 Gwyddoedd, chi wasbod! Yn cyfyniad gyda'r tro i. Gwyddoedd, yn gyfyniad ar arall yma, ond cymryd ar gweithio, yr hynny sy'n gallu bydd cymryd y mynd wedyn ynrestig y Centynore. We are really proud here at SOAS, of our record as a School of Critical enquiry and vigorous debate. We see ourselves as special because our regional expertise a'r ddweud ydych chi'n gweithio'r ddau o'r region. Fydden nhw'n ddechrau'r hyd o'r Lentynary yma, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ymdwyllgor sydd yw'r lles o'r sellebwyr. Fyddwn i'n ddweud yn perthyn ni'n ddaw i ddau, Dyne Abbot, Llyfrgellfa Oedonol i Llyfrgellfa Oedonol, wedi gweithio'r rhai i wneud i gyngorol a'n iddyn nhw'n yr olyf yn y rheidau on the role of the UK's international development programme. What I'm going to do is hand over to Dr Laura Hammond, who's the head of our development studies department, who's going to give the formal introduction. I look forward to the evening. Thank you, Diane, welcome. Thank you, Valerie. It's a really great privilege and pleasure to be able to welcome Diane Abertsesawas and as well on behalf of the Department of Development Studies, I'd like to welcome her. Obviously, the subject of the discussion tonight is particularly germane to our area of study and reflection. Diane Aberts, as you may know, is the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development and MP for Hackney North in Stoke, Newington. She was first elected to Parliament in 1987, becoming the first black woman to be elected to that office. She served as Shadow Secretary for Public Health from 2010 to 2013, and then last year was named Secretary of State for International Development. In addition to this role, she chairs the British Caribbean All Party of Parliamentary Group, or APPG, as well as the APPG for Sickle Cell and Thalasemia. As Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, Diane has sort of laid her claim to three main key priorities, the global response to refugees and migrants, gender and development and transparency and scrutiny and aid expenditure. And since taking on the role of Shadow Secretary, Diane's been campaigning for issues around global justice, human rights and peace and security, carrying on a long tradition of that involvement since the beginning of her political career. She's been advocating strongly for the rights of refugees, and especially refugee children. She's called on the UK government to work cooperatively with its European partners to fulfil its responsibilities to provide fair and humane treatment of refugees, and has warned of the dangers of a British exit from the European Union that will be felt in the poorest regions of the world. She's argued strongly against the erosion of the UK's development budget from security and foreign policy interests, and has also spoken out strongly on the need to address increasing global inequality, highlighting the extent to which this important aspect of development is often overlooked. Last week she visited Somaliland, where she witnessed firsthand the effects of the devastating drought on pastoralists there. So tonight we'll hear Diane speak about why overseas development has to move from charity to empowerment, which we look forward to. Please join me in welcoming Diane Abbott. Ladies and gentlemen, comrades, good evening. Oh, let me try again. Ladies and gentlemen, comrades, good evening. Good evening. It is with some temerity that I come to speak at a bastion of the academic study of development around the issues I think facing us at this time. But first of all, I'd like to thank SOAS for inviting me, and I'd like to thank Valerie Amos for finding the time to introduce me this evening. Valerie was herself a very distinguished Secretary of State for International Development. Overseas development is a relatively new concept in political science. It's not that hundreds of years ago, people didn't think that they should improve the condition of other people in far-off lands of which they knew nothing, or the lesser breeds without the law, but their preferred way of improving people's condition and bringing law was down the barrel of a gun on the back of a gunboat followed up by missionaries and district commissioners. The notion of overseas development as a mutual endeavour is a relatively modern one, and because it's relatively modern, it's worth examining. As many of you will know, the Department of International Development began life as the Ministry of Overseas Development over 50 years ago in 1964, and the very first Minister of Overseas Development was a woman called Barbara Castle. Barbara Castle was a well-known left-wing Labour MP of her era, and I suppose there's something about international development which attracts left-wing women Labour MPs. And she describes her first day on international development in her diaries. She's a famous keeper of diaries. She described her first day as this, the Ministry of Overseas Development with a seat in the cabinet, that was important, as a guarantee that overseas aid was no longer to be regarded as a charitable donation from rich to poor, but as an essential motor of world development. That was her theme. No longer a charitable donation from the rich to the poor, and it was a striking recognition that development should mean shared progress, shared prosperity, and a shared direction of travel. And this is reflected in the new development goals which, unlike the millennium development goals which only apply to developing countries, the new development goals apply as much to Britain and America and the West as they do to developing countries, because we're actually talking about shared prosperity and a shared direction of travel. So the question I want to pose in my remarks tonight is that 50 years after the Department of International Development was set up, how much does the development movement and development professionals and development academics and development NGOs, how much do they all reflect the changed world we live in, and to what extent has international development really moved on from being a charitable donation from the rich to the poor? Now, there's no question that over the past 50 years, international development has many achievements to its credit, whether you look at the international fight around malaria, HIV, AIDS, whether you look at how development has met extraordinary humanitarian crises, which value is often at the centre of, if you look at individual countries in Nepal, in 1990 there were 901 deaths per 100,000 live births, but last year only 258. In Ethiopia, we've seen many tragedies in Ethiopia, but nonetheless, in 1995, 63% of Ethiopians lived on less than $1.25 a day. In 2011, only 37%. If you look at Kenya, just in 2002, only 46% of Kenyans went on to secondary school, but in 2012, 77% went forward to secondary school. So, nobody can say that the international development movement hasn't got achievements to its credit, whether it's meeting particular humanitarian crises or whether it's bearing down on the indices of poverty, but nobody can say either that there isn't more to do, and the striking thing is the parts of the world into which aid has poured, and yet in real terms, people are not proportionately better off in relation to the millions of pounds and the multiplicity of NGOs that have been active in those areas of the world. And we always have to keep our eyes on the prize, which is a mutual process of global development. Development was never meant to be an industry unto itself. The development NGOs and development academia and development professionals were never meant to be an end