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from developing countries with a critical scarcity of health professionals, and later encouraged similar action by private agencies; the
problem of narcotic drugs, where simplistic attempts to address supplyside issues continued in defiance of much development experience; and
anti-corruption, where the Home Office was poorly resourced to cope
with international dimensions of the issue.
And of course, there were severe limits to the broader UK ability to
influence key international events, as the tortured history of the Doha
Round negotiations showed, despite the many positive references in G8
communiqués (notably in 2006 at St Petersburg) to the need for early
progress.
To what extent was change driven by the Prime Minister himself, or
from No. 10 in general, by Gordon Brown, by other ministers,
departments, think-tanks or any other factors?
It is very clear that the successes described above would have been impossible without support and leadership from the Prime Minister and the
Chancellor, as well as the personal contribution of the Secretaries of State
for International Development and the motivation and effectiveness of
their department. However, this played out in different ways at different
times.
Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have strong convictions about the
need to promote better lives for poor people across the world. Both
became aware early on in the first Labour term of the political strength
of both faith-based and secular campaigns for development. The Jubilee
2000 ‘Drop the Debt’ campaign was particularly significant, and its
demonstration at the 1998 G8 Summit in Birmingham particularly
effective. The handling of the debt issue at the Köln Summit the following
year was a good example of how the government worked in a coordinated
way between Gordon Brown, who had to make the detailed case to his
G7 Finance Minister colleagues, and the Prime Minister, who had to
persuade the leaders themselves.21
It would, however, be true to say that in Labour’s first term, with the
exception of the debt issue, DFID had reasonable scope to develop its
policies and systems in the knowledge that it was seen as making a positive contribution to the government’s overall objectives. Pressure for
short-term ‘initiatives’ could usually be handled in a way coherent with
longer-term objectives, such as when the Prime Minister was able to
commit the UK at the Denver Summit of 1997 to raising by 50% Britain’s
bilateral support for basic healthcare, basic education and clean water in
Africa, or when Gordon Brown announced at the Commonwealth
Finance Ministers’ Meeting that same year the writing-off of much of
Britain’s remaining aid loans. Clare Short made the maximum use of the
policy space thus created, and the 2001 Labour manifesto22 declared that
‘with strong UK leadership, the international development effort is now
increasingly focused on poverty reduction’.
The second and third terms, by contrast, saw a considerable increase in
interest from No. 10, now with a full-time policy adviser on development
and climate change, and the launching of new high-profile proposals
from the Treasury.
Tony Blair had had longstanding links with Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. He and Mbeki
worked together increasingly from 2001 to promote a new approach to
development in Africa, which was to be more African-‘owned’ and less
dependent on donors. They wrote a joint article for The Guardian in the
summer of 2001 on what was then called the ‘New Africa Initiative’.
These ideas were the subject of special mention at the G8 Summit in
Genoa in June, where leaders agreed to appoint high-level personal representatives to work with African leaders on a plan to be presented to the
Kananaskis Summit of 2002, and were further developed in the run-up to
the Labour Party conference of 2001. Tony Blair held an already planned
meeting with key African leaders just a week after the 9/11 atrocities in
New York. At that year’s conference he made a powerful statement23
about the need to give much more attention to Africa.
Tony Blair’s view of what was needed in Africa rightly went well
beyond issues of aid. He had taken a decisive line (supported by
21 Report of G7 Finance Ministers on the Köln Economic Summit, 18–20 June 1999; G8
Communiqué, Köln, 20 June 1999, paras. 29–30.
22 Labour Party election manifesto 2001, p. 60.
23 Speech by Tony Blair at the Labour Party conference, Brighton, September 2001.
Clare Short) in using UK military weight to end the rebel threat in
Sierra Leone. As a result, he had developed a strong interest in better
arrangements for peacekeeping, using a mix of rich countries’ logistic
assets and African ‘boots on the ground’. He also saw the significance
of progress on access for African agriculture to Northern markets,
and indeed crossed swords with President Chirac over it at an EU Summit
in 2002. Tony Blair strongly supported the Canadian government in persuading the Kananaskis Summit in the same year to agree a wide-ranging
‘G8 Africa Action Plan’ in support of Africa’s own ‘New Partnership for
Africa’s Development’.24 G8 African Personal Representatives (Baroness
Amos being the UK representative) presented comprehensive proposals
to the Evian Summit in 2003,25 following which President Chirac pushed
through plans for a more permanent ‘Africa Partnership Forum’, including non-G8 aid donors and African countries and institutions.
