Gordon Brown and global poverty
Posted on Tuesday 31 July, 2007
Filed Under New Labour
Gordon Brown has told an invited audience at the United Nations that there needs to be greater efforts to tackle world poverty. That’s hardly courting controversy.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a safer topic. Talking a good game on development issues is the easy option for any politician who wants to wear his conscience ostentatiously on his sleeve.
The only way the rest of us can judge the sincerity of those who make such speeches is to look at what they actually do, and what the politics they advocate actually achieve.
Brown is probably the chief backer of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, a $4bn bond issue designed to pay for the immunisation of 25m children.
But funding under this scheme is financed by borrowing against future aid commitments. Because this is necessarily more expensive than direct public funding, it actually amounts to a reduction in aid spending, according to the World Development Movement:
WDM’s research finds that the IFF would increase aid flows by $209bn in real terms for the first decade (2006 to 2017) of the scheme but that flows would plummet after 2017 if aid budgets were used to pay back the bonds at a total cost of $316.6bn in real terms.
The interest that has to be paid on the IFF bonds, 5-6 per cent according to Treasury figures, would reduce the total amount available for developing countries over the 27 [year] lifespan of the scheme by $108bn in real terms.
In other words, IFF takes $108bn that should be spent on healthcare in the world’s poorest countries, and hands the money over to investment bankers – the richest people on the planet – instead. Breathtaking.
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3 Responses to “Gordon Brown and global poverty”
I wasn’t really paying attention and Brown was on the TV talking about ending aerial bombardments, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, etc. I thought – for a split second – that he was talking about Iraq. He thinks he can dissociate himself from the occupation, but he was writing the cheques all along.
If Brown was serious about reducing global poverty, he’d've been assasinated weeks ago…
We’re all against nastiness. Not sin though, some sins can be enjoyable. The further away the poor are, the more compassionate Gordon Brown of that Ilk can feel about them. He’s used the same methods of future financing in this country, so it’s no surprise. How did these people ever get involved in the Labour Party in the first place? I mean I don’t expect hardened revolutionaries but I do expect honest, concerned liberals.
Indeed. Judge them on what they do. The new Astute class submarines, of which the Royal navy is have three, come to £4 billion.
Castro has pointed out that “with such an amount of money, 75,000 doctors could be trained to care for 150 million people, …. You could build 3,000 clinics fitted with sophisticated equipment”
Meanwhile Cuba, a poor country with just 12 million inhabitants, has trained thousands of doctors and sent them overseas on aid missions.