why we established the Commission for Africa with Bob Geldof, who is here tonight, and to whose work I pay tribute, as I should do. He is inimitable, often unrepeatable, very occasionally even unspeakable, but actually most of the time delivers an energy and commitment to this that is quite phenomenal and is one of the people that I admire most.
The Commission published its report, ‘Our Common Interest’, in March 2005. What is worth just reflecting on for a moment is that at Gleneagles three months later, the G8 agreed with African leaders - and it was agreed between the G8 and the African nations - to implement over 50 of the detailed recommendations of the Commission. As well as agree to cancel debts and double aid for Africa, there were commitments on peacekeeping, on Aids treatment, on free healthcare and primary education, on improving infrastructure and encouraging investment.
My main disappointment at Gleneagles was that we were not able to make more progress on trade. In a way what was most frustrating was that the leaders there all agreed that we needed a good outcome for developing countries from the Doha Round, but the negotiations at present frankly are not reflecting this.
Now I have been working hard since Gleneagles to turn this political commitment into a real breakthrough in the negotiations, but we are not there yet, and the coming month will be critical. And if you will forgive me just digressing a moment on this, in my view we have to have an ambitious pro-development package that will help millions climb out of poverty and stimulate global growth. This will mean further cuts in agricultural subsidies and significant market opening, as well as a deal on industrial goods, and most importantly a package of measures for the poor countries that includes some $4 billion worth of aid for trade so that they have got the capacity to trade, not merely the open markets into which they can trade, 100% market access and the power to choose their own economic and trade policies.
Now if we are going to get such a package, then everyone is going to have to move beyond the comfort zones in which they are in part at the moment. In the coming months I will work to try and make this happen. What I would emphasise is that if we fail, this is a blow not simply for the poor of the world, it will be a blow for the whole of the multilateral institutions of the international community. It is why this Doha Development Round is of crucial significance for every single major country in the world at the present time.
In any event, to go back to Gleneagles. Not everything we wanted, but I genuinely think it was the most that was ever likely to be achieved in the circumstances. Now at the time some people focused on the shortfalls - some people just always do - but others recognised how much had been achieved at what Kofi Annan called the greatest summit for Africa ever. But I think everyone agreed then, and still agrees now, the real test is yet to come. Will these promises be kept? I would say, a year on, we are doing better than many would have predicted, but not of course fast enough on everything.
So what have we to do? On climate change in the next 12 months we need to build a global consensus about the scale of the action we need to take and the long-term goal we are all working towards. We need to begin agreement on a framework that the major players - the US, China, India and Europe - put into, and has at the heart of that framework a goal to stabilise temperature and greenhouse gas concentrations. And we need to accelerate discussions, we can’t take the five years it took to negotiate Kyoto. But the important thing is that framework has got to be there and it has got to involve all the major countries in the world. If it doesn’t, if China, or India, or America are outside of this framework it is far more difficult to achieve what we want.
I also believe a clear goal and a strong framework would help spur the technology revolution we need. It is vital to give business the certainty it needs to invest in cleaner technology and reduce emissions so that they can produce the clean products consumers want to buy. And what I find when I am talking to business about this is that they do want to make a difference, they do want to be involved, they actually see potentially enormous commercial opportunities in it, but they need a framework so that they can plan ahead for their investment, and that is what we have got to give them.
And I happen to believe in such targets because I have actually seen them work. The best example is the EU Emissions Trading Scheme that has already been shown to be an incredibly powerful incentive for private sector action, involving around 12,000 installations across 25 countries, and a market that is estimated to be worth now 5.4 billion euros.
The investment decisions that are being made now, both within Europe and across the world, will determine what happens to global emissions in the next 15 - 20 years. But we need to go further. That is why within the European Union I believe we need to give a clear strong signal to business that this emissions trading scheme should be extended and strengthened after 2012 and made the heart of a global carbon market.
We also need more investment in research into cleaner technology to bring that technology from design to manufacture, and to enable it to be used by households in both developed and developing countries.
The OECD recently estimated that the market for cleaner investment in developing countries through the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development mechanism, is worth about $10 billion. But we know this is not enough on its own and we will need stronger action to help the poorest countries adapt to climate change both now and in the future.