in themselves, but despite the achievements, you sometimes have a sense about development, that the world has become divided between those that do development and those that benefit from it, and in the midst of austerity, we are hearing voices in some of the world's richest countries that almost sound as if they begrudge giving aid. Some of you, if you have an idle hour on a Sunday, will have read the Mail on Sunday's vitriolic campaign against money spent on aid. So there's, and it's partly to do with austerity, but it's partly to do with insularity, there are voices in the richest countries that seem to begrudge giving aid, but even in the developing countries, there are sceptical voices to the point as if they begrudge taking it also. Many of you have read Danby's and Moyo's work, Dead Aid. Now, I don't quite follow Ms Moyo in her belief that raising money with Goldman Sachs is the way to prosperity, but nonetheless, she raises some interesting points about how aid and development is seen from the perspective of the global south. And we do have to recognise that development is not just about delivering aid, it is about challenging a very complex system of power relations between the developed world and the developing world, which, if you think, those two sides of the equation were, in living memory, defined as the coloniser and the colonised. But in reality, it's not the emergency food rations you deliver, although those are vital for millions of people's lives. And I've come to some of the things I've seen in Somalia recently. It's not the emergency food rations you deliver, it's not the water, it's not even the shelter, it's not even the improvements in healthcare or education you may see year on year until you challenge the power relationships between the so-called developed world and the developing world. You cannot have stable and sustainable world development, like so many issues, like so many political issues in the end, development comes down to who has power and who has not. So I want to begin by talking with some underlying issues in relation to development, which some of which I believe are not talked about enough. I want to talk about foreign policy and how foreign policy relates to development. I want to talk about taxation, which actually, in recent years, NGOs like ActionAid have done some brilliant work on. I don't want to talk about trade, and trade is a long-standing bugbear as between the developed world and the developing world. On the question of foreign policy, there is this fiction that international development is some kind of vestal virgin of policy existing in chased isolation from foreign policy considerations. And certainly government has a tendency to talk and act, as if that is the case. But in reality, poverty reduction, real poverty reduction, is obliged to take place in the world that politicians and military deployment have made. And unless we acknowledge the foreign policy roots of some of the major development crises facing the world today, there can be no sustainable solution. Earlier in the year, I travelled to the refugee camp at Calais. I'd read about it. I'd spoken to people that've been there. But unless you actually go to the refugee camp at Calais, you can't believe it. There, in one of the richest countries in the world, across the channel, from the fifth richest country in the world, you have people living in the mud with tents and, at one point, without even basic sanitation and health care. And the remarkable thing about Calais is much of the help that has been given to the refugees, Maroondah, has actually been given by volunteers, although NGOs are doing great work latterly. So these are desperate people, many of whom have crossed the Sahara, have come across Europe, and as they see it, are within striking distance of reaching the UK and finding real safety and the real possibility of putting their lives back together, living in horrific conditions. And I say this, but part of the problem with Calais is that, to a degree, both the French government and the British government have turned their backs on these people. But what struck me about Calais are meeting, as I did at one point in the day, with a representative group of refugees and migrants who are in the camp, where were these refugees and migrants from? Half of them were from Syria. We've all heard about the Syrian refugees making their way from the Middle East. A very large proportion were from Afghanistan and another large proportion were from Iraq. You also had people from Sudan and Eritrea. And it occurred to me that there were many complicated reasons why people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and South Sudan might be in a refugee camp in Calais. Some of them might even come down to the person themselves. But it is no coincidence that the major groups of people sitting in the mud, in desperate circumstances in Calais, are people coming from parts of the world where there has been some ill-fated Western intervention. There is a relationship as night follows day between military deployment, between foreign policy and development catastrophe. But one of the worst examples which we hear least about is Yemen. Yemen is the Arab world's poorest country and it's being bombed to smithereens by our ally, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which is the Arab world's richest country. Saudi Arabia's intervention into Yemen's civil war in March last year got relatively little publicity, but it's actually precipitated one of the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Yemen has a population of 24 million, many more than Syria, many more in fact than Palestine, but 82% of Yemen's population need aid, 60% need food and 10% have fled their homes. And this is largely as a consequence of the civil war, but it has been exacerbated by Saudi bombing. The medicine's on frontier have received scores of dead and wounded from Saudi strikes. Three hospitals have been targeted in as many months, weddings have been hit, homes for the blind, a water bottling factory struck with cruise missiles killing dozens of workers, bodies melted into machinery all down to Saudi bombardment and the NGOs on the ground believe that Saudi is in breach of humanitarian law. And where does Saudi Arabia get those arms? Where does it get most of its arms? It gets them from the UK. On the one hand, faced with Yemen's humanitarian challenges, we gave 106 million in aid last year, which is excellent, which is remarkable. But since Saudi Arabia's intervention, we have almost certainly illegally sold more than 3 billion pounds worth of arms to Saudi Arabia to prosecute its war in Yemen. It's a war which the UN sent is targeting Yemen's civilian infrastructure, hospital schools, ports, water. The conflict places on development organisations and intolerable burden of on the one hand ever-growing need, but I say the children has put it in an ever-shrinking humanitarian space. Fueling Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States war is crippling Diffid's own aid efforts in Yemen. And so it makes no sense to talk about development. It makes no sense to congratulate yourselves that you are pure than pure development NGOs, pure than pure development academics, pure and pure even people that donate to your favourite NGO, while at one and the same time, the policies of this government or the policies of any government can be exacerbating a development crisis. And before I leave the question of foreign policy, let's reflect on South Sudan. I remember after all the problems in Darfur, I remember how glad certainly I was, and