This is not going to be a speech about development.
And it isn’t going to be a speech about Africa.
It’s going to be a speech about how we learn to live together.
Because if we get this wrong, much darker days lie ahead. We are already seeing the warning signs.
War has returned to Europe. Geopolitics is characterised by conflict, competition and chaos. And we are fast approaching – and in some cases well past – environmental tipping points that could lead to the breakdown of the life-support systems that sustain us on this small and fragile planet.
There is a lot to be alarmed about. But I also remain an optimist.
Because I truly believe that if we get this right – if we can learn to live together well – we could be part of helping make life on earth safer, healthier and happier than ever before.
How we get it right is what I want to focus on tonight.
I am delighted to be having this conversation here in SOAS. This is an institution that has always understood that our fortunes are entwined, whatever our nation, faith, language or culture. We know that the Global South is a place of unlimited potential.
But I want you to imagine you aren’t sitting here in SOAS, but instead you’re in Bilston Miners Welfare and Social Club, in a former mining village a few miles outside of Edinburgh, in Midlothian where I am very proud to be the MP.
My friend Ross lives in Bilston. He is on the club committee and helped save the club when it went through a really rough financial patch, as so many of our clubs do. Why did he do it?
Lots of reasons.
Firstly – it’s got, as the line-dancing troupe that meets there will tell you – the best bouncy dance-floor in southern Scotland.
That dance floor is in the hall where people have weddings and wakes, 18th and 80th birthday parties. That hall, is where memories are made.
Secondly, the club is what they’ve got. The pub’s gone. The pavilion is gone.
The club is the last place people can come together – what turns someone from a neighbour in the physical sense to a neighbour in the ‘love thy neighbour’ sense.
Ross is now a stalwart of the club and part of the bowls league.
You are probably thinking he sounds like the kind of fella you’d like to have in my neighbourhood – someone who gets stuck in when something needs doing.
You’d be right.
But here’s the thing. Ross doesn’t just get stuck in in Bilston. He works for Sightsavers and he spends his days fighting for the rights of disabled people who live about as far away from Midlothian as it’s possible to get.
I don’t think he’s that unusual really.
When I first got together with my husband he agreed to go to church with my dad one time, so he could learn a bit more about how growing up in the Church of Scotland had shaped me.
Now bear in mind his degree of religious literacy is such that he didn’t realise until we got together that he’d been brought up Catholic.
My husband thought all primary school teachers were nuns, and that nans had photographs of the Pope up in their houses because they were nans.
So I am not that surprised he had a lot of questions after the service. His main one was about whether the prayers of intercession were always like that:
“Going from praying for Dot who does the flowers and has had a bad fall, through to the people who’ll be sleeping rough that night, on to the people of Afghanistan all in three minutes?”
And the answer to that is yes. It is always like that.
And because it was like that for my whole childhood I’d never really had cause to think about it, but it came back to me when I was working at Save the Children during the Pandemic – and I’ll return to that in a little minute.
Because right now I want to take you away from Scotland and SOAS and imagine you’re in Ethiopia, where I was just a few weeks ago.
As part of preparing for the trip, I watched a fantastic film from the Red Cross, in which some of their local Ethiopian volunteers were interviewed.
One of them said they were all inspired by the same thing:
“To give your time, your energy, to people you might not even know. Just because they are human too.”
Just because they are human too.
That’s why Ross splits his time between fighting for his local club and fighting to save the sight of strangers.
It’s why faith communities across the country split their prayers between members of the congregation and people they’ll never meet in places they’ll never go.
And it’s why I split my time between fighting to change Midlothian and fighting to change the world.
So this is what I wanted to speak with you about – and why I was grateful to the New Economics Foundation for offering me a platform to do it.
For 40 years, NEF has never been content to look at problems in isolation – it has always asked us to recognise that the same forces – systems and ideologies that value some futures less than others – can harm people wherever they live.
I said earlier I’d come back to a realisation I had working at Save the Children during the global pandemic.
It was this – the challenges we are dealing with, in the 2020s, are universal, but not uniform.
Just take climate change.
When I was in Ethiopia I travelled to the Afar region. I challenge anyone who questions the need to tackle climate change to stand in 43 degree heat, watching people whose queuing up for the aid that will change their lives.
