John Battle spoke in the debate on Thursday 26th october on International Development

John Battle (Leeds, West) (Lab): I declare an interest as a member of the Select Committee on International Development. I welcome the comments of the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell). The report published yesterday on conflict and development is crucial and is one of the best reports I have been privileged to participate in drawing up in almost 20 years in the House. It deserves a full debate on the Floor of the House and should be the subject of our next debate on international development. I shall leave it to our Chair to say more about that.

The world is eight times richer than it was 50 years ago, yet the inequalities between the rich and the poor are widening. There seems to be enduring, endemic poverty in the world. The Economist, in its future trends, suggested that we should focus on four themes in the next 50 years—in the first half of the century. The first of those themes was the development of economic globalisation, including India and China, but still excluding African countries. The second theme was the pace of climate change, to which Members have referred. The third theme was the impact of migration, which will massively increase and has been underestimated. The fourth theme was the persistence of faith and religion.

I welcome the White Paper, which is subtitled “making governance work for the poor”. I found it to be a brilliant summary of where we have got to on the subject both here in Britain and internationally. I felt that it was a good workbook or handbook; it tells some of the good stories of what has been achieved, as well as what we are up against. I recommend it, and I hope that there is a reprint—and, if there is, that it is distributed to schools and elsewhere—because it is a good volume.

In my remarks, I do not want to concentrate on governance and corruption. There is a view that 2005 was the year of international development. It was certainly the year of increased money and commitment to the aid budget—a doubling of it, in our case. I should mention that I welcome the commitment from the Conservative party; the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield has done very well to get his one commitment—and, I say with some edge, we shall watch that space. In 2005, there was some good work on aid and on debt—although there is much to do on trade, as other Members have mentioned, and I wonder whether there is an agenda for that. But at least it was a good year. However, although 2005 was a good year, on page 29 of the report there is a piece of graffito that says, “2006 corrupt. We need change.”

In facing up to corruption, there is a danger that aid is not used well. An agenda that focuses solely on corruption might take away the dynamic that has focused all our attentions on tackling poverty, so I do not want to focus on corruption.

Mr. Andy Reed (Loughborough) (Lab/Co-op): I was in Ethiopia last week as part of an attempt to tackle corruption and to address good governance. Does my right hon. Friend accept that many people on the ground recognise that corruption and good governance are crucial to their lifting themselves out of poverty? Does he agree that although, as he says, we should not concentrate solely on that, it is fundamental to everything that flows from it?

John Battle: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his remarks, and I hope that others will underline what he says, because I agree that it is crucial; I will listen to other contributions on that, and I am convinced of the point. But other points are missing from the report, and I want to focus on them.

Good governance is about more than simply elections. We seem sometimes to think that good governance equals having elections, but my experience in visiting countries and occasionally being an observer of other countries’ elections—as other Members occasionally are—is that there is an emphasis on getting people organised so that they get to the polling booth, on organising the voting booth, on making sure that voters stamp their thumbs properly on the ballot paper, and on making sure that they are organised into lines. Often, when officials and civil servants are helping in the process of ensuring that elections take place well—they do so with the best intentions, so I say this without a pejorative edge—it is as if the people just need to be shepherded in the right direction, and then on the day of the election the problem is solved. Elections are sometimes seen as the end of a strategy, rather than the beginning of a process. We must focus much more on the process of politics, and on an election being a part of that process.

Let me just point out that in 1945 there were 32 countries with a universal franchise—countries that we would call democratic—and that there are now 192. So elections are taking place regularly, but I think that we have more to do, because in many cases we are a long way from having what I would describe as participatory democracy, built from the base upwards.

I suggest that we, as practising politicians, cannot leave election processes to officials. We, as politicians committed to political parties, could do much more to help build up political processes in emerging democracies, and particularly in fragile states, so that we do not leave countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo thinking that it can have an election that might reinforce the existing elite and that then the show is over. No: I hope there will be more elections, even though that one was its first for 30 years. That process will help the transformation of that society.

I particularly welcome the commitment given on page 124 of the White Paper to building links between community groups, tenants and residents groups, local government, faith communities, schools and businesses and charitable organisations here in Britain. I want a much more mutual conversation about building participatory democracy—one that does not assume that we in Britain have done it, have all the answers and have a perfect democracy. We have not, but we can learn from each other through exchanges and by building a much more mutual conversation.

