Clare Short

Clare Short's Keynote Speech
(full text)

Monday 7th July

Address to the 2003 General Assembly of the United Reformed Church by the Rt Hon Clare Short MP

Thank you very much, I’m very pleased to be here with you.

It is my view - and I think the case is unarguable - that the biggest moral issue facing the world is the level of poverty and inequality that we have in our world. Every generation - and all the great religions and all the moral philosophers - say we all have a duty to reach out to the poor and needy. But the duty to act depends on what is achievable and we are the first generation since humanity first evolved to have in our hands the capacity to eliminate abject poverty from the human condition. And that’s not an exaggeration, that’s not a romance. In terms of the capital, technology, knowledge, communication capacity we have, it is a completely achievable objective for our generation. And therefore it is our duty.

We live in one of the seven industrialised countries, increasingly becoming the post-industrialised countries, the OECD countries where 20% of humanity lives. There are about 40 countries in the world in which people, on average, have an income of about $20,000 per head for every man, woman and child. (In Ethiopia, for example, where there are currently 11m people facing hunger, it’s $100 per head. In most parts of sub-Saharan Africa the average is $300 per head.) In countries like ours, the fundamental question of material need, with which humanity has struggled since we first evolved, has been solved. There is untold wealth. Our great-great-grandparents, if they came back, would not believe the material wealth that is available to all of us now.

That doesn’t mean we’ve created a just society, that we don’t have inequality and lack of human respect for many of the individuals who live in our society, but even the poorest in our society have their fundamental material needs supplied. It doesn’t mean we have a good society, but the fundamental struggle that humanity has had since humanity first evolved - to survive, to have enough to eat, to see one’s children nourished and to be educated and so on - has been solved in our kind of society. You might find this contentious, but I believe so. I represent one of the poorest constituencies in Britain, the place where I was born and grew up, my great multi-cultural city gave us work and education, so I’m not talking about a place that I don’t know.

And yet I think yet we are bereft in very deep ways. In our kind of society there’s a loss of meaning, a loss of sense of purpose, of what we’re here for. It’s as though that struggle against material need kept us all going through the generations, gave us a purpose and a focus for our lives, and when that has been satisfied we’re rather bereft. What’s the point? What’s the purpose? What’re we here for? And yet material greed goes on being dominant, and politicians promise more and more economic growth, and more and more plenty as the purpose of our kind of society, when actually we’re spiritually and in many other ways bereft. And people are searching for another kind of meaning in societies like our own and feel this deep sense of loss of meaning. We’ve got a degradation of sexuality, excessive consumption of alcohol and the problem of criminality and drug-addiction - the problem that explains most of the crime and fear in our communities up and down this land. I think it is a contrast that is extraordinary. I’m coming on to how the rest of the world live, but this lack of meaning is making us unhappy. I think we also have a problem with our traditions of religious thinking and spirituality. We’re a society that’s turned away from our own traditions of spirituality, maybe because they got tangled up with dogmatic teachings that lots of people in society couldn’t accept. So you’ve got people yearning and moving towards Buddhism or towards other religions.

So I’m arguing that we, in the 20% of humanity with untold material wealth, lack wisdom, meaning and a sense of justice; we lack a sense of comfort in our kind of societies to make us proud and dignified and at ease with ourselves. That is an enormous challenge for us to after the fundamental material questions have been resolved.

At the same time there are six billion people in the world - more human-beings than have ever existed the whole of the rest of human history - in 1900 there were just over a billion of us - and even that was probably as many human-beings as had ever existed since we first evolved. By 1960 there were three billion of us. Now there’s six billion of us and there’s going to be 9bn by 2020-2050, when human population will stabilise. It’s a phenomenal shift in 150 years to go from just over a billion people to eight or nine billion people sharing our planet. And it’s nothing strange about the behaviour of people or the size of families in developing countries. In this country in 1710 there were five million of us. When people live in great poverty, they don’t live long. Lots of women die in childbirth, lots of children don’t survive past beyond the age of five. One of the things that comes with development is longer life and more survival. You get a growth of population and then you get to stabilisation of the size of population. That’s where we are in terms of the development of humanity across this world.

