Check against delivery

Conference,

It is good to be here in Aviemore to address you for the first time as Labour’s International Development Secretary.

To talk about the work we have done and the difference we are making in the struggle against global poverty.

And I come to this rostrum today with a message of pride and hope.

Now it was just over a decade ago when Wendy worked with Donald Dewar on the biggest constitutional change this country had seen since the Act of Union - the Scotland Act.

But what is less well known is that at the same time this Labour government was delivering another constitutional change which has also had profound consequences.

Because in 1997, on coming to office, we established the Department for International Development as a full government department with a seat at the cabinet table tasked to tackle poverty, ignorance and disease around the globe.

And the work which we do in DFID is about our values - Labour values - in action. 

Our belief that what binds humanity together is always more important than what divides us.

That poverty is our enemy, deprivation our real foe and disease not a fact of life but a challenge to be taken on and beaten.

And believe me conference we are taking on each and every one of those foes each and every day.

And because we have a Labour government:

Our aid – British aid – now lifts 3 million people out of poverty permanently each year.

Our aid – British aid - has treated a million Africans with HIV/AIDS.

And our aid – British aid - has put 6 million more children into school in Ethiopia, 17 million more in Bangladesh.

And we should never forget that behind these huge figures are human stories.

If, like me, you had travelled to the Al Saalam camp in northern Darfur, and met the children, the mothers, the fathers who somehow keep hope alive amidst the horror.

If you had spoken, as I have, to the mothers motivated to learn to read and write to give themselves and their children a better future yet risk rape and murder every day just searching for firewood.
 
Then you would not question our duty to act.

For in contrast to the years of Tory cuts, the retreat from our responsibilities, we are the first British government in history to set a date – 2013 - when we will meet the UN Gold Standard of 0.7 per cent of national income spent on aid.

And that aid is now untied from commercial interests and goes to help some of the poorest people on earth and not to the line the pockets of the richest companies.

But lets be honest. We all meet people who ask – why should we bother. Charity begins at home, they say. We should stick to our own backyard.

I say the reason why we are doing it is because of the values we learned in our own backyard.

That community doesn’t finish at your garden gate or the city wall or the border.

That membership of humanity doesn’t neatly stop at a boundary or a timezone.

That poverty is an affliction that needs to be eradicated not just here but around the globe.

And in a world that is today too unequal, too unsafe and too unsustainable the cause of international development isn’t only our moral duty, it is also a recognition of our new interdependence.

A world so unequal today that more than 1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day.

So unsafe, as I saw for myself, that ploughing a field, or walking along a path in Afghanistan is to risk hitting one of the millions of mines sown in decades of conflict.

So unsustainable that 1 billion people could be forced to leave their homes in search of water.

This is the test which history has set us. We know how to build schools and teach children but 72 million children today go without primary education.

We know how to build hospitals and provide health care – but 30,000 African children will die today, tomorrow, every day from diseases we know how to prevent or cure.

We know how to end poverty – yet poverty kills a child every three seconds.

Past generations could blame their inaction on ignorance. But we have the tools. History will not forgive us if we don’t do the job and we won’t deserve to be forgiven.

So how do we rise to these challenges?

We go first to those whose suffering is most acute, whose need is most urgent. Long before this weekend’s elections and long after the cameras have gone, we will be there in Zimbabwe, working to feed the hungry, heal the sick, protect the vulnerable.

But beyond the immediate emergencies – natural or inflicted – we must help governments build the strength they need to rely on themselves, not on aid, to provide the basic services their people need.

That is why yesterday at the Anglo-French Summit we announced a new partnership to get 16 million children in Africa into school by 2010 and challenged the international community to join us to provide a school place for every one of the 33 million children with no school to go to.

And we must recognise that aid on its own is not enough. Our aid must help these countries grow to escape the need for aid. To build their own way out of need, liberate themselves from want, set themselves free from poverty.

And together with this action at a local and a national level we must work internationally to make our global institutions ready for the development emergencies we face.

That is why next month I will travel to New York to put the case for not fourteen UN agencies to deal with water and sanitation but for a single coordinated approach to address this most basic of needs.

That is why next month I will travel to Washington for the annual meeting of the World Bank where I will argue not for the forced privatisation of basic services but for local solutions which meet the needs of the poorest countries on the planet.

Because in today’s world we cannot escape each others’ problems. Whether it is through conflict, the spread of disease or the impact of climate change the distinction between foreign and domestic doesn’t make sense any more. There’s no over there and over here anymore.

The old isolationism simply doesn’t work anymore. For there can be no security, no prosperity here at home unless we tackle security and poverty globally.

Not in a world where an epidemic can move across continents on a plane ride.. When a conflict in one country causes a refugee crisis across a continent. And not when the pollution emitted by one country causes hurricanes an ocean away

I saw that for myself in Garissa in Northern Kenya a few months ago. Where 350 families are now forced to live lives of abject poverty under canvas because of the flash floods which took away the lands which were their homes for generations.

They speak with a quiet dignity and reveal an extraordinary courage in the face of adversity. Their hopes for tomorrow told as vividly as they describe the pains of today.

And one of the most unexpected things of all in the refugee camps of Garissa or Darfur or the Burmese border, is when you have the privilege of meeting some of the people we are trying to help is that they thank you.

And when they do it reminds you that the capacity to help is not the result of actions of any one individual. It is an affirmation of the power of collective action.

The increased aid we give and the millions of lives our aid saves happens because right across our country people of conscience and goodwill in this Labour Party resolved together to make it happen.

The enhanced work of my department only happens because Labour party members and supporters made it happen.

People – like the people gathered here in this hall who chose not to stay in and watch the telly, not to go down the pub, but to spend their free time to delivering leaflets, stuffing envelopes, and campaigning for Labour’s cause.

For it is not by chance but by choice that this government – our Labour government - has prioritised development over the last decade. It didn’t just happen and it wasn’t inevitable. It speaks to who we are, where we come from and what we came into politics to do.

This goes to the heart of our politics, As our constitution reminds us we achieve more through our common endeavour than we can achieve alone.

Only Labour has brought about the changes we have seen and only Labour can finish the job.

Because we act not out of pity, but out of duty.

Not out of sympathy, but out of solidarity.

Not out of charity but inspired by a vision of justice.

This is our cause.

This is our calling.

And, conference, by working together, this will be our enduring achievement.