most of us was, when South Sudan finally got its independence. I think it still remains the newest independence country in the world. And what's happened to South Sudan? It's been ravaged by a terrible civil war, which has actually, as it's provocation, oil and resources and money and internal divisions in the ruling elite, it's been savaged by a horrible civil war and plunged into humanitarian crisis. To look at development and humanitarian disaster separately from foreign policy and decisions about military deployment is to look at development in a way which in the end hits a brick wall, so it can be no surprise that there are parts of the world in which millions have been poured in the name of development but have somehow not managed to lift themselves off the floor in relation to development outcomes. The next issue I want to talk about was tax. And I believe, and a number of NGOs have worked on this, that actually in the 21st century, where in reality development is taking place in a cash envelope, Britain can be very proud of spending 0.7 of its GDP on development. Unfortunately, I think Britain, Norway, Scandinavia are the only wealthy Western countries that have hit the 0.7 target. So development operates in a cash envelope, so tax justice has risen up the agenda as an important issue in terms of redressing inequality and in terms of promoting development. Now, the first issue in relation to tax justice is unfair tax treaties. Now, frankly, developed countries have been signing off, or not signing off, unfair tax treaties with undeveloped countries since some Native Americans engaged in treaties for beads and so forth with the not-Native Americans. Unfair treaties go back to the dawn of colonialism. But more recent treaties, treaties often put together post-independence, too many of them are ensuring that money flows untaxed from poor countries to rich countries, making the world more unequal and exacerbating poverty. Global corporations use tax treaties to limit their tax contributions in lower-income countries where they're generating profits. For instance, Bangladesh is losing $85 million a year from just one clause in its tax treaties that severely restricts its right to tax dividends. This money could pay for health services for 3.4 million people. In 2004, Uganda signed a tax treaty with the Netherlands that completely takes away Uganda's right to tax certain earnings paid to owners of Ugandan corporations. This means millions of pounds of lost tax revenue to Uganda which could have paid for essential public services. In Ghana, the abuse of corporate tax incentives costs the Ghanaian economy $2.27 billion a year. The Guinness factory in Ghana pays less tax in real terms than the lady you'll find by the side of the road in Ghana selling you a bottle of Guinness off her stall. How can that be fair tax treatment? Whilst on the question of tax, you will all have followed the excitement in the media and in Parliament about the Panama Papers and tax avoidance. But the point I want to make is the damage to the poor, the damage to developing countries of tax avoidance by the rich. Whilst rich countries lose between half percent and three percent of revenue to tax avoidance, developing countries are hit very much harder. Developing countries lose between six and 13 percent in some cases up to 26 times more than rich countries. So the countries that can least afford to lose money from tax avoidance are the countries that are being hardest hit. It's all good clean fun to ask David Cameron whether he's ever now or will ever benefit from money offshore. But the real issue about tax avoidance is how it is hitting some of the poorest countries in the world. The Royal Society of Medicine estimates that without the flow of untaxed money leaving the continent, Africa would, on average, be on course to hit the fourth millennium development goal this year of reducing by two-thirds the end of five mortality rate. As it is, Africa will have to wait till 2029. I think we need to address tax avoidance, but as Labour's shadow sector is set for international development, we need to hit the way that tax avoidance is damaging very poor countries. One of the things I would do is I would stop our sector of state for international development using the services of the big four accountants because they, on the one hand, don't just offer accountants service to DFID, they are allowed to deliver hundreds of millions of aid projects and yet, at one of the same time, they are involved in facilitating tax avoidance. In 2014, the Luxlicks tax scandal that revealed that PWC Pricewaterhouse Cooper had established secret tax deals with the Government of Luxembourg. They marketed their deals to their clients who shifted billions of pounds of their profits to a variety of internal tricks into shell companies incorporated in Luxembourg. This kind of illicit activity made the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which has a population of less than half a million, the world's biggest destination for investment after the United States. It seems to me that if you're talking about development, you also need to talk about tax avoidance and any politician who's serious about development cannot, at one at the same time, give hundreds of millions to accountancy companies which are also involved in facilitating tax avoidance. So, foreign policy is an issue. Tax is an issue, but trade is also an issue. Now, trade, the relationship of trade to development is a long-standing concern. But without genuinely sustainable relationships in relation to trade, we stand no hope of meeting the ultimate end of ending aid reliance. Countries will forever remain dependent on aid unless they have the tools and the clouds with which to compete in the global marketplace. How can it be that Ghana, which remains, even today, the world's second largest cocoa producer, had only one chocolate factory which closed its doors last month? This remains a common tale, whether it's bauxat, whether it's gold, whether it's oil. These countries are still, in 2016, locked into a pre-independence model where they produce the raw materials but the value-added processing takes place in the West. Unless we can smash that model, too many of those countries will remain aid dependent. Now, fair trade movements are a really important campaign. They have done a lot to raise consciousness among the public generally about the absence of fair trade, but on their own, they don't ensure real economic change. The poorest countries in the world without the infrastructure and the skills, even sometimes to negotiate on equal footing, are left vulnerable to predatory trade deals. The economic partnership agreements, which the West has made a lot of, they're often not balanced partnership agreements at all, and they often end up not with countries having access to Western markets and making money. That way, they end up with the West dumping their products on the countries that they have formed the economic partnerships with. I fear for the exploitation of new waves of resources being discovered in Latin America and Africa in particular. Proper management of these resources has the ability to lift nations out of poverty, but without the right agreements in place and no infrastructure, the cycle of exploitation goes on. Free trade is a wonderful slogan. Free trade is an issue which has exercised politicians since the 19th century, but free trade is not a reality for many countries in the South. It can't be free trade because they are finding themselves negotiating tax treaties and trade agreements which are one-sided. And