Transcript: Q&A

Challenges and Choices for the UK: International Development

Ian Birrell

Columnist and Foreign Correspondent

Peter Kellner

President, YouGov

Claire Melamed

Director of Poverty and Inequality Programme, Overseas Development Institute

Clare Short

Chair, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative; Secretary of State for International Development (1997-2003)

28 April 2015

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2 Challenges and Choices for the UK: International Development: Q&A

Question 1

A few of the panel mentioned the triumvirate of defence, foreign policy and development. I was just wondering if you could comment on issues like trade and education, particularly, that are both aspects of foreign policy that both have a massive influence in Britain's standing overseas, and you would see those being involved in development.

Question 2

I think we have a twin problem. On the one hand, we are addicted as a nation to the operational, to crisis responses in foreign policy, vastly at the expense of upstream, structural responses. On the other hand, we have no organizing narrative through which we approach international development. Almost with no exception, the points that you've raised – transnational organized crime, corruption in government – they all have their roots in one thing, which is criminality. So I'd be interested in your views on, if you were to take a twin-track approach of getting more structural in our approach and having an organizing narrative through tackling criminality, which would give all the departments that you've talked about a common thread to organize against, how that would work.

Question 3

It would seem to me intuitive that the more bilateral aid or development is granted, the more that we would benefit, because it would be obvious that the funds were coming from the UK. I've understood about half of our development budget goes through multilateral organizations. So how is the government held to account for the correct use and the benefits that we get? We've seen committees bringing in corporate finance officers, challenging them on their tax policies, etc. Does that happen? Is it an area that is monitored and government is held to account?

Ian Birrell

Education, I think, is a very interesting thing, because Britain has developed a fantastic education sector at home which is a really strong part of the British brand, whether it's the secondary school education, the private education or the university education. It has, of course, been hit badly by the visa policies, which threaten slightly to undermine the future of it. Personally, I've always thought one good way, if we're going to have a lot of money spent on aid, is to give it to British universities to offer as free scholarships to people in the developing world, which seems to me to work on many levels.

In terms of criminality, I would have thought it all comes down to one word, which is governance. Everyone should be striving to have the best possible governance in developing countries. It's not a panacea because we know that actually child health outcomes can vary and it's not just governance which is the answer. But governance seems to be at the root of many of these issues, whether it's by creating a better business environment, whether it's by clamping down on criminality, whether it's by improving accountability and getting better public services. That's why I feel so strongly that we give so much money to countries who have the most appalling governance.

Thirdly, multilaterals, there is an issue there. There's very little scrutiny of people like the World Bank, people like the World Health Organization, people like the European Union. European Union admin costs are twice what DFID allows and yet we still pump money into there. Huge amounts of the money recently has gone on the Turkish sewer system, for instance, which is a way of helping their accession into the EU. This is what happens to our aid money, while we preach about helping the poor in the developing world. 3 Challenges and Choices for the UK: International Development: Q&A

There is a bit of a scam going on and there are a lot of questions. Should the World Bank still be always turning left on a plane rather than turning right, when they fly around the world? Is that a good use of our aid money?

Peter Kellner

I'd like to pick up on the operational, structural [indiscernible]. I agree actually with everything that Clare said, except for Palestine, and the second half of Ian's remarks. Let me give a particular example: piracy off the coast of Somalia. It's not been in the news for the last couple of years. There's a reason for that. The EU organized Operation Atalanta. It was physically organized out of Britain, out of Northwood, and working with the shipping companies to have shipping lanes which were protected, it put a stop to it. It also involved some helicopter attacks on some of the pirate bases. But the real solution over time is to give youngsters in Somalia a route into adult life where it is seen to be better not to be criminals, pirates or any other form. It's true that that requires governance, but it requires a lot of other things. It requires education, it requires health, it requires trading opportunities.

So it seems to me – and I picked on that one example; one could pick many around the world – when you say actually, what should we (either Britain, the EU, the World Bank or whatever) do, if one actually looks at any real living, major international issue, it seems to me facile to say it's bilateral versus multinational. It's military versus development. It's all these things come together.

I'm not going to dispute, Ian, your things about EU administration. But I just ask the question – maybe I just amplify my remarks to Clare – the EU, Britain playing a large part in it, supports a great deal of education, food, housing in Gaza. I think both the Israelis and the Palestinians would be astonished to regard this EU support as bolstering occupation. I also think that in practice, and I'm not saying the administration is absolutely perfect, if you were to disaggregate what goes on in Gaza into separate programmes (British, German, French, Italian, Spanish or whatever), I really think it would end up far worse. I think most people in Gaza are really grateful that the EU is stopping their lives being even nastier than it already is.