Page 20 of the White Paper contains the most important passage in the whole report. Under the heading “Understanding good governance”, it refers to
“Providing ways for people to say what they think and need. Implementing policies that meet the needs of the poor. Using public finances to benefit the poor—for example to encourage growth and provide services. Providing public goods and services in ways that reduce discrimination and allow all citizens—including women, disabled people and ethnic minorities—to benefit.”

That is a basis for working on the theme of participatory democracy—by building, perhaps, from the base up.

Secondly, I want to echo the points that the Secretary of State—and, indeed, the shadow Secretary of State—made about the pace of climate change. As desertification, the destruction of forests and flooding in Bangladesh show, it is the poor who pay the highest price for the lack of action in the northern hemisphere. The onus is on us to do much more, for the practical reason that they cannot: they do not have the capacity to prevent such occurrences or to address their impact. We need to do a lot more to blend the climate change and poverty eradication agendas.

Indeed, one theme that has emerged is the good will of people toward addressing climate change. They are willing to change their behaviour—to change their light bulbs, unplug appliances and get personally involved.

I want the climate change and poverty eradication agendas to be fused, so that people say, “Can we live a bit more simply, so that other people can simply live?”, as Ghandi once said. If we are altruistic toward the environment, we might also be a bit more altruistic toward the idea of reducing the gross inequalities between the rich and the poor. We should fuse together those agendas, rather than continuing to believe that it is a question of trees versus people—an attitude that we are still a little locked into. Trees and people go together, and we must realise that fusion.
To my mind, the millennium development goals do not focus sufficiently on employment, which is an issue that does not resonate loudly in the report. Of course we need business development and economic growth, but we need a much stronger focus on employment. We must take into account the increase in the world population, to which reference has been made, and the emergence of China and India, but the real issues across the globe are going to be job generation, employment and under-employment.

The meetings that I have held in my constituency about making poverty history have been very positive, but one went wrong. It was held around the time that the Chancellor announced an extra £10 million for schools in Africa. One person at the meeting who lives in one of the poorer communities in inner-city Leeds—and who has every good will toward African countries and their development—said to me, “John, why should I support money for Africa? I am not against training and educating them, but if we do, they might be trained better than I am, and the jobs will go there and not here. What will we do about unemployment here? What about migration trends? Where will the work be within the world?” We should not draw up protectionist boundaries, but we need to address much more seriously the questions of migration and employment.

Is the growth agenda about job generation and employment? That issue is not dealt with in the millennium development goals, but it is a vital question in East Timor. Young men who participated in the conflict there and who were once armed are now standing around saying, “Where are our jobs? We have handed in our guns, but if we do not get jobs, we will start fighting again.” Exactly the same is being said in Freetown, in Sierra Leone, and in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Without work, people do not have a vision of the future.
There is another very encouraging statement on page 25 of the White Paper:
“The UK will...adopt a new ‘quality of governance’ assessment to monitor governance and our partners’ commitment to fighting poverty...use this assessment of ‘quality of governance’ as well as commitment to the three principles—reducing poverty; upholding human rights and international obligations; and improving public financial management, promoting good governance and transparency, and fighting corruption—to make choices about the way in which we give UK aid.”

That offers a strong human rights agenda based on tackling corruption, the initiative that the Secretary of State is launching, and making good governance work for the poor.

This is about not only tackling corruption and improving accountability but building up a culture, here in the north as well as in the south, of what I would describe as economic justice. We should institute that concept as a different paradigm that brings together the agendas on the environment and tackling poverty. Tackling poverty is a universal challenge: north and south; urban and rural. Tackling wider inequalities is about good politics; they go together. The report helps us to realise that.

Democratic politics must be developed in depth from the base up. In African countries especially, that means taking account of the structures of solidarity, community and hospitality that already exist and working through them to blend new shapes of democratic participation.
I modestly suggest that politicians who get behind the agenda of tackling poverty as an economic and a political agenda will do much to restore faith in politics and the processes of politics. That is a challenge not only for African and poor countries but for us here and now.

John Battle MP 26 October 2006