without an intervention, without an understanding from the West about the importance of having genuinely fair trade agreements, then development aid and development research and development NGOs are merely putting sticking plaster on the wounds. I want to say a word about TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership, although it's largely an American in EU negotiation. It's a series of trade negotiations that the party supports in principle, but I just want to raise some of the things which might be problematic about it and it's typical of these types of trade investment partnerships. Many people argue that there is too much in it which is about deregulation and the liberalisation of labour markets and lowering standards. There's concern here in the UK that it will open up the public sector, particularly the NHS, to American multinationals. There's a concern that it involves a levelling down of standards in relation to food and environmental standards. There's a concern it involves the loosening of data privacy laws, but above all, there's a concern that it allows business to sue countries, a private justice system. Egypt introduced a minimum wage last year. It is now being sued by a multinational who says it has lost the money. Of course greater trade is important. Of course the Labour Party supports TTIP in principle, but we need to be careful that these trade agreements don't act to the detriment, not just to the UK, but to poorer countries also. I want to go on and talk about some of the new challenges facing development. I want to talk about climate change, I want to talk about migration and globalisation. As you heard last week, I was in British Somalia, British Somali land, and British Somali land has, and the whole of Somalia in fact, and across eastern Africa and southern Africa, has been swept by drought. Now these are countries which might expect to have drought every seven years, every 10 years. Now they are seeing droughts much more frequently and it's a consequence, as we all know, as climate change. But to go to Somalia and see the conditions of a pastoral people, brought it home to you what climate change means. And the tragedy is that countries like Somalia and the countries in southern Africa affected by drought, they are not the main contributors to climate change, but they are the main victims of changes in the climate. And I went to a feeding camp, which people who had crisscrossed the lawn of Africa trying to find pasture for their herds and they'd ended up back in this feeding camp in British Somalia land. And they had lost, they had had, because with those pastoral societies, their wealth, their goats, their sheep, their camels, most of them had lost most of their flocks. And it's not like you've lost your goats, you've lost your pet, you've lost your flocks of goats and sheep and camels and you've lost your livelihood, you've lost your investment, you've lost your future. I was struck by a very elderly gentleman who'd lost most of his flocks, but he had kept two goats and he brought his two goats with him to the feeding station where they were handing out food and water. And he told me that every morning when he got his rationed at the feeding station, he was at pains to divide his rations into half and give half to his goats. That's how much his goats meant to him. We are seeing some of the poorest countries in the world ravaged with climate change, yet ahead of the Paris climate talks last September, they were the ones pledging more than their fair share of action to cut emissions. As I've said, this year, the eastern South and Africa are in the throes of the worst drought in human memory and the humanitarian system designed to maintain food security and avoid famine are stretched to capacity. But on the other hand, we still hand out over 9 billion in subsidies to our fossil fuel industry to extract more oil and gas out of the ground in a process which the entire scientific community agrees will spell the destruction of the environment ultimately with the world's poorest getting the biggest problems. Yes, Western governments like her own give climate finance, but what does it do if we're not tackling the root cause? We need to change our damaging practices and we need to use aid, not just to provide relief in the short term, but to build lasting resilience. To the Labour party, I don't want to be part of political, but we had a good record on climate change. It's not clear to me that this government is as committed to climate change as we were, but as I say, climate change is about fairness, not just science, the big climate impact facing the poorest countries yet, small island states like the states in the Caribbean. What they're finding is that year after year, they're seeing more extraordinary weather interludes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods caused by climate change and year after year they're having to rebuild their infrastructure. As I've said, the decades-long droughts in the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa have plunged millions of people into severe famine, part of a longer-term desertification driven by climate change. Last year, the United Nations has warned that 36 million people face hunger across southern and eastern Africa as the worst drought in decades has overtaken the region. So this is a new challenge, a new development challenge, which wasn't a challenge in the same way when Valerie was at Diffyd, the new challenge of climate change, desertification and the threat which goes with it of famine. I wanted now to turn to the issue of migration. It's very difficult to have a sensible conversation about migration in British politics because people are running scared of political impulse, which encourages people to be frightened of migration and people talk about migration in the short term, in the immediate, how it affects the UK, what the man in the pub says, but the truth is from a development context, we're in the early years of a global migration emergency that will only grow. There are multiple factors, as I said earlier, the humanitarian fallout from the Syrian Civil War, the steep decline in agricultural productivity across Africa and the Middle East, the worst drought in living memory. More broadly though, there's a global demographic bulge of young people in the developing world without the job to sustain them. Once upon a time, people in some of these parts of the world would have stayed where they were and expected to live the lives their parents lived. Now they all have smartphones and they can see there is a better world, there is a better life on the other side of the world and people are making the dangerous journey not just from the Middle East, but from Sudan, from Eritrea, from parts of Africa, putting their lives in the hands of people traffickers to stop the Sahara, I was part of that process many times, and then crossing the Mediterranean to get to Western Europe. We've heard a lot about Syrian refugees driving the Mediterranean and it is extraordinarily tragic. I visited Lesbos in Greece and met some of the people that saved these migrants from the water. But fully half of the people dying in the Mediterranean and fully half for at least a year now have been migrants from Africa and we need to address what is happening in terms not just of people who can technically be described as refugees, but economic migrants who, because of the changes I have touched on, are surging towards Western Europe. Over a million refugees have arrived in Europe over the past year, unknown thousands have died in the Sahara, the