argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Alicia Alexandra Martha Kearns (Conservative, Centre-right): I am enormously proud of our record of supporting the most vulnerable and using aid to make our people and those around the world safer, but we have suffered the biggest recession in 300 years. That is not a situation that we could have predicted when I fought the election on our manifesto promises, yet the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015 explicitly anticipated this sort of crisis where a departure from targets is necessary If I had been asked during the election whether I would reconsider the 0.7% commitment, I would have said, "Yes, but only in the very darkest of times," and if the last year or so has not been the darkest of times, then what is? Since my election, we have faced an enormous number of difficult choices. In Rutland and Melton those difficult choices and dark times have looked like this: the Government having to support 17,900 jobs through furlough and 4,500 individuals, and underwrite nearly £123 million in loans—that is almost half of all employee jobs in Rutland and Melton that we had to save. That support was necessary, but the costs pose real risks for the future, too Even with the reduction in UK aid, we remain the second largest donor in the G7. The taxes of residents of Rutland and Melton will continue to go towards saving lives, disaster relief, peacekeeping, and tackling climate change. We should be proud of that, and I hope that the reorganisation of the FCDO can augment our capacity to respond to crises outside of the ODA budget through the new conflict centre But today in the Chamber hon. Members have criticised the Government by arguing that other G7 countries are not temporarily reducing their ODA budgets, yet in 2020 we were one of only two G7 countries to meet that target and we are the only one to do it every year since 2013. Perhaps it is because those countries have not met their commitments in normal times that they do not now need to make a temporary reduction; indeed, they had no plans in the first place to meet the 0.7% they promised With this temporary reduction, we will still exceed the funding provided by every country bar one; we will remain one the most generous countries in the world. This is a temporary measure that recognises the fiscal duty we have to our children. It recognises that we will still stand by those most in need, and the Government have defined the fiscal circumstances in which we will return to 0.7%. This does not diminish our country, and, while this is a difficult decision, it is the right one for now because we have faced the darkest of times.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Sarah Elizabeth Dines (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) I have been speaking to my constituents in Derbyshire Dales who are, by and large, generous and kind-spirited people. I have listened carefully to their views and, following those discussions, I will be voting for the motion as it provides certainty and a clearly outlined path for our international spending to get back to our 0.7% manifesto commitment while delivering responsible public finances and allowing us to maintain a high level of spending on other priorities at home such as the NHS, schools and the police. It also delivers on our manifesto promises for responsible public finances At 0.5%, the UK is spending more than £10 billion on overseas aid this year. That is a phenomenal amount of money. Let us not forget that we are one of the most generous, kindest and biggest spenders in the world. I remind those who wish unfairly to characterise the Government as somehow mean or uncaring that Conservative Governments have consistently spent more on international aid than Labour. Under Labour Governments between 1997 and 2009, the average spend on overseas aid was just 0.36% The Opposition are therefore hardly in a position to lecture the Government on overseas spending. The Leader of the Opposition may find those arguments helpful in court, but they do not work here. Once again, the Opposition are totally out of tune with the British population We believe that, given the unusual time that the Government have had with the covid pandemic, we must balance spending. The Government have spent more than £400 billion on keeping the nation safe, keeping our families secure and preserving jobs and livelihoods. That has given the people of my constituency a way forward in frightening and worrying times. On behalf of the people of Derbyshire Dales, I thank the Government for their support. They are kind, not mean We must not forget that, as my adult sons remind me regularly, every pound we spend on international aid is borrowed from our future generations. As a mother of four adult children, and representing many families in Derbyshire Dales, I have a duty to help restore the public finances to some sort of responsible level. For those reasons, I have no hesitation in supporting this sound motion.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Stephen Crabb (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to be called to speak in this debate. I recognise that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has probably the most difficult job in the Government, bar none, and perhaps in the whole country. He is the only person employed to say no and make difficult choices about the spending demands that we all present at the door of the Treasury. Nevertheless, I share the concerns, fears and doubts expressed by colleagues this afternoon about whether the cuts that we are debating will become permanent. I share their fear that 0.5% will become the default setting for our overseas aid spending and that the cuts will become locked in—a permanent withdrawal and a permanent stepping back from the level of commitment that Britain has given overseas among the poorest countries on earth. I share those fears not only for reasons that hon. Members have already outlined, but because I think we are in danger of overlooking just how enormous the effort was that got us to the point where the House of Commons was united on making the commitment to 0.7%, as the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has just reminded us I am perhaps one of the few Members present who was in the House in 2005. I recall the enormous lobbying efforts made not just by churches, but by trade unions, women’s institutes and groups in all our constituencies. There was demand for that commitment. It required Opposition Front Benchers to work with Government Front Benchers; it required Opposition Back Benchers to work with Government Back Benchers. For me, it represented a high water mark of what can be achieved in this House of Commons when people choose to bury some of their political differences and work together for a cause much bigger than our most immediate political needs.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: Social Welfare
Andrew John Bower Mitchell (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is making a wonderful speech. He refers to his longevity in the House. Does he remember how Make Poverty History galvanised national opinion? Crack the Crises is the current successor to that generation, and it is reinforced by younger people. Does he accept that once covid is over and they are able to show what they feel, they will make very clear their opposition to this foolish decision that the Government have made?
