7. Public Support for ending global poverty – from Jubilee Debt to Make Poverty History and beyond

Key points

• Public support is vital to the UK’s leadership on global poverty elimination. ?It drove the Jubilee Debt Campaign and the Make Poverty History campaign.
• In June 2022 public support was at its highest level since perhaps Make Poverty History in 2005.?The Sunak-Johnson aid cuts in 2021 were not as popular as they perhaps calculated.?
• Charities and government need to build public support for development and avoid aid fatigue, by talking about progress as well as the distance left to go, and by admitting that it’s hard work and sometimes things don't achieve the desired results. ?Overall, aid makes lives better, but it can’t solve everything.

UK leadership on international development requires public support. It’s never going to be the top concern of most UK voters, especially in a cost-of-living crisis. But for people who want the government to prioritise international development, like me, it is important that most British people support (or don't oppose) the idea that Britain should help people in other countries whose income is a fraction of our own. ?Popular support has played an important role in UK global leadership in the last 25 years. ?Support did drop in the 2010s but it is back to 50% and over.?

The public were widely appalled by the Pergau Dam scandal in the 1990s that swapped aid for arms sales. It gave a new Government in 1997 the political space to refocus UK assistance on eliminating poverty.

The campaign to cancel debts was led by the public, not least church congregations and trade unions. ?At the start of my career, in the late '90s, the Jubilee Debt campaign explained simply and clearly to people that it was wrong to ask the poorest countries in the world to pay rich countries more money in interest payments than we gave them in aid, or more than they could afford to spend on health or education. ?

The government and campaigners alike saw that the UK had a huge opportunity with the 2005 joint EU & G8 Presidencies to get the world to take the next big push to eliminate world poverty.?To be really ambitious, it would need a lot of public support. Charities came together with Richard Curtis, from Comic Relief, to create Make Poverty History.?

Just as Make Poverty History was about to launch, there was a terrible tsunami in the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004, which killed over 250,000 people in 14 countries.?The public’s response was extraordinary.

The Disasters Emergency Committee raised ￡400M – still more in real terms than for Ukraine. ?I took Prime Minister Tony Blair, to a tiny mews office in London to thank the volunteers answering the phones.?No PayPal in those days! ?

But in No 10 we were a bit worried that this might mean the public wouldn’t want to get involved in Make Poverty History straight after giving record amounts for the tsunami. We were completely wrong. ?Nelson Mandela launched Make Poverty History in Trafalgar Square in February 2005 and soon everyone in the UK had heard of it. ?Charities worked more closely together than they ever had before. Or, sadly, since. ?

8 million people signed petitions which were handed in to the Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street. There were so many signatures they arrived on scores of CD-ROMs inside a large black carry-case which we kept in our office until the Summit to remind us of the public expectations on our shoulders.?11 days before the G8 Summit, BBC One broadcast The Girl in the Café film, by Richard Curtis, about a civil servant called Lawrence, working on the upcoming G8 Summit. ?We really felt the pressure of the cliff-hanger ending. The Saturday before the Summit, 250,000 people marched through Edinburgh to call on the G8 to agree to the demands of the campaign.?

The same day, in all of the G8 countries around the world, and in South Africa, Bob Geldof organised Live8, a televised music concert. Unlike Live Aid, Geldof said, “we don't want your money, we want your?voice".?We could hear their voices a mile away in Lancaster House, as we completed the last negotiating meeting with the G8 “Sherpas” before we went to Scotland for the Summit. We pointed to those voices to show why we would not compromise and, unheard of for a G8 Summit, we left major parts of the Communique to be finalised in Gleneagles itself, in particular on Universal HIV treatment and on increasing official development assistance . ?After the Sherpa meeting, I was also lucky to get to see the rest of Live8 in Hyde Park. ?It was the last time I saw daylight until the Summit finished six days later. ?My fiancée said I looked green when I got home from Gleneagles.?