Mediterranean, trying to get here. They've given their life savings to smugglers. We need to embrace this new world and we have to understand that helping the vulnerable is not a zero sum gain. We cannot talk about migration policy internationally, with one part of our brain and as politicians worry about UKIP. Migrants have always benefited the UK and our current demographic and labour trends make this true than ever. The essential thing to do and both political parties are going to have to face up to this is we have to make sure there are safe and legal routes for genuine refugees to come to Britain. Over 60 years ago, my parents came to this country, the Caribbean. But the Caribbean then was still, I think it had just achieved independence and it was possible. You had a safe and legal route from the region to come to the UK. The equivalent of my parents may be living in Sudan, may be living in Ghana, have no such safe and legal route and they are obliged to risk their lives, to spend all their money, spend all their villages' money, to achieve a safe passage to some form of economic hope which a generation ago they could have done in a safe and legal way. And it is no good whenever we see particularly horrific photographs of people who have died crossing the Sahara or people who have died crossing the Mediterranean to just express horror at that particular photograph. We have to look at a sustainable response to refugees and migration because in a globalised world, when anybody, however, however cut off the part of the world they live in, can look on their mobile phone and see a better world as possible, they will move, they will migrate. We need to have a sustainable response. And just as our hearts go out to Syrians struggling, dying, suffering and drowning, our hearts should also go out to economic migrants from Nigeria, Eritrea and North Africa struggling, drowning and suffering. We cannot just dismiss them as economic migrants who, I don't know, we're going to put them back into the water. We have to recognise that fleeing the devastating effects of poverty and climate change are just as valid as fleeing conflict. In conclusion, I wanted to say this. We have always rightly, as a country, prided ourselves of our leadership in development under some brilliant and inspirational leadership from Secretary of State for International Development, like Judith Hart, like Claire Short, like Valerie Amos, Gordon Brown gave tremendous leadership, both as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then leader of the party. But we need to be aware, and Western Europe needs to be aware, of giving with one hand in relation to development what we take away with another. So on the one hand, we give millions in aid to fragile and complicated states, but with the other aid, with the other hand, we prop up arm cells and their tortures and oppressors. On the one hand, we give millions in climate finance to help semi-arid countries dealing with plummeting crop fields and severe droughts, but on the other hand, we hand over billions and subsidies to our fossil fuel industries. On the one hand, we support public services or help public services in poor countries and try and assist their tax authorities to sustainably finance their public services, but on the other, through the City of London and the constellation of Crown Dependences and Overseas Territories, we sit at the centre of world tax avoidance, which robs fully 50% more from poor countries than they receive from rich countries in aid. On the one hand, we claim to promote free trade for the benefit of all, but in reality, the rules of the market somehow always seem to favour rich countries at the expense of the poor. So what are the answers to the challenge that you face? I think one answer for development is it needs to have a new relationship with the diaspora of developing countries. The diaspora of the developing countries here in London, the same countries they are working in. I believe that a new relationship and a new willingness to engage with that diaspora is one of the keys to sustainable international development in the 21st century. It's worth reminding the audience that I'm sure you're aware of it. The diaspora provides one of the biggest flows of revenue to the global south, in fact bigger than aid. They provide remittances. In 2013, migrants from developing countries sent home $404 billion. I suspect there are people in this audience whose parents have sent home some of that. Remittances to Egypt were larger than the country's earnings from the Suez canal. India got $70 billion more than it gets from its IT services. Expatria earnings accounted for more than a third of the Taddox town's national income. Remittances arrived first in times of economic hardship and in the aftermath of national disasters. They're more stable than private capital flows. Remittances have actually reduced poverty in Bangladesh, Ghana and the Caribbean. The money finances, healthcare, housing, business and education. There are no bigger stakeholders in poverty reduction in any given poor country than its diaspora here in the west. I believe that development NGOs should be recruiting much more actively from the diaspora. Time to have international development professionals, which reflect more broadly the countries they are operating in. I believe that development NGOs and development academics should be consulting and talking to the diaspora much more extensively than is currently the case. The diaspora don't just have economic capital contribute, they have human capital, social capital and cultural capital as well. It seems to me they're relating to the diaspora in a way which is not typical now of development industry. It's part and parcel of treating developing countries as equals with something to contribute rather than just applicants. The other issue in relation to development, which I think is very important, is transparency. There are so many stories one can say about the lack of transparency. Everyone remember the earthquake in Haiti. Some of you will have heard that the Red Cross in the United States raised more than half a billion dollars on the back of its appeal for Haiti and in the end it built less than a dozen homes. There is a real issue about transparency in relation to NGOs. They do excellent work, but it's frequently very often to see where the money is going and unless you see where the money is going, you cannot know what works. And also, and I say this mindful, there's a former very senior UN official listening to me, we need more transparency in relation to UN agencies. The Department for International Development produced a report this week and they said that they praised the UN agencies, but they said that sometimes there are overlapping remits of the agencies and there's inflexibility in their system. They point out that UN organisations receive half of diffits, one to 88 million spending on humanitarian aid and they believe there should be more transparency. So we need to engage with the diaspora. We need much more transparency at a time when the very idea of giving international aid is under attack, at a time of austerity when it's only too easy to persuade people that why should they give money to people far away when poor people here need the money. It seems to me that transparency couldn't be more important. But above all, we need this. We need to understand that development and the international development department is not just the government's NGO sitting in an office full of nice people trying to do their best for people in other parts of the world. Development