
The spirit of the G8 ‘make poverty history' summit of 2005 seems long gone
It was the culmination of a long-running public campaign involving charities, churches and celebrities, and benefited from the passionate commitment of Gordon Brown, for whom international development is a lifelong cause.
A few days before, more than 200,000 campaigners had gathered in Edinburgh and formed a noisy, joyful human chain, demanding that the world's leaders 'make poverty history'.
As a result of the momentum created and the promises made, international aid increased – and 36 countries eventually had their crippling overseas debts drastically reduced.
There are many reasons it would be hard to envisage a Gleneagles summit today.
The certainties of the early noughties, when globalisation felt like an unstoppable force underpinning economic growth and restraining inflation, are long gone.
Just three and a half years after Gleneagles, Brown, by then prime minister, was hosting a meeting of the G20 in London's Docklands, at which global leaders scrambled to respond to the havoc wreaked by the global financial crash.
Old certainties were cast aside, relationships strained – and the claim to leadership of the old guard of the G8 industrialised countries was hopelessly undermined by the fact that the crisis originated on their doorstep.
The resulting deep recessions in many wealthy countries raised questions about voters' commitment to global causes. In the UK, public support for development, once solid enough to encourage David Cameron to embrace the target of spending 0.7% of national income on aid, started to fall away from around 2012-13.
More recently, the world has become a much more fragmented, multipolar place. Middle-income countries such as China and India have demanded more prominence on the global stage. Russia's territorial aggression in Ukraine prompted its expulsion from the G8 – now the G7 – and killed off any lingering hopes that free trade and capitalism would ultimately usher in liberal democracy.
Global solidarity was hard to summon, then, even before Donald Trump's second term unleashed chaos in the global trading system.
The budgets of many rich-country governments have taken a battering from repeated economic shocks, at the same time as pressure is mounting for more defence spending to confront potential threats. Labour ministers are quite right when they say, 'the world has changed'.
Yet despite the more fraught global backdrop, the campaigners who worked alongside Blair and Brown at Gleneagles and beyond have been profoundly shocked by this government's casual disregard of development.
Three years ago, Keir Starmer was promising to undo Boris Johnson's 'misguided' decision to absorb the Department for International Development (DfID) back into the Foreign Office, 'for so many reasons'.
Labour's manifesto dropped this idea, but did suggest the UK had 'lost influence' as a result of the Tories' neglect of international development, and promise to 'turn the page to rebuild Britain's reputation', restoring aid to 0.7%, 'as soon as fiscal circumstances allow'.
Instead, Labour slashed the aid budget, with little discussion, when Starmer wanted to promise Donald Trump he would raise defence spending, on his White House trip in February.
Baroness Jenny Chapman, who replaced Anneliese Dodds when she resigned in protest at this deep budget cut, has insisted the UK still wants to lead on development. Yet it is hard to take the moral high ground while admitting that no area of policy, including projects to support women and girls' health and education, will be safe from the cuts.
Labour has said it wants to create respectful partnerships with developing countries; but Save the Children UK's director Moazzam Malik told me recently that the cuts will be felt by many countries not as a new-found era of collaboration, but as a withdrawal.
As the UK steps back, at the same time as Trump is dismantling USAID, the challenges in some of the world's poorest countries have only intensified.
In particular, a blizzard of recent expert reports has called for action on the unsustainable debts squeezing many governments' budgets.
The UN-backed Financing for Development conference in Seville last week ended with promises of reform, including the wider use of 'pause clauses', to halt repayments during natural disasters, for example – something the UK has supported.
More radical solutions, that might have included debt write-offs, did not make it through the negotiations; but South Africa hopes to use its chairmanship of the G20 to press for more progress in the coming months.
Michael Jacobs, a former Brown adviser, now visiting professor at the Overseas Development Institute, insists there was a sense of momentum on debt relief in Seville.
'It was the single most significant topic of debate. There is rising pressure on the creditor countries – including China – to act. So, as in 2005, the moment for a new international debt relief package may be arriving,' he argued.
Other campaigners returned from Seville notably downbeat, however, pointing to the difficulties of assembling a global coalition of the willing on development, in a time of tight budgets and fraying international bonds.
Summoning the spirit of Gleneagles may be too much to hope for, two decades on; but after a string of economic shocks, and as the climate emergency accelerates, the moral imperative to act remains – even if this Labour government can't find it in a focus group or on a spreadsheet.
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It's still unbelievable.' In the immediate aftermath, the family were too stunned to think about inquiries or even formulate questions. Katie remembers flying straight back to the UK, walking into the family home and seeing the runner beans Amess had picked from the garden before going to surgery. 'I washed up his breakfast plates – tea and toast – from the morning it happened as well as his dinner plates from the night before and could not believe it was the last time I'd ever be doing this,' she says. 'All those times I was annoyed that he'd left his plates for me to clean when I was in his London flat for drama school. Now, I just wanted to be able to clean them one more time.' When details about Ali's history with Prevent began surfacing, the family assumed an inquiry would be announced after his trial. (In April 2022, Ali was given a whole-life sentence.) 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'If that was true, why were three little girls murdered in Southport last year?' Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, was referred to and rejected by Prevent three times. One of the questions to be asked in the Southport inquiry is whether Prevent needs a complete overhaul. 'They could have asked that question years earlier after my dad was killed and perhaps Southport wouldn't have happened,' says Katie. Campaigning hasn't been easy. Katie is based in the US and her mother, Julia, is not well – she had a stroke shortly after Ali's trial, which the family attributes to trauma and grief. The change of government briefly gave them hope. Katie and Julia had a video meeting with Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary, who told them that Amess was a great friend, their Westminster offices were next door and they used to walk to the Commons chamber together. 'We thought: 'Perfect. Now we're getting somewhere,'' says Katie. Instead, months passed. Finally, in March, in another video call, Cooper admitted there wouldn't be an inquiry. 'My mum said: 'Look me in the eyes and tell me as his friend that you think you're doing the right thing.' Yvette Cooper could not answer.' In a formal letter, Cooper explained that it was 'hard to see' how an inquiry could go beyond what had already been established in the trial, the Prevent learning review and the coroner's report, as well as the forthcoming rapid review by Lord Anderson. 'When an elected official is killed in a church hall in broad daylight by somebody the government is monitoring, there should be an inquiry – it shouldn't even be a question,' says Amess. 'This isn't a witch-hunt, but there should be some accountability. The mistakes made cost me my father, my mother's husband, a grandfather, a brother, a son. 'I don't think we'll ever recover,' she continues. 'It's my 40th birthday this month and I know I'd have flown back to England like I did every summer and my dad would have thrown me a huge party. There'd have been 40 balloons and he'd have made my friends give me 40 bumps! I want to have children, but I think: 'What sort of mother would I be now when I'm in so much trauma and heartache?' I used to think he'd be such a funny grandpa. All that has been robbed from me.' For Katie, the lack of support from Westminster after her father's decades of service is deeply painful and nonsensical, too. 'I just cannot believe the way we've been treated by his friends and colleagues,' she says. 'It's in all their interests. They are meeting the public day in, day out, so why don't they want to investigate properly and establish what would make them safer? Dad's legacy needs to be that through what happened to him, he saves other people. Please, just show some human decency. Do the right thing.' 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