Clare Short

I agree that if people are suffering desperately in the occupied territories, you can't turn your back. But if you simply spend a lot of money on humanitarian relief that doesn't make their lives okay but it stops them dying and being desperate, but you do nothing about the political situation, then you're propping it up. That is my point. The question of the expenditures is a factual one that everyone can check.

On trade, there has been some progress. The launch of the last trade round, the Doha round, was meant to be a development round. It hasn't been completed and has been a failure, but there's been a lot of pressure to give more trade access to the least developed countries. There's the Everything but Arms initiative of the European Union and so on. So the poorest countries, their trade access has improved. DFID has an influence on UK policy to achieve that end, was one of its achievements.

On education, this is very important, about whether you should be in Nigeria or Rwanda or Ethiopia. The single most powerful intervention you can make in any country to promote development is to get a generation of children educated, including the girls. Girls who have been to school transform their country as they grow. They marry later, have less children, are better at increasing family income, at getting their own children to school, at accessing healthcare. So if some people are living – the Nigerian ruling class is a kleptocracy, it misuses the oil money and yet there's lots of poor people. Should we just 4 Challenges and Choices for the UK: International Development: Q&A

say we don't like the government so we won't do anything? Or should you look for interventions that will both bring a bit of relief to people who are poor but also bring long-term change? I think intelligent interventions do that. Similarly, in Ethiopia, it's very authoritarian but it's not having famines anymore. There's much more education and so on. I think that will lead to development and change in Ethiopia. Similarly in Rwanda, after the genocide in 1994.

So I think it's really foolish to say: this isn't a nice government, we won't have anything to do with any relief or any of the people who live in that country. It means you have to look for intelligent interventions that don't prop up the government, but it's possible to do that. I think that is what should be done.

I'm not sure it's true that the root of all problems is criminality. If you take the asylum problem, it seems to me the root of it is that we have a convention on asylum that was written after the Second World War, that lay down what we should have done to accept Jews fleeing from Germany – which we didn't, we turned away lots of ships of Jews fleeing from Germany. Now we have a convention which says anyone fleeing must be allowed to come to the first country they get to. So nobody can apply for asylum without arriving, and the whole system is run by criminal people smugglers. I think it's an outrageous system and we need a new convention where anyone who’s fleeing is cared for near that space by the High Commissioner for Refugees, automatically funded. The issue automatically goes to the Security Council and then all our countries take certain numbers of families in an organized way. That means anyone who arrived illegally would be returned to the camps, and that would mean the people smugglers were ruled out. I don't know why we can't have an intelligent conversation about managing that policy better.

But to the MOD guy, I would say one of the proudest things we've done as a country is Sierra Leone. It was a real collaboration between DFID and the Ministry of Defence. It wasn't a war but we had a collapsing UN peacekeeping operation. So there are things we can do together that will make countries that are both causing suffering and are unstable and dangerous, safer for their people and for us in the long term. So I don't think just the focus on criminality is the thing.

Then I want to respond on the bilateral thing. I agree with some of the criticisms. I don't think 0.7 is the crucial point, but I think development strategies are very important. But we have to get an international system that can work anywhere when there's a crisis. It must be able to respond to Nepal or wherever it might be. You need to preposition stocks and people need to be able to come into countries that are in an emergency. You don't want Union Jacks and French flags and German flags, you want to build a multilateral system. So I think putting a lot of our resources into an international system and focusing more on making it work better is a very good thing to do, rather than have lots of separate bilateral programmes.

As I tried to say, what's happening in the World Bank is really very destructive and needs a tighter grip. The UK is a big contributor and should be doing more. I think we could make the UN development system more effective. So I favour bilateral but you have to focus on it and make it work well. But there are too many actors, and getting a good and effective multilateral system that can work anywhere in the world is surely what we should be aiming for.

Claire Melamed

Just on that multilateral point, this government did introduce a multilateral aid review, where they did attempt to inject a certain amount of rigour into the assessment of where British taxpayers' money – into which multilateral organizations British taxpayers' money should go and on what criteria. One can 5 Challenges and Choices for the UK: International Development: Q&A

challenge the criteria, but it was probably a more rigorous and transparent process than we've seen to date. The reports of the review are all online.