And finally we need to back all this up with real action to reduce UK domestic emissions. It is worth just pointing out that the UK has already reached its target under the Kyoto Protocol, 7 years ahead of schedule. We will be doing actually double our Kyoto targets by 2012 - a track record very few can better. But there is also a more ambitious 20% target on CO2 emissions. We are getting closer, but we are not there yet.
The Energy Review, which will be published shortly, will be critical in setting out new measures to help us go further, including on renewables and energy efficiency.
We need also however to recognise that taking action on climate change is not just a matter for governments. Yes, government needs to give a lead, but ultimately one of the things government has got to do is to make it easier for each one of us to act in our daily lives, in the choices we make, whether it is in the energy we use at home or how we move around, we can each also make a contribution towards tackling this global challenge. But we need to get the framework in place, we need to get it as a framework that involves all the major countries, we need to make sure that within that framework we are incentivising business and the consumer to make the choices necessary to make a real difference on climate change. We estimate that by 2050 we are going to have to reduce emissions by 60%. The truth is Kyoto stabilises emissions. So that is the scale of the problem.
Now if we want to mobilise the research and development, the innovation, the creativity and the technology in order to bridge that gap, we are going to need very much more radical measures than those that have been taken before now.
Let me turn to Africa, first of all on the numbers. At Gleneagles we agreed to double aid for Africa and increase total aid for all developing countries by $50 billion a year, up from $80 billion in 2004 to $130 billion by 2010. In 2005 aid was increased to over $105 billion, it was hugely over half way to the 2010 target.
Now it is true a lot of this increase in the figures resulted from debt cancellation for Iraq, for Nigeria. We know that this meant that for some there is a real challenge to ensure aid figures don’t fall again in 2007 and 2008. We are trying to face up to that challenge. DFID increased aid to Africa from Britain by 22% last year to over
£1billion for the first time ever, and we have increased aid by 140% in real terms since 1997.
But again we acknowledge we have to do more. We are taking forward various innovative financing mechanisms to ensure that aid is increased as quickly as possible. Along with a number of other countries, Gordon Brown has launched the International Finance Facility for immunisation, and this is going to frontload some
$4billion of aid to help save somewhere in the region of 5 million children’s lives before2015. The first bonds will go on sale this year. Solidarity contributions on airline tickets are another innovative way to help deliver more aid. The UK already has an air passenger duty, and with France in particular we are developing an international drug purchase facility designed to lower the costs and improve the availability of drugs for HIV and Aids and malaria.
We are not apologetic about increasing debt relief. Debt relief brings real benefits to developing countries. NGOs campaigned for Nigeria’s debt to be cancelled, and we worked hard with Nigeria to find a solution. It is worth just pointing out that as a result of that solution, although I know some wanted us to go further, Nigeria is now developing poverty reduction programmes that will be funded from the annual savings of at least US$1billion, employing an extra 120,000 teachers and sending 3.5 million children to school.
In addition the G8, thanks to the work that Gordon did, agreed to cancel 100% of the multilateral debts of the highly indebted poor countries. This could amount to a total of $50 billion of relief. 14 African countries have already benefited from cancellation of their debts to the IMF. The World Bank and Africa Development Bank will cancel debts owed to them in July. A further 18 African countries could benefit once they qualify under the HIPC initiative, which is to ensure that the resources released by debt relief go to the benefit of the poor. Zambia for example has already used the resources released from this debt relief to make healthcare free for all people in rural areas.
These increased resources should help us invest, above all, in better healthcare and education for poor people in developing countries and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals to get all kids into primary school, to cut infant and maternal mortality rates and to tackle infectious diseases. Again here there has been progress, but we need to go further. The polio eradication initiative is on track to end polio transmission in all countries, except Nigeria, by the end of 2006, though extra international funding is still needed to eradicate polio fully.
