I went to a talk and Q&A session with Clare Short on the subject of Britain’s role in creating a more just and safe world order. She spoke at great length on the need for Britain (and the rest of the world) to acknowledge international development not simply as something to be tacked onto foreign policy, but something that should be placed at the core of foreign policy. She spoke with an optimism that the goals of the UN Millennium Development Goals could be achieved, but that a substantial shift in the politics of the US and other powerful nations needed to happen first. The very fact that people pulled together in the face of the Tsunami disaster showed that the international community was capable of incredible compassion and joint effort, but that the message that poverty and poor health and education in developing nations was an even bigger disaster needed to be hammered home to people.

She also touched on a wide range of other issues, including civil liberties (“That disgraceful and horribly misguided ‘anti-terror’ bill going through Parliament at the moment”), the EU (“The EU is important – I’m in favour of the European Constitution – but currently the beaurocracy in Brussels hugely limits its potential to make any appreciable impact on the world”) and globalisation (she argued that multi-national corporations could be a good thing for the developing world so long as they get a handle on the idea that their corporate image and social responsibilities are important, making reference to the time she approached the Top 200 FTSE listed companies to ask them to switch to Fairtrade coffee and Nestlé went ballistic).

I was, frankly, hugely impressed; I think I’d be hard pressed to find anything she said that I disagreed with in the whole evening. She came across as compassionate but thoughtful and well reasoned; although she had an incredible social conscience, she wasn’t so quick to dismiss or paint as pure evil the role of, say, large corporations or organisations such as G8 in the building of a more tolerant and just world order. Frankly, we could do with more people like her in politics today; it’s a crying shame that, as Naomi commented, she seemed to be speaking in direct contradiction to nearly everything her party seems to stand for these days.

A greatly summarised version of her speech can be found here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.