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Andrea Jacqueline Leadsom (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Member is making some very serious points, but does he accept the fact that the UK has set out 0.7% in law? Many countries around the world also commit to 0.7%, but always fall short and do not bother to have a discussion about it.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Ruth Rosamond Edwards (Conservative, Centre-right): I did not come to this House to reduce overseas aid, but then I also did not come here to tell people that they cannot see their parents or their grandchildren, that they had to close the business they have spent years building up, or that they could not get married with their friends and family there to support them. Those are just some of the soul-searching choices that covid has forced on all of us in the past 18 months Today’s choice is no different. Voting for the Government’s motion will take £5 billion out of the overseas aid budget. Voting against it will cut £5 billion out of our public services here in the UK or necessitate tax rises on our constituents, many of whom have been living on restrained incomes over the pandemic. It is important that we are honest with our constituents, especially at a time when the NHS has a huge task to get a backlog of millions of operations and treatments down, when so many children have had their education so badly disrupted, and when the police are dealing with a chilling rise in crimes such as domestic violence There have been some suggestions in the debate today. My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) suggested cutting HS2. That would no doubt be very popular in some places, but business leaders throughout the east midlands have made it clear that that would significantly degrade the ability to grow the economy there. The hon. Member for Dundee West (Chris Law) suggested degrading our cyber-capabilities at a time when our public services, businesses and society are increasingly reliant on digital infrastructure and digital services. There are no easy choices here. There are no cost-free options The second point I want to make is that the definition of ODA is very narrow. It excludes much of the support the UK provides overseas from being included in it: £85 million invested to help to develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which is now being distributed without profit across the world; we are the largest donor to Gavi, immunising 300 million children against infectious diseases; and we provide £350 million a year to the UN’s peacekeeping budget on top of our ODA contributions Finally, even with the reduction to 0.5%, the UK will spend more as a percentage of GNI than almost any other major economy—more than the US, Canada and Japan, and well above the OECD average. We will still be the third-largest bilateral humanitarian donor in the world. So to talk about Britain as if it is withdrawing from the world or turning its back on people is, in my view, divorced from reality.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Peter William Bone (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill), who speaks with passion. I do not accept his arguments, but I accept that those people who will vote against the Government tonight do so with genuine concern. I welcome the fact that we have a lot of SNP Members here, we have the Democratic Unionist party here and we have the Liberal Democrats— ah, but only two Labour Back Benchers have bothered to stay in the debate, and one has just arrived, so I am not so sure about the concerns expressed by those on the Labour Benches I welcome one thing that the hon. Gentleman mentioned: the fact that this Parliament is having a vote and a debate on this issue, and that is to the great credit of the Government. They are bringing forward a motion that they may well lose tonight, and that is to their credit. They are letting this Parliament decide on this very important issue I think this debate is not particularly about the merits of overseas aid and 0.7%; it is about the state that the economy is in. I cannot tell from sitting here whether the Chancellor is his happy self. He is very popular at the moment because he has been giving money away and helping people, but there is an economic crisis coming down the line, and certainly on these Benches, we should recognise that. That is the reason we should support the cut of £4 billion in overseas aid. If we do not do that, the Chancellor either has to borrow £4 billion more, or he has to tax more, or he has to cut public expenditure. That is actually what the issue is about, and that is why I will be supporting the Government tonight I will just touch on what I think is more important with overseas aid: it is the outcome, not the amount of money we are spending. Labour Governments used to say, "We are spending record amounts of money", but that did not mean they were having record outcomes. When I was chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on human trafficking, it was often the small charities without state money that were having the best outcomes The great thing about this Government is what they have done with the vaccine and AstraZeneca. The fact that we have given this to the world and that there will be 3 billion doses across the world by the end of next year is tremendous testament to this Government. That is world-leading and it is changing the world, and it is saving millions of people from being seriously ill and dying. That is the sort of thing we should be proud about. We should not be worried about a figure.