It is 25 years since Aids was discovered. For the first time we have in place the means to begin to reverse the Aids epidemic. Eight times as many Africans are on treatment now as three years ago - 8 times - but still only 1 in 5 who need it get it. The G8 agreed that we should aim to provide universal treatment for all Aids sufferers by 2010. The UN has now agreed that every developing country should produce a plan for delivering on this promise, and that no plan that meets the criteria of the UN should go unfunded.
On corruption we have ratified the UN Convention against corruption which came into force in December. We are taking action to enforce this. We are implementing the recommendation of the all-party parliamentary group on Africa to set up a dedicated unit, joining up the Met and City of London Police with other key agencies and departments to deal with international corruption and ensure that allegations of bribery and money laundering are properly investigated. I know it sounds peripheral to the central task facing us in Africa. It is interesting when I met at a meeting I was doing in Bristol last week on a completely different topic, I met someone from one of the African countries who said to me that action on corruption was probably the single most important thing that we could do for her particular country. And the fact that we are able now to take action against the assets of the fruits of corruption, often transferred abroad, is immensely important.
And then there is another particular priority of mine, which is peace and security. Over 20,000 peace keeping troops have been trained since the 2004 G8 pledge to train 75,000 by 2010. We have been training for example Rwandan troops in Kenya who are now protecting refugees in Darfur. I learnt about this from the time in the year 2000 in Sierra Leone where we sent - the UK - a relatively small force to Sierra Leone to help end the civil war. I have always since that time been sure that if Africa had its own ability to respond rapidly to the conflicts as they broke out, then many of the long protracted conflicts we have seen on the continent could be avoided.
Yes, poverty is a killer, and yes famine is a killer, but so is conflict in Africa. And conflict is what often contributes to the famine and to the spread of disease. It prevents countries settling down, it prevents them having any prospect of getting inward investment, it prevents the people of enterprise in the country having the possibility of moving forward.
Now the African Union has established this doctrine of what they call non-indifference, which is I think a very good way of putting it, and they have now established a standby force to do this, and we will help it achieve full capability by 2010. But I just want to emphasise why this is so important. In the Sudan at the present time we have an African Union force. But let us be very clear about this, if we had had a really good standby force capability when things first began to go wrong in Sudan, the situation would be very, very different today. The fact is we have had to go through a situation of trying to broker agreements between the different groups, whilst all the time in Darfur, an area the size of France, an enormous area without proper infrastructure, so extremely difficult to police, has been in a situation where literally tens and tens of thousands of people have been losing their lives. If we want any reason why this issue of an African Union standby force is critical, again not peripheral, in dealing with the issues of Africa, then we need to look no further than the Sudan.
The European Union has now agreed to provide some 300 million euros for the Africa Police facility for the period 2008 - 2010 to support these efforts further. But I think this is an absolutely critical part of the picture on Africa.
And finally, there is actually some good news on Africa’s economy. Last month’s IMF world economic outlook showed that Africa’s economy is growing faster than the global average. It said, and I quote: "Growth in excess of 7% in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, reflects the continuing positive effects of early reforms", and again I quote "The economic outlook in sub-Saharan Africa remains positive with growth of 5.8% projected this year, the highest rate in over 30 years, underpinned by high commodity prices, improved macro economic policies and structural reforms."
I say that simply to emphasise that although we always hear the grim news, and there is enough of it from Africa, actually there are people making changes in Africa to the real benefit of their citizens and it shows that it can be done.
We are also trying to make that investment happen in Africa’s economy. At Gleneagles we pledged to support the African Union/NEPAD investment climate facility we launched in Cape Town a month ago with about $100 million of initial capital from four multinational companies, three governments, two international organisations. We also pledged to build an international infrastructure consortium to increase investment in the infrastructure which business in Africa is crying out for. We launched this in October. In its first year consortium members secured funding for 10 regional projects worth $700 million, and 34 country projects worth somewhere in the region of US$2 billion, and they have agreed scoping studies that will lead to further rounds of new infrastructure projects. So all of these things have to come together, that was the purpose of Gleneagles. The purpose of Gleneagles was to say it has to be a comprehensive plan and it has to be based on partnership between Africa and the developed world.