Of the six billion of us, half live on less that $2 a day. That isn’t what $2 would purchase in Africa, it’s the equivalent of what $2 a day would purchase in America. It’s a pretty small amount of money. That’s half of humanity, or 2.8 billion people. (Incidentally, every cow in Europe, under the Common Agricultural Policy, gets a subsidy of more than $2 a day, which is what half of humanity lives on.)

One in five of us, 1.2 billion people, live on less than the purchasing-power equivalent of $1 a day. That means they live under the sort of conditions that were common in our cities at the time of the industrial revolution: life expectancy not much beyond the early 40s, a lack of access to literacy. Half of humanity has no sanitation, over a billion don’t have access to clean water. Millions of children don’t get a chance of education or have any basic access to healthcare. 500,000 women a year die in childbirth and millions are permanently disabled as the result of the lack of very simple interventions. That creates poverty and suffering. One in five of us are living in those sorts of conditions.

We’re living in a world that is integrating more and more. In fact, humanity’s been integrating and trading and learning from each other, and sharing technology, from at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. But we’ve had a speed-up of globalisation, partly because of the end of the Cold War. Now there is one global economy instead of two great political blocks. And technology is driving change in the current generation: communications technology that makes the speed in which money, ideas, information can be moved around the world more rapid than ever before.

The world’s globalising and integrating - and it’s also urbanising. For the first time in human history, more than 50% of us are urban. The projections are that over the next 15 years that will move to 65% of people being urban. I think that the urban poor will be less patient than the rural poor. One can often romanticise the way in which the poor of the world work so hard and live so close to nature. But if they move in big numbers, as they do to these great sprawling metropolitan centres, living in slums in very visible poverty, they’re choosing to live there because that life is actually better than the life of rural poverty. I think as people integrate more, live in urban areas, see more and more clearly how the rest of the world lives, there will be more anger amongst the poor of the world at the contrast and the division and the inequality and the poverty - and the sense that we have plenty and they have so little.

Of course we have a growing problem of environmental degradation and strain on the environmental resources of the world. We 20% from the rich countries create 80% of the pollution and 80% of the consumption in this world of ours.

We have more and more talk. We have the commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. I understand that you endorsed those today and I think they’re enormously important. They’re a commitment that has been put together, through the United Nations, that the international system should work together systematically to reduce poverty. They’re a recognition that the systematic reduction to poverty requires a reduction in income poverty but it also requires that every child should get a chance to be educated. It requires that children should be able to survive and women should not die in childbirth - and that means clean water, decent nutrition and access to basic healthcare systems. They encapsulate the things that need driving forward in every country across the world in order to give the people of the world the chance to improve their lives. Now there’s an absolute global agreement on what we’ve all committed ourselves to do, it gives us a chance to unite our international endeavours and to judge, country by country, where we’re making progress and where things are moving forward and where they’re not, and how we can learn lessons from countries that are succeeding and pass them across to countries that are doing less well.

So we’ve got a global agreement, in a way we’ve never had before, that this is what we’ve got to drive forward and that we’ve all signed up to it. I think this is a big advance, because in the past presidents and prime-ministers from all countries in the world used to go off to the UN and sign up for wonderful declarations and then go home and do the same as they always did. Now we’ve got something clear and measurable by which the people of each country and the people of the world can test their political leaders and hold them accountable. And you signing up to them and maybe starting a movement amongst the faith groups of the world is very important to drive that ever-forward and ensure that the people of the world - and particularly the poor of the world - know of their entitlements and demands on progress. We signed up to all of this and repeated that commitment at the Millennium Assembly of the UN.