This might have been thought sufficient G8 attention to Africa. Tony
Blair, however, decided in 2003 on two further initiatives: that Africa
would be one of the two major themes of the Gleneagles Summit of 2005,
and that in preparation for this a ‘Brandt-style’ international Commission
would be created to assess what progress was being made and what more
needed to be done. The decision to establish the Commission owed a good
deal to the concerns expressed to the Prime Minister by Bob Geldof following a visit to Africa that far too little was being done despite wide
agreement on what was needed to improve local conditions.
The Africa Commission brought together a mix of African leaders and
policymakers – who between them constituted a numerical majority
within the Commission – and senior figures from a wide range of nonAfrican countries. Bob Geldof himself was a member. Its crucial meeting
was hosted in Addis Ababa by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi
and attended by Tony Blair. The degree of consensus was remarkable and,
working against a tight deadline, a report ( Our Common Interest) was
issued in March 2005.26 What made it different was its comprehensive
approach and recognition that different clusters of issues could not be
approached in isolation from each other; its intellectual rigour with
which those linkages were demonstrated; the strong degree of African
participation in and ownership of its recommendations (which were
endorsed in full by the African
Union Summit just days before
24 G8 Africa Action Plan, Kananaskis Summit Communiqué, 27 June 2002.
25 Implementation Report by Africa Personal Representatives to Leaders on the G8 Africa
Action Plan, June 2003.
26 Commission for Africa, Our Common Interest (London: Penguin, 2005).
Gleneagles); and the thorough consultation process across Africa, within
the G8, with the international organisations and elsewhere which took
place before and during the writing of the report.
The report was used effectively by the UK as the intellectual driver for
the Gleneagles Summit conclusions. These do indeed amount to a fairly
comprehensive and linked set of commitments: on peace and stability; on
governance; on investing in people; on growth; on development finance;
and on mutual accountability. The Gleneagles communiqué captures very
much what Tony Blair was aiming at in relation to Africa over several years.
Gordon Brown also took a strong and increasing role in the area of
development. While Tony Blair concentrated on the ‘big picture’, with
Africa as a particular focus of concern, Gordon Brown worked in several
areas where Finance Ministers were key to progress, and tenaciously
pursued a limited number of major themes which had relevance for poor
countries as a whole. Probably the one with the highest profile was debt,
where his chairmanship of the International Monetary and Finance
Committee (in essence, the IMF Board meeting at ministerial level) gave
him an excellent position to influence the international financial institutions. Crucial advances were made at the Köln Summit in 199927 and then
in 2005,28 where the UK secured the writing off of IFI loans and credits to
countries covered by the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative
(HIPC). The Labour government was at the forefront of proposing ways
of addressing the debt problems of poor countries – as indeed was its
Conservative predecessor – and could fairly claim that by 2005 it had
achieved pretty well all its objectives, including a very significant settlement of the international official debts of Nigeria.
Gordon Brown, however, appreciated that debt relief alone was not an
adequate or in isolation a sustainable response to the problems faced by
poor countries. He saw both trade and aid as important contributors to
development. The international trade agenda was set essentially by the
Doha Round, but Brown had a more direct stake in the issue of aid
volume.
Gordon Brown played a central role in the extent of increases allowed
for DFID in the various public spending rounds during his chancellorship. It seems unlikely that Tony Blair put the Chancellor under pressure
to be particularly favourable to DFID, though of course he accepted the
figures put down by the Chancellor. Figure 25.3 shows the percentage
27 Report of G7 Finance Ministers on the Köln Debt Initiative, June 1999.
28 Report of G7 Finance Ministers, 11 June 2005.
10%
9%
8%
7%
6%
5%
4%
3%
2%
1%
0%
2002 Spending round
2004 Spending round
DFID
All government departments
Figure 25.3. Annual increase in department expenditure limits (source: DFID).
increases provided to DFID in each spending round compared to the
average across all government departments.
This degree of consistent increase was certainly fundamental to the
UK’s ability to influence its international peers, and translated into large
increases in the aid receipts of countries where UK bilateral aid was significant. But Gordon Brown’s approach was not limited to action by the
UK alone.