As I have shown in other articles in this series , the major promises made by the G8 at Gleneagles on Aid , Debt and HIV Treatment , were far more than the G8 had ever promised before and they were delivered.?Trade was the main disappointment. But some of the charities still wanted more and criticised the outcome. I remember sitting in Perth airport, missing a thankyou dinner with Geldof and Bono to get home to my pregnant fiancée, crying down the phone to my brother wondering what more we were supposed to have done. ?He kindly pointed out that most people would think the outcome was extraordinary.? He turned out to be right. The newspapers the next day certainly did.?In No 10 we were frustrated that 8 million people in the UK had just achieved something amazing but some of the charities were going to tell them they had failed. ?We sent a proposal to the Prime Minister suggesting that No 10 write to all the 8 million people on the CD-ROMs and thank them ourselves instead. Tony Blair wrote back, “You guys are very touching in your faith in our ability to persuade NGOs!?But I’m afraid it is in the nature of the beast and actually I think you did very well with them.” ?It was a no, but a very nice no.

I think it was a real mistake of the charities to disband Make Poverty History after 2005 instead of build on it.?It was driven by competitiveness over lists of supporters, and then later justified by criticising the name Make Poverty History for over-claiming what aid would do or for being about white saviours, neither of which I think are true.?MPH wasn’t only about aid. ?It was about justice. And making poverty history is an admirable goal - indeed it is the first UN Global Goal , agreed by all countries in the world in 2000 and again in 2015. And all countries and everyone have different roles to play in making it happen.

Whatever arguments were going on between charities, the public had supported Make Poverty History and they wanted to see the G8 promises implemented.?So much so, that in his leadership bid speech later in 2005, David Cameron said , “I want people to feel good about being a Conservative again.” And one of the ways for people to feel good, he said would be that “we don't just stand up for Gibraltar and Zimbabwe, but for the people of Darfur and sub-Saharan Africa who are living on less than a dollar a day and getting poorer while we are getting richer.” ?This was a big change compared to Thatcher’s Pergau Dam scandal and her approach to apartheid in South Africa. ?It marked the start of a 15-year period of cross-party support for international development in the UK that only happened because all major parties saw – because of Make Poverty History – that most of the public agreed that anyone living under a dollar a day anywhere in the world was unacceptable.

That cross-party consensus led eventually to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, enacting the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015 , putting into law what had been the Labour Government’s policy since 2005, that the UK will provide official development assistance of 0.7% of gross national income. ?

From 2010, however, opposition grew. By 2010 (see chart 5 above) UK ODA was at 0.57% of gross national income and the highest proportion since 1962. ?By 2013, it had reached the target of 0.7%, while other government department budgets were being cut as part of the coalition austerity policy, following the 2007-09 global financial crisis. ?Inside government and in parts of the press, knives were out for DFID’s budget. ?Despite being one of the smallest budgets in government, people started talking as if cutting the aid budget would make austerity unnecessary. Even one minister I spoke to didn't seem to realise his own budget was five times the size of the aid budget, and wanted to swap!

It was right that aid should come under more scrutiny as the budget grew. ?Some of the scrutiny was fair, especially about some aid workers using their positions of power and privilege to sexually exploit the very people they were meant to be helping. ?But other people had a clear agenda to portray all aid as useless, wasted or stolen, regardless of the facts. ??Parts of the media started looking for any small story of bad aid projects and then use them to suggest it was all this bad.?

Occasionally, the media or the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, established by Andrew Mitchell when he was the minister, found a genuinely unsuccessful project.? Of course they did. And, unfortunately, instead of admitting that eliminating world poverty is quite difficult and not all projects work as hoped, both the government and charities tend to try to defend everything as good. This is not smart, true or believable. ?We should not do it. And it harmed public support for international development.??

But often, the media would find a project that just sounded weird to them.?It didn’t fit their preconceived notions about what aid “should be”.?The Ethiopia Spice Girls is a famous example.? The band was actually called Yegna, and it was an innovative programme, funded by DFID and the Nike Foundation.?It was designed to address social norms about adolescent girls, by empowering those girls to speak for themselves and to each other in their own way.?It could have been brilliant. It was not given a chance.?Under media ridicule it was cancelled (before that even became a thing).?