Currently we have internationally £50bn that we spend on aid to the poorest countries. It’s a small investment fund to help the poorest countries put in place the kind of arrangements they need in order to grow their economies, get all their children to school and so on. But the world spends $350bn a year on agricultural subsidies - that’s the rich countries. That means that we have expensive food, big tariffs against the natural exports of developing countries, and we have surpluses and therefore we pay subsidies to our farmers, or indeed to agri-industry, to export some of that surplus food and undercut the production of farmers and workers in the agricultural sector in developing countries. The USA, just to take one more figure out of the global figures, spends $350bn a year on defence spending.

Are we serious about these Millennium Development Goals? Do we mean it? £50bn for the whole global spend. We as a country spend £110bn on social security in our own country, and it’s £50bn for those 1.2 billion people in abject poverty or the nearly half of us living on $2 a day. As Andrew [Bradstock] so generously said [in his introduction], in my time at the Department for International Development the UK doubled its aid spending. We’re now at the grand figure of £3.6bn. And we spend more than £30bn on defence, just to get it in proportion. Or £90bn on health - good, something similar on education - good, £110bn on social security - good. But you can see how miniscule the amounts are. We can afford more. It’s a matter of will, not money. It’s a matter of meaning it, caring about it, being determined as a country to make our contribution to a greater sense of justice and fairness in our world.

We’ve got a panic going on in our country about asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are coming partly because the countries that they originate from are in trouble. The recent numbers have come from Afghanistan, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Somalia - all of these countries are in trouble. But there’s no doubt also that there are people desperate to get into our countries. They leave home and family and the lands they love. They go through terrible journeys across the world, just desperate to get into our countries to get a chance to work, to be able to make some money and send it back to their countries of origin. We’ve got a panic about asylum seekers, how can we get more and more controls? But actually it is partly a reflection of the inequality in the world - people from other countries simply wanting the chance to work and see their children educated and have the chances we have to improve their lives. We’ll either deal with the problem of asylum seekers and people wanting to migrate by more barriers, or we’ll be determined to create more justice and opportunity in the countries from which they originate. Then, as people move around the world they’ll do so out of curiosity and anxiety to share ideas and meet each other, rather than out of economic desperation.

There are people every day who die trying to walk across the Sahara desert and there are people every day who die getting dinghies and boats from North Africa to try to get into Spain. Dead bodies are found every day on the shores of Southern Spain, as people try to get out of Africa, desperate to get into our kind of economies, to have the chance of a life, a chance to work, a chance to send some money home. That’s the world that we’re living in. But you know what our newspapers are saying about asylum seekers and whipping up a sense of hostility and hatred and the need for a fortress Britain. That’s a reflection of the kind of inequality that we have in our world, and yet we live in a culture and a society that claims to be inspired by its Christian heritage. We have a Prime Minister who is publicly very strongly committed to his Christian outlook; we have a President of the USA who is very strongly committed to his Christian beliefs. I don’t know about all the other leaders of Europe, but I guess if we went through them, most of them would probably say they’re firmly committed to their Christian beliefs.

Jesus Christ repeatedly talked about the poor: how blessed were the poor, how much he was concerned for the poor, how the poor will inherit the Earth. He told us whatsoever we do to the least of his little ones we do it unto him. So we have very clear teaching, and it’s paralleled in all the other great religions of the world, the same kind of values: the need for justice, the need to give the poor of the world a fair chance. And we all sign up for it, and yet the world goes on with this level of plenty. We’ve even got this problem of obesity - a very serious growing problem of obesity in this world of inequality and poverty.

Now I think most church-going people would say, ‘Of course, Clare. Of course we care about development. I give money to Christian Aid, I campaigned for debt-relief, we’ve got all these Christian NGOs which campaign on these issues.’ But it isn’t good enough. It’s tokenistic, it’s a residual, it’s in the charity box. It comes later, after the mainstream things have been dealt with in our politics and in our society and in our organisations. Lots of very good people work in NGOs. They seek to grab a headline and raise some money to fund some projects, and that is good. But that isn’t justice. That isn’t an equally developed world. That isn’t every child in the world getting a chance to be educated. That isn’t clean water and sanitation for everyone.