I just also wanted to pick up on the points on education and criminality and governance. One of the things that we do at the Overseas Development Institute is, together with the United Nations, we run a big global opinion survey called the My World Survey, which has had 7 million responses to date. We think it may be the largest opinion survey ever, we're not really sure. It's a very simple question. It asks people to choose from a list of 16 options, what their top six priorities are for themselves and their families. It's almost impossible to cut the data in any way which does not put education at the top, for any age group, for any country, for men and women, for different levels of income.

The big surprise to me when we started to run the survey – I'm somewhat less surprised by it now, after a few years – is that an honest and responsive government is one of the options that people have to choose, and that is consistently in the top four. Usually the top four are almost always, as they say in almost every country, health, education, jobs and a good government. I think that speaks to a lot of the things which have been raised , both about potential priorities for aid but also about the sort of commonality of interests.

Clare Short

I think an honest and responsive government would probably come top in the UK.

Claire Melamed

Usually for people that is – when you look at that, when you correlate that with the responses from other opinion surveys and more detailed [indiscernible] data, what that turns into is something which is much more about service delivery and people just getting a good sort of service from their government, rather than necessarily anything grander around specific political freedoms or human rights concerns.

I think we've got time, if people are exceptionally disciplined, to at least get in those – I've seen three people clustered here who wanted to get in. I may not have time for everyone else, so I apologize.

Question 4

I just wanted to come back on that Save the Children point. I used to work for Save the Children for ten years, until about a year ago. I worked at Save the Children with Justin Forsythe and the directors when a lot of your press releases came in, Ian. What I'd like to say about that is I think you could be a really important critic of aid and move things away in a positive manner, because it's obvious you know and love Africa very well. You've got really important insights. But the nature of the polemic just doesn't do that justice. It feels like an attack on individuals, possibly because of their previous jobs in Labour administrations. I think it's a real shame, there's a lot of complexity. What I would like to see, as a former staff member, would be some of this vitriol – it just is unrecognizable. It's a shame security doesn't allow it, but you should go to the north of Nigeria and see the families that are benefitting from the cash programmes that Save the Children are doing, with DFID, there. Or go to the countries of your musical tastes, like Niger, and see the supplementary feeding programmes that have been run there for ten years now, which really do have a great impact. They're not being designed by people who are thinking, how can we get our snouts in the trough or influence SPADs or whatever. I think you've lost that voice. There is a lot of complexity. I recognize what you say about Rwanda, I worked there in 1994-95. But I also understand why people continue to support Rwanda today and what some of the alternatives might have 6 Challenges and Choices for the UK: International Development: Q&A

been. I think aid is a very ambiguous subject. All of us deal with very ambiguous situations all the time. It's not a great narrative to portray aid agencies in this, I think, very unfair light. Again, I read your stuff. I know how passionately you feel about migration. But if you want moral ambiguity in financial stuff, stop taking money from the Daily Mail and the Sunday Mail, they must be your biggest – because they're creating this atmosphere that you said is poisoning proper political debate about migration.

Question 5

Just in relation to this question about the European Union's role in bolstering the occupation, I think the fundamental point there is that it's the EU- association agreement –

Clare Short

Absolutely.

Question 5

– which effectively gives Israel preferential trade access to the European Union. A lot of that [indiscernible] access, for example, research and development and so forth, which not only bolsters the occupation, it bolsters the Israeli economy and makes us complicit in Israel's war crimes in Gaza and the continuing apartheid occupation. I just want to put it to Peter as well because one person who had a big effect on me recently was Alon Liel, the former secretary general of Israel's department of foreign affairs, who used the phrase to describe his own country – a former top diplomat – 'apartheid reality'. Of course, he is also involved in the board of B'Tselem, the well-known Israeli human rights organization which does a lot of work in documenting the abuses in the territories. I think the point is, it's not just that we bolster the occupation, we are complicit, because we do not enforce the human rights benchmarks under that trade agreement. Therefore, the European Union makes us complicit in that regard. Thank you.