What is the next set of objectives? We will publish shortly a new White Paper on eliminating world poverty, which will set out what we need to do in the next ten years to ensure that we deliver on Gleneagles and get Africa back on track to deliver the Millennium Development Goals. And we cannot be complacent or under-estimate the action required. I want at the G8 Summit in St Petersburg the leaders to reaffirm their commitment to the promises they made at Gleneagles, review progress and focus on further steps we can take, particularly on health and on education. And on health and education for a moment therefore, the G8 has promised to help developing countries to fund free healthcare and primary education for all - that was the promise we made. The challenge is now for the developing countries to draw up ambitious plans for both areas of activity and for the G8 to provide the long term predictable funding that is required.
And to encourage developing countries to do this, and to encourage developed countries to step up to the mark, the UK is taking the lead. In April Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn announced that the UK would provide £8.5 billion over the next ten years to fund long term education plans, and in order to deliver on this I can announce tonight that DFID’s budget for education will more than double to over £1 billion a year by 2010, up from about £450 last year. Alongside funding from others, this will help to give at least 22 developing countries the predictable funding they need to invest in ambitious long term strategies to get all children into school by 2015. And as we get closer to getting all children into primary school, the demand will increase for secondary and higher education. This again is crucial to give people the skills they need in developing countries to work in a growing economy and to be the teachers, the doctors, the nurses and the entrepreneurs needed to provide health and education for the next generation.
In our forthcoming White Paper the government will set out how we will increase our support for post-primary education to underpin economic growth, good governance and public services. In addition we need to provide developing countries with long term predictable funding for ten year health plans to provide free basic healthcare and universal access to Aids treatment. Save the Children have estimated that making healthcare free for all could save nearly 300,000 kids lives in Africa every year.
So we will be working with developing countries, with the NGOs, with other partners, to produce those ten-year health and education plans and to secure the funding for them. The important thing is this, it is for the developing countries to produce their plans, but if they produce them, no good plan that meets the criteria should go unfunded. This will require obviously a huge joint effort by all donors to implement the commitments made at Gleneagles and at the UN Millennium Summit. And at St Petersburg we will discuss specifically the launch of a pilot, called Advance Market Commitment, to stimulate research and development into vaccines for killer diseases.
However, we can’t just focus on health and education, we have to focus on the whole of what was as I said, a comprehensive package. At Gleneagles the G8 agreed that the existing Africa Partnership Forum should be strengthened to monitor implementation. The UK and other donors are funding the establishment of a support unit to help the APF carry out its monitoring mandate. The Commission for Africa recommended the establishment of an independent mechanism to monitor and report on progress, and in the year since then I think this has become more necessary and not less.
Working with Bob, who is also as I said on the Commission for Africa, I have therefore decided to convene a panel of world leaders from all sectors to ensure that our promises to Africa are kept. It will be called the Africa Progress Panel, it will encourage and measure progress against the commitments made to and by Africa at G8 and UN summits, notably Gleneagles, towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, and will maintain the international political profile of Africa that was achieved last year. Kofi Annan has agreed to chair it, he has worked tirelessly for Africa as UN Secretary General for the last ten years, and before that within the UN. No-one understands the challenge better. We will be ready to introduce the whole panel in the next few weeks, but I can say that as well as Bob Geldof and Kofi Annan, President Obasanjo of Nigeria, Graca Machel, Peter Eigan, the founder of Transparency International - who has done so much to make sure that we have transparency in commercial dealings in Africa - have all agreed to be on it, and Bill Gates has also kindly agreed to fund it. It is a remarkable thing about the announcement today that anyone has got that amount to put into anything, but anyway, it is fantastic work that Bill does and we should be very grateful he has helped to do this.
The panel will produce an annual report that will be submitted to the G8, the UN and the Africa Partnership Forum, and I will meet the panel regularly to hear reports from them.
So there is an enormous agenda of work to do and I am under no illusions at all that we set very, very ambitious goals for Gleneagles. We have made good progress but it is going to take an enormous amount of work in the years to come to eliminate poverty in Africa and tackle climate change. However, the fact is we have a framework in which these things can now be done. The truth is that the Commission for Africa and the Gleneagles Summit gave us the commitments that are necessary for the years to come. We have to deliver on those commitments, but no-one seriously disputes the analysis, no-one seriously disputes the scale of the challenge, and actually no-one really disputed the scale of the commitments at the time they were given. But we have to make sure that they are now implemented and carried through.