Those kinds of things requires intervention on the bigger level and, yes, then that needs to be chided and pushed along by NGOs and so on - but sub-contracting the work to NGOs is to marginalise it. It’s not adequate, it’s not what Jesus Christ was talking about and it doesn’t deal with the problems that we are facing. And yet, as I said earlier, we’re living at a time when enormous progress is possible.

In the last 50 years more human beings have made the journey out of extreme poverty than in the previous 500 years. And when you think that the previous 500 years included the time when the whole of Western Europe and North America made that journey out of extreme poverty being the normal condition of the people, still in the last 50 years more people have made the journey. More people are literate, more people have clean water and more people have been educated. But we’ve got more people. So we have to scale up our efforts and apply the lessons of success - and they are plentiful lessons of success - more broadly, to more people, if we want to make more progress. But we know what works. There have been great advances and enormous gains are possible in this era and this generation. Two thirds of the poor of the world live in Asia, and yet there’s been great progress in Asia - enormous progress in reducing poverty in China over the past 10 or 12 years of so.

So if we’re going to work together as faith groups and churches, we have to it ecumenically. We have to link up with other churches worldwide and mobilise this energy worldwide to implement what our leaders have signed up to at the Millennium Assembly of the UN. There is a movement, the World Faith Dialogue, put together around the World Bank, where many of the great world religions have come together to talk about how we can drive this implementation. I think we should energise that and mean it and move it.

Africa is the poorest continent; it’s very close to Europe. Half the population of sub-Saharan Africa are living in dollar-a-day poverty. Poverty there is deeper than any other part of the world. There are countries in Africa that are making considerable progress but overall the continent is going backwards. 20% of the people of Africa are living under conditions of conflict, there are something like 10 million refugees in Africa. We talk about asylum seekers coming to Europe, but there are large numbers of refugees being hosted by very poor countries and neighbouring countries - people escaping from the conflicts in their own nation. We in Europe, as you know, have an enormous historical responsibility for the condition of Africa and some of the ridiculous national boundaries Africa inherited at independence that cut through normal geography or traditions of peoples - and, of course, African leaders have responsibilities too. But the people of Africa are enormously hard-working, as the poor of the world are, yet lots of them are living in failed states where constant conflict and terror means that they can’t improve their lives. Africa is a deeply religious continent, Muslim and Christian, people are very church-going, very committed to their faith.

To mark the year 2000, a study of the voices of the poor of the world was commissioned. It was organised through the World Bank. 60,000 people in 60 countries among the poor of the world were asked to talk about how they found life, how life was for them. It’s available, that document, I recommend it to anyone. It’s very moving. The dignity, but also hurt and anger, that the poor of the world talk with about how nobody hears them or listens to them. About how impossible it is to improve their lives. Funnily enough, the top issue they ask for is order and security. Because, of course, you can’t begin to get your cabbages grown or keep your chickens or get your children to school if you can’t stay on your lands or stay at home because there’s conflict that causes you to be displaced. But when asked who represents them, who speaks for them, who listens to them, they say over and over again, politicians are useless, their governments don’t listen to them. They don’t see much of NGOs. It’s their churches and faith organisations that are closest to them.

I think people like you should be moved by that. But it’s also a very big responsibility. If the faith organisations are closest to the poor, then the faith organisations ought to be doing better at enabling them to speak for themselves, and to demand justice and to demand the implementation of those Millennium Development Goals. Of course, the world’s hyper-power, the USA, by far the richest and most powerful country in the world, bruised and angry as it is after September 11th, bestriding the world and wanting to use its power to punish whoever it is that it thinks dared to assault it is one of the most religious countries in the world. People in America are far more church-going and church-active than people in Europe. And yet the USA is in a mood, and operating in a way, that endangers any vision of implementing the Millennium Development Goals and making a safer and more just world.

