For the Record

by David Cameron

  I tabled the paper the next day, and chaired the meeting aggressively, giving each committee member no more than ten minutes to talk. One by one, they signed up to the list. Those twelve goals eventually became the seventeen ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, including that of which I am most proud, SDG 16, which promises access to justice and stronger institutions. The ‘golden thread’ – or at least most of it – is now something global leaders are united in striving for.

  Despite better goals and a more targeted aid budget, it was still a struggle to sell the massive commitment we were making on development. So I decided to highlight its benefits with annual conferences – key ‘moments’ – to promote our work and seek funding. It was essentially ‘Give us your focking money’ for politicians – and it worked. At the Vaccines and Immunisation event I held in 2011 with Bill Gates, we arm-twisted enough money out of leaders and foreign ministers to help prevent four million deaths from pneumonia and diarrhoea.

  I used this ‘convening power’ to get people talking about the more controversial subjects. For our 2012 ‘moment’ I seized on the issue of family planning. In Sierra Leone, for example, two-fifths of girls have their first child between the ages of twelve and fourteen. This was both a cause of poverty and a consequence of poverty – and, frankly, horrifying. But for decades family planning had been something of a taboo subject in the international community.

  I wanted to break this taboo and help get basic family planning services to the millions of women and girls who desperately needed them. And I wanted to go further, by calling out practices such as female genital mutilation. I announced that Britain would toughen its laws on FGM, and lead the way in stamping it out in countries like Sierra Leone, Guinea, Djibouti and Somalia, where over 80 per cent of girls are subjected to the barbaric practice.

  ‘It really should only be discussed by African women,’ some officials warned me as I planned this. Ridiculous. It was exactly this sort of cultural relativism that had let us overlook the disgusting crime for fear of offending anyone.

  Then there was the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict – the largest gathering in history to tackle the stigma and culture of impunity that enabled rape and sexual violence to be used as a weapon of war. William Hague made this harrowing issue his big focus, driven by his tenacious spad Arminka Helic, herself a refugee of the Bosnian War.

  As for 0.7 per cent, the opportunity arose for us to enshrine it in law – something we had promised in our manifesto – when the Lib Dem former Scotland secretary Michael Moore won the chance to take a Private Members’ Bill through Parliament. Though legislation wasn’t my priority, I was still happy to see 0.7 go onto the statute books, committing all future governments to it.

  Looking back now at what this aid drive achieved during my time in office makes me even more of a stubborn supporter. Polio, which used to paralyse or kill hundreds of thousands of children each year, is now, with British support, on the brink of being wiped out. Deaths from malaria were cut by 29 per cent between 2010 and 2016 – that’s over half a million lives saved.

  Thanks largely to 0.7 per cent, British scientists have invented new technologies, from drought-resistant crops to new vaccines and smarter water pumps. Sixty million people have received clean water and sanitation. Eleven million more children around the world go to school, and millions more women and girls have access to family planning. Six million people can claim more secure land and property rights. Twenty-four million mothers, babies and children have been given the nutrition for their bodies and minds to grow to their full potential. Thousands of bright young Brits have volunteered overseas through the International Citizen Service scheme we introduced. As for the starvation that shocked us all at the time of Live Aid, world hunger has nearly halved.

  This was about people, not just statistics. In 2011 I visited a vaccination clinic in Nigeria. Amid the heat and humidity, under flickering lights, were rows of women holding their babies. A nurse explained to me that if it wasn’t for British aid, many of those babies would be dead.

  The aid budget allowed us to act quickly after a typhoon hit the Philippines in 2013, an earthquake struck Nepal in 2015, and, as I’ll explain, a deadly virus swept across west Africa. ‘Britain stands ready’ is a phrase politicians often use, but I knew how much of that readiness came from 0.7 per cent.

  The irony is that the people who complain of our waning influence in the world are often the same ones who complain about our development budget. They don’t seem to appreciate that our aid commitment gives us soft power unlike anyone else. Britain is there, in every disaster zone. Food packages and tents stamped with the Union flag and ‘UK AID’ – another Andrew innovation – can be found all over the world. Our aid workers, peacekeepers, medics and volunteers are there on every contin­ent. We don’t just stand ready: we stand tall.

  One fragile state that became a preoccupation for me was Somalia. The country was a source of terrorism, a driver of mass migration, and the global headquarters of piracy, one of the biggest issues on my desk in 2010, after scores of hijackings and kidnappings, including that of a British couple. It was also, tragically, a land of famine, with an estimated 260,000 people dying of starvation during my first two years in office.

  I wanted us to use the lessons learned in Afghanistan to help rebuild this broken, and largely forgotten, country more remotely and smartly. We drove that via the NSC and two international London Somalia Conferences, in February 2012 and May 2013. A key aspect of our approach was separating the unacceptable al-Qaeda part of the al-Shabab movement from deeply conservative and tribal elements that could potentially form part of a future political settlement in the country. It was also about pledging money to stop people starving, funding prisons to lock up the pirates, and helping the Ethiopians and Kenyans defeat al-Shabab.