has to come up with a government agenda. Development should be part of government policy whether it's tax, whether it's trade, whether it's what we do with healthcare. Development needs to be part and parcel of government policy across the piece. Rather than being the step-sister of the SEO, development should be a partner with the Treasury and it is no coincidence that this country has never done more around development when it was the particular concern, the particular care, and the particular focus of the then Chancellor Jack Gordon Brown. We need to reimagine the Department of International Development. We need to move decisively away from the notion of charity of rich to the poor, which Barbara Castle spoke about 50 years ago. And as part of that reimagining, we have to have the communities in the global south themselves at the centre of that debate. We need to have their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and cousins right here in London as part of that debate. And only in that way can we move from charity from the rich to the poor. Can we move to circulating money round and round. Can we move to parodic appeals where people are invited to feel sorry for African babies with swollen stomachs. Can we move to what we all want to see is a society, a world society with genuine fairness, with genuine equality and sustainable development. A better way is possible. International development is part of that better way and that better world. But it is long past time to reimagine the ways and the thinking of international development. Thank you very much. You understand very well. Thank you very much, Diane. You've given us a tour de force, I think, of all subjects related to development. Everything from foreign policy, taxation, trade, migration, environment, transparency, diaspora. So there's a lot. You've given us a lot to think about and a lot to discuss, I hope, in the next few minutes. Let us, we have some time for questions before, it's time for formal questions and we are going to have a reception upstairs to which you're all invited. But let us take questions in groups of three if we can so that we can get through as many as possible and then Diane will respond to them. I should have said at the beginning and some of you probably have figured this out already that there is a hashtag for this event which is Diane at-so-as. So if you want to see what's been being tweeted already by some people, you check that out and if you want to join into the conversation and the remainder of the program tonight, please do that. So three, let's start off with three questions. Here in the front, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, if you can speak loudly, so yeah. Can you just keep, pick the top one, yeah? So we have time to get through as many people as possible. No, it's not the reason there's a war but it's taking part in the war. To combat terrorism for tens of years and then they ended up killing the people. Another thing is about refugees in Calais. I haven't been there, thank God. But most of them, maybe 90% of them are men. Now when they cross to the UK, it doesn't become a safe haven 100% because for me as a refugee I was left in hostels that were mixed and then they mistaken my name to a man and I ended up in a hostel with men. And then I was very powerful woman back home as a women's rights activist and I ended up so deprived from my basic rights. So even here there's a problem. So not only the ones in Calais or even the ones here, there is a problem. And the ones who get the papers are the ones who are not necessarily the ones who are in need the more. So there are certain rules that need to be rethought about like you think about. So can you frame a question please? No, I don't have a question. Okay, then I think we need to move on because we need to have some time for a response but thank you very much for those points. If we can, let's go to the back section here, yeah? Maybe first in the front row and then at the back. Yeah, thank you. Hi, I'm from Lebanon and I'm a master's student here. And this kind of touches on the point but it's more of a question. So with the new law now in the UK I think where you have to earn at least 36,000 pounds a year to be sponsored for a visa. I think that's quite unfair because international students pay huge very, very high fees to come and live here and to study here and then we have to earn very high salaries to be able to stay. And I think that's quite contradictory and quite unfair because that's just a one very channeled approach. The money comes here and then what happens we're sent back to our countries where in Lebanon with a master's degree I would earn a maximum of $1,000 and I think this is very unfair. And the reason why I would earn only $1,000 is partly because of international influence in the country and I just think there's something very wrong here. So I was wondering what you thought about this. Okay, great, thank you. And here in the back on the side, yeah? Thank you. Hi, my name's Emmanuel. I'm doing a master's in African politics at economic development. I was going to ask you what you think or who you think are the most impactful actors in international development. That's a big question. But I mean, there are so many people involved in it and I guess I just wanted to hear your personal take on it. Okay, great, thank you. So we had two, the first question was more of a comment so do we have one more question, yeah, maybe from this middle section while you're here. Guy in the striped t-shirt, thank you. Hiya, I wanted to ask why you think the Conservative Party has ring-fenced aid funding. All right, thank you. Okay, very interesting questions. The lady from the Lebanon raised the question of people, militias that had been trained in combat. You know, I could have said a lot about the Lebanon but that would have taken up my entire speech. But I was just pointing to, I took the arms trade point to make a more general point about military intervention and armed deployment but you're absolutely right. And again, when you look at other parts of the world you can see that pattern as well. But you also made a very good point about the proportion of men in some of the refugees coming across now. It's perfectly true that in Calais, probably three quarters of the refugees are men but I've also been to Greece recently, I was in Greece last month and what they were telling me was that currently half the people coming across in the boats from Turkey are actually women. But that doesn't take away from your point and I do think that we have to be in a position not just to treat refugees in a fair and positive way but to have standards and rules so that a young woman like yourself that finds herself in a position where you're amongst disproportionately male MPs. Male MPs, yeah. That would be unsafe, right? So we do need to treat them in a way. So young women like yourself don't feel threatened in certain situations, I think that's a perfectly fair point. A lady from the Lebanon raised the question of the minimum salary of 36,000 pounds. I think he's extremely unfair. Let me stress, because maybe I didn't make the point clear at the beginning, this is a Conservative government, I'm a Labour MP. I think it's wrong, I didn't vote for it. It's caused a lot of problems to my own constituents and frankly, no one in my own family who's currently here could have come here if they'd had to earn that equivalent. I mean, it's wrong and it's occasioned by something I referred to earlier, domestic politicians running scared of UKIP. It has nothing to do with