We’ve got a united commitment to justice, and to sharing the knowledge and capital and technology that we have, in a way that would make the world more fair - but would also make it more safe. I think that’s another big responsibility on faith communities. For whatever reason, the USA lives on a rather different planet than the rest of us. I think the links that faith organisations have need to be activated strongly and we need to work together to say, ‘look what Jesus Christ has to say.’ If we are committed Christians, then let’s work for this. That means looking at the world in a different way and looking at the dangers that face the world in a different way. It isn’t good enough for any of us to say, ‘thank God I’m not like the others. I campaigned for debt relief, I give money to Christian aid - or if I’m really radical, War on Want. And my organisation is represented at the Chancellor’s breakfasts.’

I think we’re living in a time of great opportunity and enormous danger. I think people in our kind of countries are yearning for something different than this materialism and lack of meaning. They’re yearning for some moral commitment, some fulfilment, something bigger than themselves to believe in, something that is just, decent and fine. And I think that issues of development are moving out of the charity box for people. I think the whole shift - and the faith organisations have been involved in this - in starting to demand more just trade rules for the world, is a shift to a world order of justice, rather than, ‘let’s give a little money for a little project, to try and soften the conditions of the poor.’ There’s a very significant shift there that has taken place and it is of very great importance. I think people in our kind of countries are looking for that.

I think in a funny way, you could say that we’re living with our Sodom and Gomorra. If you go to Birmingham anyway, this wonderful city of mine that is undoubtedly the centre of the universe - forgive me. It’s the place where the industrial revolution began. It’s very, very, interesting, beautifully multi-cultural, becoming much more comfortable with being multi-cultural. It’s taking a joy in that and becoming a kind of treasure for the world in the way in which people of all different religions, origins and backgrounds live together and are larger because we live together.

But if you go to the street where young people go to socialise on a Saturday night, the excess of alcohol and so on is a kind of desperation and I don’t believe it’s happy. There’s something wrong with us and there’s something wrong with what we’re giving them. We need, for ourselves, less obsessive materialism and to use the material plenty that’s now available to us for what it is intended: to give everyone the chance of a decent and fulfilling life, and to have more respect for each other and other peoples. That’s what material goods are for and after that, they’re useless.

Once we’ve fulfilled those basic needs, more doesn’t make any difference. We can only sleep in one bed, wear one set of clothes, eat so much food - even though so many of our fellow citizens are experimenting with a surplus of that. We need a renewal of a decent politics and a real democracy focussed on justice, truth and beauty. The sort of values that move people and that belong to people and then enlarge people. We need these for ourselves, for our own dignity in our own kind of society. But we also need it in order to have a safe and decent future world.

We’re at a crossroads. We’ll either make the world more just and more fair or it will become more and more bitterly divided and conflict-ridden. Diseases will spread - there’s multi-drug resistant TB spreading in Russian prisons, for example; there’s more and more dangerous forms of malaria, as well as the obvious HIV/AIDS which is spreading in India, Russia, China - it’s not just confine to Africa. There’s environmental degradation, and we’ll either deal with that by sharing the resources of the planet more fairly, and be more responsible with the consumption in which we engage, or we’ll all be in trouble. America can’t make itself safe through its power.

We can have more and more bitter conflicts and division - there’s a ridiculous book about a conflict of civilizations, the suggestion that there’s any natural conflict between Islam and Christianity when we both share the Old Testament, the roots of our religious outlook on the world. We can have more and more bitter conflicts and division coming through in front of our eyes if we’re not careful. This is a time for all good people, and people of faith, and people who are inspired by the teachings of Jesus Christ to mean it, to take it into the mainstream, to move our societies and to move our world forward.

Thank you very much.

After prolonged applause, Ms Short answered a number of questions. The Assembly gave her a standing ovation as she left the hall.

 

  

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Clare Short

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