Month: February 2013
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Labour pushes Democrats for a Robin Hood Tax
First posted on Liberal Conspiracy I’m back from a 48-hour round trip to Washington DC with Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury Chris Leslie MP, and it was really interesting to see exactly the same debates about a Robin Hood Tax being had in the USA as we’ve had in the UK. EU Tax Commissioner…
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Ivan Lewis MP responds to David Cameron’s comments on international aid
Ivan Lewis MP, Labour’s Shadow International Development Secretary, responding to reports today on David Cameron’s comments on international aid, said: “David Cameron’s comments on aid and defence spending are a cynical attempt to appease his right wing backbenchers and another example of his weak leadership. One day, he claims credit for honouring Labour’s 0.7 aid…
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Cameron may be breaking OECD aid rules to placate Tory backbenchers
As posted on Left Foot Forward. The Labour Campaign for International Development warned before the 2010 election that there was a risk the Conservatives would divert the aid budget away from poverty reduction and towards national security. Today’s news that hundreds of millions of pounds may be diverted to peacekeeping defence operations in bid toplacate backbenchers proves those warnings right. And it wasn’t…
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Labour’s Mark Hendrick Seeks Legal Commitment to 0.7%
Labour MP Mark Hendrick has used a private members bill to propose a binding legal commitment to ensure that 0.7% of UK GDP is spent on international aid. Writing to David Cameron this week he called for the Prime Minister to strongly support the measure, given concerns that the bill would fail to gain sufficient…
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Poverty is Political
First published on LabourList. The launch of the Enough Food IF campaign by a wide spectrum of British NGOs is to be warmly welcomed. The demands of the campaign, if met, would transform the lives of people around the world who currently suffer poverty, hunger, malnutrition and the appalling diseases that often come with them. In his speech to…
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It’s politics that will deliver a successful G8
First published on Labour List Eight years ago Tony Blair used his Davos visit to lay out the UK’s agenda for the G8 Presidency. He proposed a doubling of aid and 100% debt cancellation for the poorest countries, in order to mobilise resources for the Millennium Development Goals. At the Gleneagles summit six months later the…
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The post-2015 Panel: An unenviable task
First published on Labour List The 27 eminent persons gathering in Monrovia this week to discuss what should replace the current set of Millennium Development Goals have a prodigiously difficult task ahead of them. The process to agree the original MDGs was contentious enough, but the ‘High Level Panel’ of world leaders selected by Ban Ki-Moon to help set…
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A critical look at Justine Greening’s uncritical faith in private sector development
Justine Greening’s speech to the ONE campaign yesterday was a ramble through her brief, and some of it was decent stuff. I think she was right to suspend aid to Rwanda, for instance, although President Kagame’s regime has a much longer charge sheet than the military intervention in DRC that precipitated the decision. The commitment…
Labour Campaign for International Development 