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Tobias Martin Ellwood (Conservative, Centre-right): This is a vote about our soft power; a vote on the definition of global Britain; and a test of our political courage to see the bigger international picture and stay committed to our international obligations even when we face difficulties at home. I will not tire of telling the House just how dangerous and complex our world is becoming. A simple question that I put to the Prime Minister, the National Security Adviser, the Defence Secretary and all the respective heads of the armed forces was this: is global instability over the next five to 10 years going to increase or decrease? In every single case, the answer was increase We face an unpredictable, uncertain decade, with growing authoritarianism and extremism on the rise, an ever assertive China and Russia, and, of course, climate change increasingly wreaking havoc across the world. The Government acknowledge that in their own integrated review, but hard and soft power are two sides of the same coin, as we learnt to our peril in Afghanistan. Cutting our soft power will have operational, strategic and reputational consequences. The sheer scale of global challenges was acknowledged at the G7 summit, yet here we are debating the reduction in our soft power profile—the only G7 nation to do so. In contrast, China is using its aid programmes as part of a long-term strategy to advance its own global reach. Look at what is happening across Africa and Asia. A new global soft power war is taking place. This, to me, is the face of a cold war that is slowly emerging, but we in the west have yet to wake up to its reality. China is weaponising its immense soft power to significantly advance its influence and reach and to promote its own interpretation of the international rules-based order, and it ensnares dozens and dozens of countries into its sphere of influence. That is why we should not be diminishing our own soft power I suspect the Government may succeed in winning the argument today, but they will lose the moral high ground. We claim to be a problem-solving and burden-sharing nation with a global perspective. It is simply not a good look to promote a global Britain agenda, emphasising leadership, responsibility and resolve, but then to cut our overseas aid budget I urge the Government to ask what Churchill might say to the House now, given the 1930s feel to the world. Why not articulate to the nation the wider geopolitical uncertainty that we face, the urgency for the west to regroup, and the influential role that Britain could play if we retain our soft power commitments so we can begin to address the progressively dangerous trajectory our world is now on? I have no doubt that, if the Government did that, the nation would be fully in support.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Anthony James Holland Mangnall (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the Government for being courteous in having the Prime Minister present and the Chancellor respond to this debate. They have been courteous in holding a vote at long last, but I am afraid that is where my thanks end As we have heard in the course of this debate, the 0.7% target was not only a manifesto commitment made by every political party in this place but a commitment to the world’s poorest. It was a commitment to join in force with other nations around the world. Many Members have said, "We didn’t do anything—no other country followed us" but Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg all now fulfil the 0.7% target, France is set to hit the 0.7% target next year, and the United States of America has uplifted its spending by $16 billion. We say that we did not have influence; I beg to differ. Today’s debate is really about the fight for parliamentary engagement. In 2015, this House voted for the International Development Act, which enshrined the right to make sure that we did not make short-term decisions and that when the years were good the spending went up and when the years were bad the spending went down. That is something we should have kept in mind before we made today’s decision. Instead, we have been offered a mirage. What looks like a compromise is something that will never be reached. Despite the arbiters of the OBR, the spending decisions on the issue will still be made by the Treasury. This announcement comes before a spending review, so we do not know how much is going to be spent on social care, health or education. We do not know what the Government’s financial commitments will be in the years to come. We are therefore being led down the garden path, and by that I am appalled. Just as with Gordon Brown’s checklist to join the euro, we will never meet these targets The Government’s proposal is a short-termist approach. Like many Members, I have seen the value of what we spend in foreign aid, whether that is on women’s education, AIDS programmes, deradicalisation or climate change. I believe passionately that the UK leads by example in those policy areas, so I will not apologise for voting against the Government tonight. I will not apologise for the fact that I will be standing up on behalf of the NGOs and experts who are based in the UK but operate around the world and who lead by example and help other organisations to follow suit. For that, I offer no apology, but I remind Members of this House that we make an extraordinary impact in the world and to shirk from it for a short-term decision is something that we should all be appalled by.