In addition, if the G8 and the five that came to the G8 last year - China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa representing Africa - if we are in a position where we can establish a proper framework for tackling climate change in the future so that post the expiry of Kyoto in 2012 we have a framework with binding targets, a stabilisation goal and a means of getting there, then we will have begun, possibly late in the day, in fact definitely late in the day, to tackle what must be the biggest long term threat facing our planet.
This will take a lot of hard work by governments, it will take an enormous amount of support outside of government. I mentioned the importance of the Make Poverty History campaign, the Live 8 concerts last year, frankly we need that type of public support year in year out in every country if we are to end poverty and stop climate change. But we have in both those huge issues facing us the possibility of making a real difference. Whether we do so or not depends I think on the specifics of both programmes for change in Africa and for climate change, but I think it also depends on something else. It depends on our acceptance that there is a different type of foreign policy on offer today, which is not simply about narrow national interests or competing spheres of influence, but is a recognition of the fundamental change that has happened in the world over the past few decades, driven in many ways by globalisation but not by globalisation alone. That change is that the only sensible view of national interest in the modern world is an enlightened view of self-interest, that in other words if we fail to tackle the problems of Africa, though the moral cause is huge, so are the reasons of self-interest.
Look and see what is happening in Africa today, look at how many of the disputes could spill over into issues like mass migration and terrorism and conflict that could be exported beyond the boundaries of Africa to our countries. Look there and if the moral cause does not inspire you, for reasons of self-interest understand why it is important to act. And the fact is when we look at the challenge of climate change, yes it is important that Britain has leadership, but Britain is around 2%, or will be, of the emissions that harm our world. Unless we are able to use our position in the world to gain a partnership with other countries that involves China, and India and America and the major developing countries of the world, then we are never going to be able to deal with this problem.
So what does this really teach us? Quite apart from the importance of the specifics on Gleneagles there is one other major, major lesson of the past few years. That is that the only sensible view of foreign policy today is one of engagement, is one of preparedness to intervene, is one of recognising that if we have a problem the rest of the world has, that these problems can only be tackled collectively, they cannot be tackled individually, that the best form of foreign policy is therefore a muscular and a strong multilateral intervention on the issues facing us in the world today. Africa and climate change are two such issues that cry out for such an approach. We made progress at Gleneagles, but the hard part of the task is still to be performed.
Question:
Prime Minister, first of all my name is Martin Kirk, I am from Save the Children, so thank you for the name check for our research, it is always good to see that it gets through. I just wonder what message you would like to send to the other G8 leaders. We know that the British have done an awful lot in the lead up to Gleneagles and since with the … announcement for healthcare, the education funding, which is all well and good. Apart from the debt relief, which we acknowledge, and some of the HIV work, do you feel any sense of disappointment that the vision that was created last year at Gleneagles, a sense of unity of purpose, that you got all the leaders to sign their names on the paper, that any of that has evaporated somewhat and that none of them has come forward with the sort of initiatives that the British government have done? And secondly, in order to address that, have you had conversations with those leaders about the Africa Progress Panel and are they signed up to it?
Question:
I would like to thank you for the support that you have given through the NHS to an organisation like THET, which has linked NHS hospitals with Africa, and the support you are giving to Sir Nigel Crisp to do more work on development in Africa. But can I ask you to concentrate on the importance of trade, because it doesn’t really matter if everybody is being built up with investment and everything else if the world trade agreement does not enable people to earn enough money to pay back these debts.
Question:
Thank you for a very inspiring oration Prime Minister. My question really has to do with the trade if you like in health professionals, which we are seeing through the migration of health professionals, particularly from developing to developed countries. And we know that in fact one of the major benefits of mass migration are the remittances from workers worldwide which I understand actually exceeds any of the aid budgets of any governments worldwide, and it does create a significant dilemma for the G8 countries in particular because they are by and large the beneficiaries of this trade. I just wondered if there are any plans for the International Finance Facility to actually look at capacity building schemes for health professionals within developing countries and perhaps repatriation as one of those options?