  The results were that in 2013 not one ship was successfully hijacked. Al-Shabab had been pushed back. Somalia had a government. William opened the first Western embassy there since the 1990s. The country is part of the global consciousness – and there is now a consensus to fix it.

  Fragile states would remain on the agenda when our turn came to host the G8 Summit in June 2013. For it to be a purposeful, productive and memorable summit, I knew the location was important. I chose Lough Erne in County Fermanagh. I wanted to show Northern Ireland off to the world.

  The theme I chose would be important too. It had to tie together the needs of the rich world and the developing world, and it had to be achievable.

  From the earliest days of party leadership I had been talking about what was going wrong with the global system we lived by. In 2006 I gave a speech entitled ‘The Challenges of Globalisation’. In 2007 I said: ‘We must create fairness alongside wealth, or we will lose the argument for a dynamic global economy, and lose the benefits it brings.’ In 2008, the year the crash happened, I argued that ‘We shouldn’t replace the free market – we should repair it.’

  The Occupy Movement, which camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral from the end of 2011 into 2012, represented one solution to the state of affairs: to end capitalism. For me, the solution was to fix capitalism. After all, free markets were providing the answers to so many of the ills we faced, from helping people escape extreme poverty to developing the innovations needed to halt climate change.

  Now, as G8 host, I had the chance to galvanise the globe about the specifics of how we would fix this global system. I homed in on three things: advancing trade, ensuring tax compliance, and promoting greater transparency. My ‘three Ts’.

  World trade still hadn’t recovered from the crash. As the economic balance of power shifted eastwards, we rich Western nations wouldn’t keep growing unless we signed new trade deals and succeeded in new markets. For the countries of the developing world, prosperity would never be achieved by aid alone – they needed the opportunity to trade. And that was being stifled by outdated rules and vested inte
rests.

  Aggressive tax avoidance, and its criminal sibling outright tax evasion, were also problems for both rich and developing countries. More and more schemes – not illegal, but morally questionable – were coming to light, depriving people of the revenues they needed and decoupling wealth and fairness. As with most things, the solution had to be inter­national. If one country cracked down on corruption or poor tax practices, its perpetrators would just go somewhere they could get away with it. We had to close off every avenue.

  Linked to all this was transparency. Without it you can’t see who owns what, who pays what, or where money looted from poor or corrupt countries is hidden. You couldn’t separate out the rich world and the developing world on this issue, because so often the stolen wealth was being hidden, for example, in the London property market. That’s why I was so keen to legislate for a register of who owned what in Britain – the beneficial owners, the real flesh-and-blood people, not the shell companies they hide behind.

  The feel of the summit was important to its success, so I was interested in every last detail, even down to the furniture. The last time a prime minister paid so much attention to a table was probably when Harold Macmillan had the long, narrow cabinet table remodelled to a coffin shape, supposedly so he could see into the eyes of all his ministers. I wanted the G8 table to be small enough to make sure there was no room for additional attendees – translators, private secretaries, even foreign secretaries. We ended up with one beautifully crafted from Irish elm, that remains in Downing Street’s Thatcher Room today.

  The sun shone on Northern Ireland for those two days. Despite being held in a province that had suffered so greatly from violence, it was the most peaceful G8 ever – and two of the most satisfying days of my time as prime minister.

  Even though Syria dominated, there was room to make significant progress on my three Ts.

  On trade, the first discussion we had was about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the USA, which could break down many of the barriers to exports and give an unprecedented investment boost to the British economy. The big announcement was that talks on this, the biggest free-trade deal in history, would begin in July, although it would eventually be crushed under the weight of anti-globalisation, and a fair bit of ‘fake news’.

  On tax, we agreed that authorities across the world should automat­ically share information to fight the scourges of tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance. Multinational companies would have to provide more detailed financial reports about their global activities, which would make it more difficult for them to pay tax only in low-tax countries. This greater openness could help developing countries get the oil and mineral money that was rightfully theirs, and I was pleased when several African leaders we had invited to the event praised the agenda and said that Britain had the credibility to champion it because we had kept our aid promises.

  Transparency was always going to be the most difficult one. Leaders tend to be in favour of it in principle and then, armed with endless briefings about why it would not be possible or desirable in their own countries, turn against it in practice. And the spotlight was on Britain for supposed hypocrisy: launching an open-ownership register for ourselves, but exempting our overseas territories like Bermuda, Jersey and the Cayman Islands, whose economies – it was alleged – were built around low taxes and secrecy over ownership.

  This was unfair: those territories’ practices and procedures were far from the worst in the world. But in order to close off that line of attack I had managed to get ten British dependencies with large financial sectors to agree a convention on information-swapping. We actually invited their leaders over to London on the Saturday before the G8, treated them to a lovely day at Trooping the Colour, and brought them to the Cabinet Room to sign up to rules on tax transparency and mutual recognition that no one had thought possible. Eventually they all committed to drawing up registers of beneficial ownership, although most stopped short of making them open for public view.