Question 6

The interesting thing which I would like the panel to comment on is the following. We talk about development as a general area, but judging from what everyone has been saying it's much more diffuse than that. I'd like the panel to comment on the following. Development economics was founded, was started, in 1943. There was one famous article by Paul Rosenstein-Rodan which is regarded as the founding thing. The assumption was then that the development of modern economies had somehow been confined by market forces to a small minority of the world's population and that the basic rationale of development policy was to make modernization go global. That rationale is on its way out. The development of Asia but also parts of Latin America, the 40 per cent of the world's population in China and India and so on. What we haven't got today is a new basic rationale for development policy. It may ought to be called global civilization policy or something like that. But it isn't just dealing with backwardness. Would you please comment on that?

Ian Birrell

The issue I have with Save the Children is nothing to do with what Justin Forsythe used to do. The issue is whether you should have an organization which is beseeching people to hand over money when it's paying so many of its senior executives six-figure salaries, some at £200,000, £237,000 a year, when it's still using the type of advertising which is so scarring of how people perceive the developing world, which other charities don't do. Actually, it might interest you to know that I get a huge amount of support from 7 Challenges and Choices for the UK: International Development: Q&A

other charities when I talk about that particular organization because of the dislike for their commercial activities and fundraising that goes on. So that's not correct, your interpretation on that.

To the gentleman here, I do think you've put your finger on the core issue, which is the world is changing so fast, and in Britain we're stuck in the past. We're still seeing it as the poor people out there. We don't realize the speed of change, which is incredible. When you travel around and you come back to parts of Europe, it's like you're coming back to the past almost. We're stuck in this mindset that we're the elite and they're out there and they need our help. Actually, we need their help as much as they need our help. It's an incredibly interconnected world that's changing so fast and is so complex. I don't think the development debate tends to pick up and understand or appreciate that.

Claire Melamed

While I don't agree with many of your views on aid, it is true that if the development sector wants to, in a sense, be taken seriously as grownups, with serious policy positions, then in a sense we have to accept that becoming more professional organizations may mean losing some of the moral high ground, and we have to just get with that and behave like any other voluntary or commercial organization.

Clare Short

In 2000, when the Millennium Development Goals were set – to halve the people in extreme poverty, to get all children into school, to cut deaths from malaria and so on – there has been massive success. We're talking about an area where in terms of just numbers of people and more kids in school and less children dying of malaria and so on – but of course, it's halving. There's no doubt there's a new middle class, there's no doubt the world is changing, there's no doubt lots of least developed countries are now lower- middle-income countries. All that needs assessing and looking at. But there is still a lot of extremely poor people and there's still some children not in school. We've halved the numbers dying from malaria but it's not all, and we could do more. We could take what's been achieved and just reach everybody.

I agree the discourse needs to change. I agree the discourse is insulting. These poor, helpless people that we have to help. It's not like that at all. But there is room for investment in institution-building and economic development and getting kids educated and so on, that might need some resource transfers to speed up development in some of the most needy countries. I agree, we need a new discourse, but actually the achievements of the last 15 years are phenomenal, in terms of looking at the whole world and taking responsibility for the whole world, and aiming to lift the poorest of the world to a chance to participate in a civilized life, where they can take control of their own future. We've had a lot of success.

Claire Melamed

To some extent, this speaks back to the sort of schizophrenia of the way in which we sometimes think about these issues. While most people would say that they want to live in a more modern world but they don't see these sort of needy recipients of aid anymore, etc., anyone (including myself) who's worked for a large NGO will tell you that the most effective fundraising initiatives are those which portray people as being very passive and needy, and speak against all of the many good things that many of those organizations also are trying to do, to change public opinion. So I think you get some of the sort of duality around people trying to hold many different views about development and about Britain's place in the world at the same time. 8 Challenges and Choices for the UK: International Development: Q&A

Clare Short

But the government doesn't have to fundraise. By the way, you pay £157, each taxpayer.

Claire Melamed

On this, let me give the last word to Peter. Can we have a sensible debate about this in public?

Peter Kellner

What I was going to say is that if we end up having a referendum on the European Union – leaving aside the arguments about Europe and about the referendum – this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have a grownup debate about Britain's place in the world, about the interconnectedness of it.

Claire Melamed

And the chances are?

Peter Kellner

I hope the big lesson from the Scottish referendum was that a campaign based on fear alone is not going to be wholly successful or convincing. They've learned. I agree with you, Ian. It's at best 50/50. But there is an opportunity we've not had for decades to have that debate.

Claire Melamed

Let's all agree to come back in the middle of a referendum debate and see whether we're actually managing it.

Clare Short

We hope not to have that referendum.

Claire Melamed

In the meantime, can you join me in thanking the speakers.