But I also challenge them to go to Makerfield or Stourbridge to speak to people whose lives have been torn apart by floods or fires and tell them that it’s just a price worth paying for an addiction to fossil fuels.
Or think about work. There are people in precarious employment everywhere in the world.
Whether it’s the garment workers in global sweatshops, or Brits stuck on the zero hours contracts we’ve acted fast to ban – it is simply the case that there are people all over the world who don’t have the protection to secure a fair day’s pay for a hard day’s graft.
Or take violence against women and girls. Globally, one in three women will be a victim of gender-based violence.
There are survivors in this room and there will likely be survivors in every single room you go into this week.
Now I am absolutely not saying that these experiences are equally intense everywhere and for everyone – that’s what I mean when I say the effects aren’t uniform.
But the underlying experiences are, I think, universal ones. We all know what it is like to worry about our homes, our family, our safety.
If we haven’t been there we know someone who has – so when we learn about it happening to people overseas, I think something stirs – just because they are human too.
This, of course, is not a new idea. John Donne wrote in 1624:
“Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
But this is, I believe, an idea with renewed relevance, as we seek to navigate the second quarter of our century.
So my first argument tonight is that because the UK retains extraordinary diplomatic, development and humanitarian capabilities, we will put them to work, in the service of our values.
Of course we are also resolutely committed to defending and indeed advancing the national interest.
Take the Horn of Africa, we are working with partners to strengthen maritime security because disruption to some of the world’s most important shipping routes does not respect any borders. Its effects are felt in global trade, in supply chains, and ultimately whenever any of us do our big food shopping at the weekend.
Or take our new Growth Partnership with Ghana. Already, garment firms in Ghana are supplying school uniforms to ASDA George in the UK – supporting hundreds of jobs in Ghana, most of them done by women, while helping British parents with the cost of getting their kids to school.
So we are unapologetic and we are energetic about pursuing deals that make the British people safer and better off.
But know this too – we are equally unapologetic and equally energetic about doing some other parts of our work simply because “we are involved in mankind”.
When we all watched the horrifying footage from Nepal we didn’t ask for whom the bell tolls. We knew.
When we think about the situation in Sudan – one that is as defining as it is devastating – expect to hear more from us in the coming weeks and months about how we will do everything in our power to preserve life and prevent horrors.
And when I was in Ethiopia and I visited a mobile health clinic where local pastoralists who’d otherwise have to walk for days to access, I heard the two best sounds in the world – children crying after they got their jabs and a healthy heartbeat when an expectant mum got her ultrasound.
I wasn’t wondering then about whether those kids will become future customers for UK products or whether they might migrate.
I was thinking about what a precious gift life is and what a privilege it is to be able to support doctors and nurses to help children survive.
So when the Foreign Secretary says that climate and development are now at the beating heart of British foreign policy, be in no doubt.
We mean it.
When we take a stand to salvage the two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, it is because we recognise, as Ed has said, that this is a moral emergency.
And when we talk about international humanitarian law and what we need do to protect civilians, please be clear on one thing:
We want to stop atrocities because they are atrocious.
No other motivation is required.
So my first argument tonight is that this community should know that in this FCDO you have ministers who believe fighting poverty and changing lives is a core mission for our organisation.
The essays from parliamentary colleagues contained in the collection launched today will be a great guide for us to start.
They do not all reflect current government policy, but they are all valuable contributions to the work ahead.
The input of Parliamentary colleagues – and yours – will be fundamental to our success.
Now my second argument might be a bit harder to swallow, as it involves us changing both how we describe the world and how we move through it.
For lots of people in this room, the idea we work in or are somehow involved in the process or endeavour of “international development” is really central to how we see ourselves.
But I think it’s probably time to stop talking in these terms altogether, which I do appreciate is a somewhat unorthodox thing for a newly appointed minister for development to be saying.
Many of us of a certain age are well used to explaining that we don’t do this work as an act of charity, we do it because of justice.
And that served us well – it allowed us to mobilise massive global concern against things that clearly were unjust – some of the world’s poorest countries were paying us more in debt than we provided in aid,
weaponised patent laws that kept drugs out of the hands of dying people,
– trade rules that dumped our goods across Africa while keeping the doors to our own markets padlocked tight.
Here’s the problem though – the old story – of a rich world colluding to exploit and extract from the poor world – is still a story of “us” (the subject) doing something to “them” (the object).