anything sensible about migration policy in the economy and it's quite wrong. Who's been the most impactful person in development? Actors. So it could be organisations or, yeah, okay, fine. It's difficult. First of all, I would have to say, one of the, I still think, one of the most important thinkers in development and economic development in developing culture. I don't really like the phrase developing but it's hard to have an equivalent. I think one of the most important thinkers was actually Kwama en Cruma cos en Cruma talked about the importance of trade, of development, of building your economy and not being dependent on aid and I was recently in Ghana looking actually at tax justice and also women's projects and I had the occasion to reread some of en Cruma's works and I recommend it to you cos amazingly, 50 years on, some of it is very relevant. The other person that I would name-check is a man called Mo Ibrahim. Mo Ibrahim made his fortune selling phones in Africa. He's a multimillionaire but unlike the generality of African multimillionaire he's really tried to contribute to development and he has an index of corruption which he produces every year which is really valuable work and God knows he's tried to give a prize to African leaders who are not corrupt. Sadly, more years than not, he's unable to give out the prize but you have to say Mo made his money. He could do a lot of African millionaires who just enjoy his money but he has sought to give back and give back in ways that try and change the paradigm so I give him a lot of credit and also, and I think it was clear from my remarks I think the unsung heroes of development are the diaspora that every week go to the post office and send that little money home and you know, my family from Jamaica and you can drive around Royal Jamaica and it's a little tiny dusty village in the middle of nowhere and you can always spot the house that diaspora money built because it's always an extraordinary sort of excessive house in the middle of nowhere but some proud diaspora person has been sending the money home for years. So yeah, the diaspora I think are my unsung heroes and herons and oh, should Cameron be ring ffencing the 0.7? Well, if it makes you feel any better Cameron is engaged in whittling away at the 0.7 don't worry about it being ring ffenced. Some of it is being spent on military expenditure and the foreign office has got his eye on some of it. Foreign office people tell me whenever you come up with a new project in the foreign office, the first question you're asked is, is it ODA-able? In other words, can we winkle the money out of the different budget? So you're worried that the budget is ring ffence? Rest assured. The tourists pay lip service to 0.7 but they're whittling away at it. OK, let's have another round here. So let's take some from this side here and maybe in the green. Hi there, thank you for your talk. I'm a PhD student and I'm looking at youth unemployment and I'm from the Caribbean. My parents are Jamaican so I totally understand and relate to that. My question to you is, you've mentioned things as it relates to fiscal policy, trade, et cetera. These are solutions that the UK government can certainly help to empower and bring about fairness. But what about the country themselves? What about the actual empowering these developed countries and these, you know, to really take, to make, to be much more influential in the decision making of their countries? I just wanted to know what has been done. I mean, how do you go about doing that? Because ultimately empowerment is all about involving those who are not empowered. Great, OK. Let's have one more question here and then we'll shift over to the other side. Thank you for your talk. And I'm John and I study here at SELAS. And can you just elaborate on your point regarding the sustainability of providing a safe and legal route for refugees to enter into the UK? And how would you or the government sell it to the public, especially the UKIP supporters? Thank you. That's a good challenge. OK, let's, if we can shift over to the other side here, that would be helpful. Yeah, so, yeah. Hi, my name is Craig, I work for Overseas Development Institute. I'm wondering whether you think we should ever train the police or army in conflict affected states. And I would like to give one caveat. The common, the common argument against that is that they will then abuse human rights. My argument would be is that's why we're there. So the constant day, the Daily Mail article will say that. We've trained someone and now they're abusing someone, but this is the mucky world of being involved in conflict affected states. So it would be good to get your opinion on that. Thank you. OK. So that's three questions. We have some response and then we'll go back to the back. I'd never say that you should never train the police and army. I mean, I was, where was I, I was in Trinidad where I think the British have been involved in training the police to be more effective in case of domestic violence. And this was a revelation to Trinidadian police. I think that there are times and places where you can provide training and support, but you shouldn't do it in regimes which are involved in completely egregious and systemic human rights abuses. That's all I have to say. I would never say never. On the question of safe and legal rights, this is a very delicate question and much of it falls outside my brief. And you quite rightly put your finger on it that in the current political climate, it's very difficult to talk about it. But in the end, it has to be the only way. I think the curious thing about migration, the fewer migrants that are in a part of the world in this country, the more frightened they are of them. I remember in the 2010 general election, when I was in Hackney, I was just campaigning how I didn't go anywhere else. So I rang a friend of mine who represents a constituency in Lancashire, and I said, how are things going? And he said, fine. This is in the middle, this is kind of not rural exactly, but it's in the outskirts of Lancashire. And it's quite a tight seat, but he holds it for labour. So I said, how are things going? And he said, fine. He said, there's just one thing. Let's call the constituency Crocsford, okay? So he said, there's just one thing. He said, everywhere I go, people are talking to me about immigration. But he said, I say to them, there are no immigrants in Crocsford, and I could talk about attitudes to migration, but it's the fear of migration that convulses people as much as anything else. And let me make just one point. I don't want to be drawn into a big discussion on migration, but to illustrate the difficulties. You will hear people go on about the anti-immigrant sentiment towards Eastern European. And they will say to me, Diane, well, that's not racism. That's not racism. They're not black or brown, are they? And as many of you academics, I can only refer you to what was said about the Irish in the 19th century. Every single thing that is said about Poles and Eastern Europeans today was said about the Irish in the 19th century that are coming over here, they're taking our jobs, they're undercutting English workers. The truth is that the narrative about migration as the other and a threat to English working people has not varied over a century. But it's very difficult for politicians, and this issue of safe and legal routes is difficult. And I don't have an answer because it would mean venturing outside my brief, which is development, but I'm confident that it has to be part of the solution. The solution to the