Archive for category: International Issues

Britain helped found the Global Partnership for Education and was once its largest donor. Today we have cut our annual support to GPE by 77% from £86m to just £20m. As Chair of the APPG for Global Education, I’m deeply saddened and angry.

Earlier this year, I saw in Malawi what British support delivers: teachers trained, children learning to read and count who otherwise never would. That progress is now at risk. Every pound cut is a child left without a classroom.

Ministers promised aid cuts would be offset through multilateral funding like GPE. This pledge breaks that promise. Fewer children learning means slower growth, more instability, wider inequality – that serves no one. The Government must reconsider.

Today, I visited the Zambian High Commission, to speak to members of the African Union Heads of Mission about my Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Private Member’s Bill. The discussion provided a good opportunity to get together with civil society groups and High Commissioners, and work together on bringing the Bill to the forefront of debate on international development in the new parliamentary session.

Many low and middle-income countries are spending more on servicing their debt than on healthcare or education, at a time when the withdrawal of US development funding is leaving the poorest nations more exposed to crises than at any point in recent memory. My Bill seeks to regulate the recovery of sovereign debts owed by developing countries, preventing private creditors from using UK courts to extract full repayment from nations that have defaulted on unsustainable debt and agreed new repayment terms with bilateral or multilateral creditors,  building on the principles established by the original Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Act 2010 that was implemented by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

With the King’s Speech this week confirming that the Government will use next year’s G20 Presidency to drive global growth and reinforce global stability, I will be pressing for debt relief to be a central part of that agenda, and I look forward to reintroducing the Bill in this new parliamentary session.