If this narrative held together twenty or thirty years ago, it cannot keep up with where the world is now.
Fifty countries have graduated from aid.
Power is more widely distributed.
And competition between states within both the North and South is fierce.
I think it’s time to recognise we need a new way of thinking and talking about what we’re really doing together here.
Nowhere is the desire to rewrite the script stronger than in Africa. That’s why my predecessor, Baroness Chapman, launched the UK’s new Africa Approach last December – because leaders across the continent – in policy-making roles, business or civil society – consistently told us they want a blunt, brisk and business-like conversation about where our shared interests truly lie.
That’s what we mean by partnership – not about one country having all the answers and another having all the questions – but instead, bringing together different strengths to achieve far more than either of us could alone.
So if we were creating my job today, I think we’d probably think of it more as the minister for international co-operation or the minister for global resilience or the minister for security through solidarity.
That’s certainly how I will be approaching it.
Because the work in front of us now is about the management of cross-border risk through multilateral action.
So I want to be clear that the focus on multilateralism in UK Aid is here to stay.
And our commitment to working through agile alliances in our diplomacy will continue to be a hallmark.
Both are based on one of our oldest and strongest intuitions as a species: that there is strength in numbers.
Now some people might say that this is an era where the strong prevail.
But I would say – even if you are wholly rooted in the realist school of thought – would surely acknowledge that the biggest problems we face are not ones that any one country can deal with in isolation.
Indeed, our times are not so different to those described by US Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau at the close of the Bretton Woods conference:
“None of us has found any incompatibility between devotion to our own country and joint action. Indeed, we have found on the contrary that the only genuine safeguard for our national interest lies in international cooperation … That has been the great lesson taught by the war and is, I think, the great lesson of contemporary life – that the peoples of the earth are inseparably linked to one another.”
This is surely true of contemporary life too.
Think back to our experiences of Covid.
A virus that broke out in China meant kids missing school from Minnesota to Maputo to Midlothian.
And it was only fought back by science on a planetary scale, with researchers, clinicians and volunteers from every corner of the world working together to create the vaccines that meant life could resume again.
Or consider the summer we have just survived – simultaneously the hottest on record, and possibly the coolest any of us will know for the rest of our lives.
No region on earth has been immune but the poorest, as always, have been hit hardest of all.
Or reflect on how recent instability in the Gulf has exposed how our economic security is vulnerable to choke points that can turn dangerous in days.
Or think about how quickly conflicts that start with local clashes can suddenly consume nations and whole regions and end with people dying in the waters around these islands as they try to reach the UK.
And the one that is keeping me awake right now is the pressure facing our global food system.
We are now entering what could be one of the most devastating El Niño events in history, so I have just released up to £15 million for anticipatory action.
Because whether it is a family facing hunger in South Sudan or a family that can’t pay at the till in South Shields, we all rely on the same harvests in the same system to deliver affordable, accessible food.
So these are the five securities that will be consuming my time – health security, climate security, economic security, human security, food security.
Each of them requires us to think much harder about building resilience and managing shared risk to prevent crises becoming catastrophes.
And each requires a mindset well beyond “development” and certainly a toolkit much broader than Official Development Assistance.
Now please don’t misunderstand me, I am a true believer. I am incredibly proud of what high-quality aid achieves.
But ODA from any country is never going to be enough on its own.
So while I’m sure you will continue to push us on the trajectory for the return to 0.7 that was promised in our manifesto, I also want us to spend a lot of our time together co-strategising on how the UK’s money, voice and expertise can be most catalytic of much bigger global flows and scaled impact.
As we approach the UK’s Presidencies of the G20 and G7, the questions I’m interested in are:
- How do we best create alliances with other countries and institutions that want to move fast and try things?
- How do we mobilise the best forces – scientific, diplomatic, creative, philanthropic, commercial, diasporic – to create the breakthroughs that we need?
- And how do we ensure that the overwhelming majority of our time and effort, beyond responding to emergencies, is spent on these shared risks which impact us all, North and South, and where their resolution will represent neither charity offered nor justice owed but instead a common solution to problems in our common life?
So that means much of my own time is going to be spent on the reform agenda – working out how we get the global systems to work more effectively.