The British media took these usually quite small projects, twisted them and then presented them as being what most aid projects looked like. They never were. Good or bad they were rarely typical. But it left the public with the growing impression that most or even all aid failed or was wasted, or stolen.?Not surprisingly, they started to think the budget could be used better.

Charities also have some responsibility for the public’s sense that aid doesn’t “work”. Our fundraising focusses almost entirely on the work left to do and not enough on the progress achieved. And that is why I want these articles to say more about the progress and tell a fuller story.?

Sometimes we sound as if aid alone will make poverty history.?As I said right at the beginning of this series of articles , that’s not true, and is not claimed by anyone serious. Progress is certainly also about the private sector and governance. So when we give people that false impression and people still see poverty, they think 70 years of international development assistance must have failed.?Some charities, including CARE, WaterAid and Save the Children, are working together now to make sure they fundraise and communicate very differently, in a way which is more dignified, more empowering of the people we want to help, is more realistic about what ODA can achieve and tells a better balance of what has been achieved, what didn’t work and what remains to be done. ?

The reasons why the public supported Jubilee Debt and Make Poverty History have not gone away.?People do believe that people living in destitution is wrong, wherever they live, in the UK or in South Sudan.?Their scepticism is about whether aid works, not whether we want to end poverty.?We have seen a very big increase in UK public support in 2021. I think that's because people have been reminded again about the amazing things which good, and most, aid projects can achieve.?

In November 2020, Rishi Sunak announced that he was cutting the aid budget by 30%. The public reaction was fairly muted. People were wondering if Christmas was going to be banned.?An opinion poll suggested people agreed with the cut. I wasn’t surprised. People had been told by the media and some politicians for years that aid was lost, wasted or even harmful. Who wouldn’t cut that??But, by February 2021, charities and journalists were finding out which aid projects had actually been cancelled and it was shocking. ?Will Worley has tracked the appalling stories of cuts to Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, family planning, girls education, research.?The government even stopped distributing medicines they had been given for free. ??I recently published an analysis of the latest stats on the 2021 aid cuts .?

Suddenly support for the UK aid budget jumped from 44% in January 2021 to 53% by May 2021 (see Chart 5 below). ?And it stayed there and even increased to 56% in June 2022. ?A 12% swing is huge in political terms. For example a 10.5% swing could take the Labour Party from its worst election result in 84 years, to a slim majority, in the next election. Crossing the 50% majority line is also very politically significant. On a single issue, it's the difference between winning and losing.

I think a lot of those one-in-ten people who changed their minds, said to themselves, ‘when the government said it was going to cut the aid budget, we thought they were going to cut all those terrible things they have been telling us about, not this stuff which sounds likely exactly what aid should be doing.’?But when you cut the aid budget by 30%, you have to cut a lot more than the small fraction that’s not great.?When the government cut good aid projects, the public thought the government was wrong.?

We have seen support drop back to 50% in October 2022, at the same time as the UK economy was tanking, thanks to the Truss-Kwarteng ‘mini-budget’. But that’s still strong compared to pre-Covid, and impressive in a cost-of-living crisis.

The new UK Development Minister, Andrew Mitchell , said about these latest figures that “The drop in support is not just cost of living, but because – unlike in the past under Blair, Brown, Cameron and May – the aid budget has not been defended,” Mitchell said. “When you have the PM [Johnson] describing UK overseas aid as ‘some giant cashpoint in the sky’ it’s not just wrong, but when the public faces hard times it damages support.”

So charities and governments need to build public support for development and avoid aid fatigue, by talking more about the progress, as I am doing in this series, as well as about the urgent needs today.?And by admitting openly that it’s hard work and sometimes things don't work.? Overall, aid makes lives better.?Aid alone can’t end poverty.?We also need trade justice, climate action, economic justice and good government policies. Those simple truths are the cornerstone of public support.

Further reading

Just last week, Development Engagement Labs - who produced chart 6 above and the data behind it - published a new set of UK public opinion polls on what people will think of a third round of UK government cuts to ODA in 2023.

Next article - Aid and 0.7% - UK leading by example, until 2020…

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