  (This was genuine progress. It is vital, in the first instance, that tax authorities in different countries are able to see this information. And it immediately put our overseas territories and crown dependencies above many countries in the world, and also many US states. Beneficial ownership registers that are open to the public remain the gold standard, because they allow civil-society organisations and journalists to help with the work of seeing who owns what. In the long run this is essential, not least because tax authorities in some of the most corrupt countries are unlikely to seek information about political or business leaders and what they might own in other countries. In 2018 the UK Parliament took the next step, insisting, via an amendment to a government Bill, on open registers in all the territories for which the UK is ultimately responsible. The backbench MP moving the amendment was Andrew Mitchell.)

  The summit ended with a communiqué which, for once, was short, clear and understandable, and is still being followed to this day. As the leaders prepared to depart, Obama asked my team for drinks with his team in his lodgings by the side of the lake. He wanted to congratulate us on a job well done, and knew that the people who really deserved the praise were those who had been working around the clock to make things happen. It was during this friendly exchange that we worked out that Liz Sugg, in many ways the architect of the summit, did the job of fourteen of his staff.

  The narrative today is that world leaders were caught out by populism and the anti-globalisation sentiment that fuelled it. As the 2013 G8 shows, that is simply not true. We were confronting the issues head-on. We were being constructive rather than destructive. We were repairing rather than replacing, reinstituting the link between wealth and fairness, and preserving a global system upon which the future of all countries depends. The subsequent success of populist candidates proves how drastically such work is still needed.

  The concept of ‘action now’ had yet to reach another international gathering, the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

  The Commonwealth brings together north and south, east and west. With such diversity and scale – it covers a third of the world’s population, its biggest and smallest nations – it has had a unique impact on the world, from sanctions against Apartheid to strides on combatting climate change.

  As with many multilateral bodies, it is dysfunctional. But my apprehension about the November 2013 CHOGM was caused by something other than the organisation’s usual inertia. One of the fifty-three member states, Sri Lanka, had endured a twenty-five-year civil war, with both the government and the Tamil insurgents accused of torture, rape, extra­judicial killings and disappearances. The war was over, but only after extraordinary bloodshed.

  Almost all insurgencies require a political solution, from the IRA in Northern Ireland to the FARC in Colombia, but the end of this war was so brutal that the insurgency was almost entirely snuffed out. Sri Lanka’s leader at the time of the final military offensive against the Tamils was Mahinda Rajapaksa. And he was to be our CHOGM host.

  When the Indian and Canadian prime ministers announced that they would not attend in protest, there was pressure on me to boycott the event as well, not least from Ed Miliband, who had found another bandwagon to jump on. Buckingham Palace also played rather a cunning game, not confirming whether the Queen would be attending or not. Though Prince Charles was increasingly representing the Queen anyway, I felt her courtiers wanted to see what I would do before they made their decision.

  They needn’t have worried. Despite the political heat, I thought it was right to go. I should represent the UK at a meeting of the Commonwealth wherever it was being held, and Prince Charles deserved the PM’s support. Besides, what would be a more effective challenge to Rajapaksa and his denial of war crimes: staying away and saying nothing, or going there and holding him to account?

  I rather began to embrace the idea. If Somalia had been an example of how to
use aid, defence and foreign policy to effect change, going to Colombo would be a way of using these conferences to our advantage, and pressurising a nation to do the right thing.

  I wanted to visit the north of Sri Lanka, so my first destination was Jaffna, the Tamil city that had been the scene of fierce fighting during the civil war. I was the first foreign leader to visit since 1948, and the day I spent there will live long in my memory. I saw what was left of Jaffna Library, whose priceless manuscripts had been destroyed by fire as government forces tried to eradicate Tamil history.

  I visited the Tamil newspaper’s offices and met the editor, who had lived in the building for the past three years because he feared for his life. There was a charred printing press that had been shot and burned by regime hoodlums, and the walls were covered with bullet holes where journalists had been murdered.

  I went to a refugee camp, whose existence the regime denied. I’ll never forget the crowds of women, holding up photos of young men, desperate to tell us their stories. We all had letters thrust towards us about these sons, husbands, fathers and brothers who had surrendered to the military and not been seen since. What had happened to them? Could we help find them?

  I flew back to the capital for my bilateral – or rather showdown – with Rajapaksa. His brother, the defence minister, who had supposedly issued orders for the terrible events at the end of the war, reached out to shake my hand. I kept my hands by my side, and sat down.

  The truth is that the Tamil Tigers had done some dreadful things, and I did have some sympathy with the case the government put. But I had to make a judgement. Was this a leader who was trying to reconcile his country and have inclusive political institutions that worked for everyone? Or was he a South Asian sectionalist who wanted to secure funding for his own people alone? I thought he was the latter, and I essentially told him so. As we walked out, William Hague said it was the worst-tempered foreign meeting he’d ever been in.