Now of course I see that the multilateral system is under pressure – its funding is tight, its legitimacy under threat. That’s exactly why reform is necessary.
Not just to get more money out of the system – although that’s needed – but to deal with the underlying problems of representation, effectiveness and impact that we’ve seen for a long time.
So whether it’s a new deal on debt or Tom Fletcher’s humanitarian reset, expect to see Labour ministers expending serious political capital doing the diplomatic hard yards across our multilateral engagements.
And where multilateral institutions are not the right mechanism, we will be flexible and build coalitions – as we did last week on sanctions, or as Brazil has with their Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty.
Now those of you who study political history may see an echo of the last Labour government here – a government in which both the Foreign Secretary and I worked with and learnt much from Gordon Brown. Back then the mantra for public services was investment and reform. For this Labour government our approach to the global system will be much the same.
The Foreign Secretary’s early announcement that he’d be becoming the Governor of the World Bank was us starting as we mean to go on.
So I hope by now I have convinced you of my first two arguments –
Firstly, that we can and should be confident in taking a first principles approach to some of the lifesaving and world changing work the FCDO and wider humanitarian community undertakes.
And secondly, that the era of development is over and the era of mutual interest and shared resilience is upon us.
Now I hope I can also convince you of a third argument – that our collective resilience starts in the same place as this speech:
Bilston Miners Welfare and Social Club, and places like it.
Just as this government believes in devolution and community power here at home, so too do we believe that communities have extraordinary strength and potential overseas.
Whether at home or away, it is central to my own co-operative politics – and to the Prime Minister’s – that the people closest to the problems should determine the solutions.
So for the last few years I have been working on something called Club Together, a campaign to help social clubs to thrive.
That might sound like a world away from what we’ve been talking about tonight or from UNGA where I think many of us will be next week, but I think it holds the key to everything that the people in this room care about. Hear me out.
We are living through a generational transformation in technology. The digital revolution has the potential to liberate our time and talents and close the distances between us like never before. Unfortunately, for too many of us, it is making us sick and it is making us sad.
Because, as some of you will have heard me say before, we simply aren’t wired to live like this, trapped behind our own front doors while apps and algorithms feed us suggestions about what to eat next, watch next, read next, hear next, or buy next, who to meet next.
All of it is making us lonelier, angrier and more susceptible to believing the worst of each other.
44% of us in the UK – nearly half – say that we ‘feel like strangers to those around us’.
The antidote is time together, with people outside our immediate families, developing the relationships and practicing the reciprocity on which a healthy common life depends.
Now I am conscious that some of you might be thinking that sounds like a nice enough thing in its own terms, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the big questions we’ve been talking about tonight.
I think this could not be more wrong.
Here’s why.
People cannot be expected to feel concern for the stranger if they’ve had no love from their neighbour. Being seen, known and valued are among our most fundamental needs. When those needs go unmet our ability to empathise shrinks.
But on the flip side our capacity to act in solidarity is a muscle – it grows with use.
If we all start flexing that muscle locally, then together we will be so much stronger when we come to flex it globally.
Some of you might have an additional worry that building stronger communities here at home could actually tend against internationalism – because communities can become closed and exclusive, focused on what differentiates their group or their tribe, instead of what it has in common with those who live elsewhere.
To this, I would draw attention to the words of Pope Francis, who said:
“We constantly have to broaden our horizons and see the greater good which will benefit us all. But this has to be done without evasion or uprooting. We need to sink our roots deeper into the fertile soil and history of our native place.”
Reading that reminded me of the famous opening lines of Sir Walter Scott:
“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, “This is my own, my native land”.”
The point, I believe, is to first feel secure in what is our own – our family, our community, our country – as precisely the sort of solid base from which we can build equitable relationships with others – other families, other communities, other countries.
So I want to leave you with a plea – to sink, in the words of Pope Francis, your roots deeper into the fertile soil which surrounds you. Find something that will let you become not just a participant but a member, something where you don’t just attend but join something bigger than yourself.
This is the everyday behaviour from which global resilience emerges.
So that’s what I meant when I said this wasn’t a speech about development.
Or about Africa.
I hope I’ve persuaded you that this has actually been a speech about what we owe the stranger because they are human too.
About the shared security that comes from scaled solidarity.
And about the world that can emerge if we recognise that the answer to our biggest problems is now, as ever, to club together.