Tony Blair:
Just on that last point actually, we are indeed looking, we have a protocol now in place in respect of key workers, particularly health professionals from African countries. Obviously it is very difficult when they both want to go and get a better life, to put it quite bluntly, and when you know if we say we are not going to take them, they simply move around what is a global market. But we are actually also entering into agreements now where we try and incentivise some of them to go back after their training. Some of the overseas scholarships that we have now got are specifically going to be geared on the basis that people come here, we give them actual free study here but then that is on the basis that they go back to their own country. And part of the aid that we need is to build the capacity, because the idea of aid that we have in our mind still is kind of that we give people money who don’t have money. Of course part of it is that, but actually building capacity is the single most important thing you can do in virtually any of these countries. That is why infrastructure and how governments and the public sector operate are very, very important and so we are looking at that.
Martin, your point about Gleneagles, well look I think that the truth is we have done a lot since Gleneagles, but yes we need to do even more. And what I would say to you is that the best way of persuading those other countries who maybe don’t view it with quite the same priority as us, is to engage their civic society that I think does see it in a very powerful way. That is why I think it is important that what the Make Poverty History campaign did and Live 8, that that rolls on, that that carries on. And also I think the other thing, if I can say this very gently but nonetheless strongly to people, is to put it in the right way which is to give credit but ask for more to be done, and I think that is important for politicians who are under enormous pressure, who don’t. Some of these countries who may have all sorts of people competing for resources and who actually sometimes would like to do more but kind of feel - well are we ever going to get any credit for having done anything at all. That for me is not an issue because I think we just do it and get on with it, but I think it is important that the right relationship is there between the NGO sector and governments. That is my honest view if you want to know how we can get the governments to do more. And yes I raise this with them the whole time, but the Africa Progress Panel I regard it as my kind of decision because it arose out of the Commission for Africa, and I am sure that it will have its impact beyond this country.
But we need to keep this going, and we need to keep it going with a sense of hope. This is I think sometimes important that occasionally when we are drawing attention to the plight of Africa in order to mobilise action, that we also even it up the whole time by saying ‘and look what happens when you do act, it is not all bad’. There are countries that are making a big difference with the way their countries are being run. Take a country like Mozambique, scarred by civil war and terrible, terrible problems, and actually for all that they have still got a massive challenge they have significantly turned themselves round. And I think sometimes the other thing we need to do is to get over the sort of fatigue that there is occasionally on this.
And the point that Michael was making on trade is absolutely right, but again this is where we need immense pressure in the next couple of weeks because we have got a lot to do. This world trade deal is the nearest thing I have ever come to the rubic cube in politics and the different bits of it have got to slot in at some point. We have got to get that done in the next few weeks because the US President’s mandate runs out in 2007 and people may have all sorts of issues to do with George Bush on other issues, which we won’t go into, and me for that matter. But on this issue the pressure from Congress is likely to be against free trade more than in favour of it, and we therefore have to really work at this in the next few weeks because I think that this trade deal is an absolutely essential part - especially for the development package obviously - of getting hope for a lot of these countries who if they are given the chance to trade, and then the aid for trade, are perfectly able to make big differences.
Question:
Thank you Prime Minister for a very wide ranging speech which reminded me actually of the keynote speech from Billy Brandt at Oxford prior to the launch of the Brandt report, and I am delighted to hear about the Progress Panel as a way of ensuring that the proposals today go forward in perhaps the way that we hoped the Brandt ones might have done but perhaps didn’t. Clearly the climate change thing is an issue which has arrived since Brandt and that is a new piece of the puzzle. One piece of the puzzle that Brandt talked a lot about was conflict, which was why we were so glad to have Desmond Tutu here as Visiting Professor in post-conflict studies when he gave the commemoration oration. You referred to the standby force, but I wonder if another part of the puzzle that we need to include is the whole issue of conflict, international conflict, whether that is in terms of the number of small arms we have been importing or whether we are renewing our nuclear deterrent, and the relationship when you talk about muscular preparedness to intervene, how that is done with the whole international community’s will.