Brown was impressed, in the run-up to the Monterrey Conference of
2002, by the report of an international team led by former Mexican
President Zedillo,29 which suggested that international aid would have to
rise by some $50 billion a year from its then level (also of the order of $50
billion) if the Millennium Development Goals were to be reached. He was
therefore sympathetic to an attempt, put in motion by Koos Richelle, the
Director-General of the Development Directorate of the European
Commission in late 2001, to find a formula which would enable EU member
states to go to Monterrey with a common approach to increasing the volume
of their aid. Brown backed the formula (a commitment of 0.39% of GNI at
EU level and a minimum of 0.33% in any one member state by 2006), and
played a key role in getting ECOFIN agreement to it in time for the
Barcelona Summit of 2002 that endorsed this ambitious proposal.
The increases agreed by the EU at Barcelona and the parallel initiatives
by the Bush administration were quite impressive in a context of static or
29 Report of the High-Level Panel on Financing for Development, 28 June 2001, www.un.
org/reports/financing.
declining international aid. However, they fell far short of the doubling of
aid called for by Zedillo in order to achieve the Millennium Development
Goals. Brown and his advisers therefore looked, even before the EU discussions, at the scope for innovative measures to boost aid in the short to
medium term.
In November 2001 Gordon Brown launched in his annual autumn
statement30 a proposal for a new way of financing a major increase in
aid – the ‘International Finance Facility’. This concept, originally developed with his advisers and Goldman Sachs, was to float bonds on the
market whose proceeds would be used to ‘front-load’ aid spending, and
which would be redeemed from the aid programme at some future date.
Because the bonds would not be redeemable if certain specified events
were to take place, the ‘mortgaging’ of future aid budgets would not be
treated as a Budget liability. At the same time, the specified events – for
example, a breach with the IMF – were designed to be sufficiently unusual
to give some comfort to the bondholders, and thus minimise the interest
charge on the bonds.
Gordon Brown’s announcement was met with some surprise by his G7
colleagues, although they could see the theoretical attractions of achieving extra aid spending without having to write it into their own immediate public spending plans. Many of them argued that their systems would
not permit what some regarded as budgetary legerdemain. However,
Gordon Brown continued to press the idea in bilateral and multilateral
forums. He secured French backing at a meeting with the then French
Finance Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the spring of 2004. From subsequent technical work emerged the idea of a pilot scheme for doubling the
rate of vaccinations financed by the Global Alliance on Vaccinations and
Immunisation, and this became a reality in the autumn of 2006, with the
Pope symbolically purchasing the first bond. Although there still seems
little likelihood that the much more substantial scheme originally proposed will generate a
critical mass of support, Gordon Brown’s determination was central to achieving the ‘International Financing Facility for
Vaccines and Immunisation’,31 which is resulting in a doubling of the rate
of vaccinations for a series of life-threatening childhood diseases and is
predicted to save the lives of five million children by 2015. It also enabled
him to be in a position to encourage his G7 colleagues to come up with
alternative possibilities for increasing aid.
30 Statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Pre-Budget Report, 27 November
2001.
31 See www.iff-immunisation.org.
In February 2004, Gordon Brown called a meeting, chaired by
Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and involving nongovernmental organisations, the president of the World Bank and public
figures such as Bono and Bob Geldof, to assess what sort of options
should be considered in the context of the UK’s Presidency of the G8
in 2005. At this meeting, the Chancellor made a speech32 in which he
emphasised a triple strategy of further debt relief, progress on trade
and a further push on more aid. In the light of NGO pressure, he also
concluded that the UK should, for the first time, aim to achieve the UN
0.7% target for aid as a percentage of GNI by a set date (2013), a very
radical change in the UK’s traditional position of supporting the target
in principle while avoiding any set date for reaching it. This decision,
announced in the 2004 public expenditure round, gave the UK useful
moral high ground in arguing the case for its G7 and EU partners to do
more.
In February 2005, Gordon Brown persuaded his G7 colleagues to put
work in hand so that decisions could be made at the summit on a ‘financing package to achieve the Millennium Development Goals’.33 By June
2005, the G7 Finance Ministers were able to talk in terms of a possible
increase in ODA between 2004 and 2010 of $42 billion,34 with decisions
still awaited from Canada and the US. This was a key building block on
the road to the Gleneagles conclusion of a planned $50 billion increase in
aid between the two dates.
As far as the EU was concerned, a formula based on that of 2002 was
proposed by the Commission for 2010 and strongly backed by the UK: an