waves of migration we are seeing is not barbed by. It's not people firing rubber bullets. It's not letting people drown in the Mediterranean. It's looking again at the system whereby people are able to have a better life for their families. And the final point was how do you empower the countries? Well, you know, Jamaica is a funny thing to point from Jamaica. Jamaica has some of the most brilliant and talented diplomats in the world and has had since independence. You know, in the end with some of these countries, and this is a slightly controversial thing to say, in the end with some of these countries, I don't mean absolutely bankrupt Sub-Saharan countries, but in relation to some of these countries it comes down to the attitudes of elites. And the issue has to be that elites yes, come abroad to train, but are willing to go back to their country of origin and help to clean up the politics. The other people say, oh, I would never get involved in politics in X, Y instead, but highly skilled and qualified elites have to go back and do that. I, as a British politician, cannot change the nature of the elites in some of these countries. The elites have to say, this is our country, we must do things better, we must stand up, because in many of these countries it is not a lack of skills or understanding, it's an attitude amongst elites that their future lies perhaps outside the country. OK, let's move to the back section if we can. Take a few back there. So I'm sitting on the stairs, thanks. Hi, I'm an alumni from Sars, and I'm currently working for MedSans en Frontier. I was just wondering what your conception of the current move towards converging development and humanitarian assistance in global policy circles is, because I mean the World Humanitarian Summit, UN bodies seem to be suggesting that this would be an effective move for development and humanitarianism in those two separate sectors. Just, there's a gentleman in the back there, yeah. Thanks so much indeed. Thanks so much to our Diane. My name is Paul Ivorrable. My question really is that we have experienced many changes in the world, and nothing remains the same forever. So I'm asking, is it not high time that we do our way with the system of money? Because you find that all these problems we're experiencing, they all fall down to money. You see, countries rich people, they want to get richer, thereby suppressing the aspirants of other people. Now I think it's high time we should come down to God-centered means of governance. God-centered means of relating with each other. I believe that if we can get this done, don't you think it will change the whole, you know, atmosphere, the whole thinking, and the whole world? Yeah? Thank you. Great, thank you. And just coming down the stairs, just here on the, yeah. I just wondered all the problems that you talk about are very top-down. How can, say, the average show take action on these things in their own communities at local level? Great, okay. So we've got three questions there. Okay, top-down as opposed to bottom-up. One of the reasons I talk about diaspora, because that's the original bottom-up form of development, I think that depending on what institutions you're involved in, I think it's good to look at partnerships between particular individuals or churches or villages and their opposite number in a developing country. I think it's about, I mean, apart from giving money, which is always good, it's trying to engage with people on the, as equals. We've had great projects in Hackney with children in Hackney writing to children in developing countries. So I would say, short of whatever money you're able to donate, I think it's trying to find a way to elect people in developing country as equals and as people. The money said quite correctly that money is a curse. I think we should, I think before we get rid of money, though, we need to get rid of greed. On the question of do we need to merge development and humanitarian aid, I don't think so. Not at this time. I was very struck in Somaliland, for instance, that they had a humanitarian crisis which needed specific remedies, but there was also a development issue about making them resilient to increasingly frequent drought, and they are separate work streams, I think. In terms of the World Humanitarian Summit, I hope to be going to that in May, I think it is, and maybe I'll have a better answer for you when I come back. Great. Shall we take time for one more round? Is that all right? One more round. I know you're getting tired and probably losing your voice. So we'll try to get one more round in. So if we can have here in the centre section, then we'll come down to the front. Hi, thank you very much for your talk. My name's Beth and I'm a master's student here. Regards to the EU referendum, I just want to know what your opinion is on the two possible routes if we leave the EU or if we stay in the EU for British overseas development. Great. Thank you very much. And then can you come down to the front and Mira in the front row will have a question. Yeah. Hello, thank you very much. I'm Mira. I'm a lecturer in international relations here. One of the successes of Labour's different policies prior to 2010 was national ownership of aid and that was instilled in various international agreements and that's something that has been basically chucked by the present government. There's no more general budget support as far as I know and the tendency that was going towards national ownership of planning for development has since been abandoned. Would you reverse that? Great. And the last question here in the opposite. Hi, Sarah, from Communities for Development. Excuse me. My question is about what's your view of the increasing discussions about private sector investment in terms of development, so more public-private partnerships, blended finance. Is this something that's a positive move or should we be worried that this is just another path for wealth extraction from developing countries and just further exploitation? Thanks. Great, thank you very much. On the EU referendum, I think it must be better for development for us to stay in the EU, but I was worried you're going to ask me what's going to be the results of the EU referendum. That is a trickier question to answer. I can only urge all of you to go and vote to stay in if you have a vote. On the question of budget support, I'm a little bit wary of budget support. I mean, Valerie may have a view on it. Budget support is only as good as the governance of the country you're giving it to. I think there's still a lot of work to be done on governance, so we can satisfy ourselves as a government, but also satisfy the British public. The money is not just disappearing into a moras, but it's actually being spent on the things the British public would like to see it spent on. On the question of private sector investment, there's clearly a role for private sector investment. But again, you do have to be careful. In Nigeria, for instance, different spent millions on getting private consultants to go and give Nigeria advice on its electricity supply. Nigeria still has outages. It still has problems with its electricity supply, but millions of pounds of British taxpayers' money has gone on private consultants. So there's a role for the private sector, just as there's a role for the private sector in British society, but we do have to be careful. Great. Thank you very much. You've definitely left us with still a lot more to think about. Please join us in thanking Diane in the first instance, and then if you'd like to stay on, join us upstairs for a drink.