Question:
Prime Minister, thank you very much for linking the two issues of climate change and poverty. You talk about climate change in terms of being a long term threat for us all, which it is, but it is also an immediate threat to the lives and livelihoods of millions of poor people, as Christian Aid’s recent report "The Climate of Poverty’ points out. We also would very much welcome an international framework for dealing with climate change, but do we not therefore need to go very much further as a country, as a UK country, because we in the rich world are responsible for most of the emissions that are causing the problems still, and therefore we need to lead the way. Climate change is an issue where charity very much begins at home. So should we in the UK, if we are trying to influence our partners around the world, particularly the US, China and India, should we in the UK not lead the way by setting an annual contracting carbon budget which we stick to very strictly with independent monitoring and auditing?
Question:
Thank you Prime Minister for your speech and I want to underscore the need for peace and security on the continent of Africa if we are going to have long term security and development. But I however want to mention a gap in the support to the African Union. Much attention has been focused on developing the military capacity of Africans to be able to peace keep or keep the peace on the continent. Very, very little attention has been devoted to the capacity of civilians. We have not noticed a gap but because of long years of military rule or civilian authoritarian rule the field of peace and security has been a no-go area for civilians, as a result of which the back stopping capacity in the African Union, or in ECOWAS for that matter, has been very limited, and unless we devote attention to this by training a cadre of Africans consistently it might be very difficult to be able to retain the capacity over the long term for peace and security.
Tony Blair:
We got into quite a lot of issues there towards the end, Dean. As I would expect from a Dean, it was very nicely done. And I think that the issues incidentally of climate change and global poverty are linked very directly. As Andrew was saying from Christian Aid, it is the case that these poorest countries are going to suffer most and over probably a shorter time period. They will be far less capable of handling it and there are real issues to do with desertification and so on that are going to be really, really difficult, so this is quite urgent actually. And the problem, and I will say some more about the standby force in a moment, but the problem with the point about intervention is this, that people agree with intervention when they agree with the reasons for intervening, and they disagree when not.
The difficulty that you get into is that there are always forces that will tell you not to intervene. Leave aside some of the more contentious interventions of recent years, but if you take something like Rwanda for example where, I don’t know, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people died, the fact is it is sometimes very difficult to get the consent of the international community in a unified way. Look, we have still got issues we have got to iron out on whatever intervention force there is in Darfur at the moment and yet the case for it is, one would have thought, pretty obvious. And it is true also that issues to do with small arms and so on are important, which is why we have been trying to get international agreement on these issues, with some success. My view is that the UN Reform Panel, when it came out with the idea that as one part of the changes in the UN we should actually agree that states have a responsibility to protect, and the international community has a responsibility to protect the citizenry of the world, I think that is a very important step forward. Because one of the things that I have always found very curious is why anybody on the sort of progressive side of politics certainly should not be in favour of intervening in circumstances where there are inhumane things being done by a regime to its own people.
Now the trouble is, around the world you will get people who say no, sorry, if you start down that road, heaven knows where it all ends up. And therefore there is a lot of reluctance, and sometimes one of the reasons why for example when Kosovo happened we couldn’t get UN Security Council approval was because others felt very strongly this is the wrong thing, you know you leave states alone, you never intervene. And so some of the issues there are very, very difficult to resolve.
But the reason I place such a focus on the standby force is because I think it is an absolutely central part of the whole equation in Africa, and I just want to return to it in a moment whilst dealing with Andrew’s point. On climate change I agree we should offer leadership, but I am dubious, I have to say, about an annual target being set and independently monitored, just as to whether it is practically doable. I have that worry because this can fluctuate enormously on a year-to-year basis. Now you may be able to build in all sorts of mechanisms and adjustment, but what I am interested in looking at is what we were asked by the Climate Coalition, which is to look at the idea of a sort of carbon budget. I think we should be refining policy in this area.