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Mark James Harper (Conservative, Centre-right): I have listened very carefully to the speeches in this debate, and many of them focused on our manifesto promise on aid spending. That is entirely correct but, as I said in one of my interventions, we also made a commitment not to borrow money for day-to-day spending and to reduce our debt burden. All those commitments have been made more challenging by the global pandemic we have faced. The Treasury’s motion, which I will support, as I hope all my colleagues will, is an attempt to deal with the challenge of the pandemic and deliver on all our manifesto commitments in a way that reflects the reality of what has happened over the past year I have also heard many Members talk about the borrowing that we have had to make over the last year. I know the Chancellor and I am very proud of that borrowing, because it has helped us get through an incredibly difficult year, but one-off borrowing for a crisis is not the same as ongoing day-to-day spending. I am surprised by many of my colleagues who talk about the £5 billion a year that it would cost to replace this spending as if £5 billion was not a lot of money. I can remember many difficult conversations when I was a Minister, and indeed when I was Government Chief Whip, about far smaller sums of money, sometimes involving many of the colleagues I have heard talk about £5 billion as if it were nothing. I am afraid that we are going to have to get used to the fact that there are certain realities in the world—that money we spend has to be paid for, and it either has to be borrowed or financed from taxation One of the problems we now have with the borrowing we have had to make over the last year is that we are very vulnerable to increases in inflation or interest rates. I heard someone say we are living in an era of low interest rates. We do not know how long that is going to last, and a 1% rise in inflation and interest rates would cost us twenty-five thousand million pounds, five times the amount we are arguing about today. Those are the realities that not just the Chancellor but all of us in this Parliament, and particularly those of us in the governing party, have to grapple with My final point is just to say to my colleagues that I fear that this debate is going to be repeated many times as we move through the comprehensive spending review. We are all going to have to face very difficult challenges. Governing is about choosing. It is about setting priorities for what we think is important. This is important, but so is keeping the fiscal measures on balance. All of them are important, and I am glad that the Chancellor has brought forward the measures that he has today.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Rishi Sunak (Conservative, Centre-right): It is not an either/or. This Government are doing both. We are one of the largest donors to the UN peacekeeping operations and that is why we are making a difference in countries across the globe, not just through our ODA budget but through all the other ways we express global leadership.
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
John Henry Hayes (Conservative, Centre-right): The Chancellor is right to say that the countries with big hearts also need clear heads, so will he confirm that, with the roadmap he has set out today and the proposals before the House, we will still be spending 20% more on overseas aid than we were when Labour was last in government?
International Aid: Treasury Update — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: International Affairs
Rishi Sunak (Conservative, Centre-right): If my numbers are right, as a percentage of GDP we were for the last few years spending double what Labour ever spent when it was in office, and my right hon. Friend is right about what we will be doing even at this reduced level Today’s approach is a pragmatic approach to meeting our commitments to the world’s poorest today and to have the secure fiscal foundations we need to meet those commitments for decades to come. We should be proud of what UK overseas aid means to millions of the world’s poorest people. It means tens of millions of girls around the world getting a better education. It means food parcels stamped with a Union Jack arriving in famine stricken countries such as Syria and Somalia. It means wind turbines, solar panels and hydroelectric dams generating clean energy in developing countries. I am proud, as I know the whole House will be proud, of the extraordinary good this country is doing around the world.