And I also totally agree that there will be a big argument about nuclear when it comes to the energy review, but it shouldn’t just be about that. Renewables, energy efficiency, and micro generation are hugely important and we have got to be bold on all those aspects of it. And the only reason I keep saying to everyone that you have got to have an international agreement is that you know without America in this deal, and China and India, we are not going to get it. And I will just say this one thing to you about America. A lot of people hide behind the US position on climate change and say, yes we will be doing this and we will be doing that, but you know these Americans won’t come on board for it. And actually the truth is if you are going to get America on board, you have got to get China in the deal because otherwise it isn’t going to happen. It doesn’t matter what any President agrees, they can come and fight whatever campaign they like, they will never get that through Congress unless they have got China in the deal, and if China is going to be in it, India has got to be in it as well. And that is why I say it is only international agreement that does it, but I agree we should go as far as possible in our own leadership.
And that just brings me back to the link between these issues. You see I think there is a link obviously at the level of climate change and Africa being important because if the climate carries on changing then the situation in Africa will become so much harder to deal with. There is a link also in the fact that these are multilateral issues that need a multilateral solution. There is also this link, and that is why I come back to the standby force. I totally agree with what the last speaker was saying about the civilian capacity, but what I have tried to do on both of these issues is to get what I would call a hard headed analysis and set of responses, and these are two issues that are too important to have people simply grandstand on. And the reason why I think the standby force is important is that - believe me - you can pour unlimited amounts of aid into Africa, but if you do not deal with these causes of conflict over resources then you can have improvement happen, but then a fresh wave of conflict attacks let’s say the Congo, and all that progress is then dissipated.
And as with these agendas, in my view there is always a hard and a soft part to it, and the soft part of the agenda in relation to development is aid and trade and debt relief and dealing with the killer diseases. What we try to do in the Commission for Africa is to put what I would call the hard part in as well, which is about governance in those African countries, about corruption, about conflict. And the fact is when these conflicts arise you have got to have sufficient armed forces, that is, military force, to be able to go in there and keep the sides apart, and anyone who starts the shooting has got to be stopped by force. Now that is I think sometimes a bit uncomfortable for people, but my view is unless you put both of those things together you don’t make the thing work. And what we have tried to do with the Commission for Africa is to make it a genuine partnership. I think when for example Olesegun Obasanjo recently said OK I am not going to change the constitution, I am going to deliver it under the existing constitution, it was an important moment. There are countries that are changing their governments in Africa democratically, that is an immense part of getting this thing resolved. Without it you will never resolve it, and you only have to look at the countries not going down that democratic path to realise that.
And on climate change I feel the same way. There is a soft part to this, I don’t mean soft in the sense of sort of unserious, I mean in the sense of easy to say, which is about the framework, about the targets and so on. The hard part is to say let us be clear, if you don’t get America, and China, and India in this deal, forget it, whatever anyone says, it isn’t going to work. And what we have tried to do with these two issues, linked together as they are, that is why I call it a kind of muscular multilateralism, which is an ugly way of putting what I am trying to say.
What I mean by it is that if you want to be in the world of practical politics that really makes a difference, as opposed to people making a point, then you have got to have that agenda knitted together in that way. And I think what we have provided at Gleneagles last year are plans that if done would work. I kind of feel that I am taking on sometimes the people on the right who will say look, it is all about national interests, forget about it, you know what can you do, it is all hopeless in Africa anyway, and the people on the left who say well if only America does this, or someone else does that it will all be hunky dory. Actually there is a common sensible ground that you can get to that is about strong firm action on every front that would actually deliver in practical political terms, and if we do that we will make a difference on these two issues. I If we don’t I think the future is very, very threatening for us indeed. I think on climate change, every single thing I read about this makes any mild obedience to the precautionary principle mean you should be rushing into action, you know we should be held back from acting on it, and frankly we are not at that stage yet.
And on Africa, as I said earlier, there is every single moral reason to act. Anybody who is seriously looking at what is happening in the world today and the migration that is happening, with all the pressures that are going on, anybody who thinks that if Africa does not improve, that it is without consequence for our own communities and our own streets, is I think being very blind to the reality of the way the modern world works. And that is why on both these things we have got to keep action up to the mark.
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