Fourth Ambedkar Memorial Lecture: “Poverty and Inequality – a Major Threat to the Future”

Manchester Metropolitan University
24 September 2004

I am honoured to have been invited to give the fourth Ambedkar lecture at Manchester Metropolitan University and delighted that the general theme of the programme of lectures is the history of poor and disadvantaged people throughout the globe.  What I want to argue in my lecture is that every generation has a duty to quest for justice and to reach out to the poor and needy, but the present generation has a bigger responsibility because we have in our own hands the means to eliminate extreme poverty from the human condition. And if we fail to do so, we will hand on to future generations a world of turmoil, conflict and environmental degradation which will lead to suffering and catastrophe on a very large scale. Our moral duty is to do all we can to make the world more just. Our self interest suggests that we must do so if we want our children and grandchildren to be able to enjoy a safe and secure future.

It is often argued that what is morally right is rarely politically expedient. Whether or not this was true in the past, it is certainly not true now. Making the world more just, reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development is in our self interest and if we fail to make faster progress than we are at present, the world is going to be in enormous trouble and the problems that result will affect all of us, wherever we live, and whether we are rich or poor.

I should immediately make it clear that my knowledge of the work and teaching of Dr Ambedkar arises from what I have learned from my constituents. In Ladywood, we have a very special settlement of people originating from lower caste communities in the Jullundur area of the Punjab. They have organised their resistance to the evils of castism in a variety of ways. Some are Ravidassi, some Valmiki, some Christians, some Ambedkarites and some Buddhists, but all would give great honour and respect to Dr Ambedkar. My understanding of the evils of the caste system and the greatness of Dr Ambedkar arises from my constituency. I have learned in particular from members of the Ambedkar Society in Ladywood.  I am grateful to them for what they have taught me and for introducing me to the inspirational example of Dr Ambedkar.

One of the things I admire greatly about Dr Ambedkar is that despite his great achievements in education and in politics, he never turned his back on the people from whom he came. He was not content simply to improve his own life, but determined to make life more just for the oppressed and down trodden people from whom he originated. I want to suggest in my lecture today that all of us who carry memories within our family histories of poverty and suffering in generations that went before us have a particular duty not to forget the terrible poverty and suffering that still afflicts at least half of humanity.

Many argue that people are fundamentally selfish and greedy and are not concerned for the poor and the needy. Certainly we are living at a time when consumerism and materialism are celebrated and indulged above most other values. If our great grandparents could come back and see the way we live in the OECD countries – and 20% of humanity live in the richer countries – they would be astonished by our material plenty. I think they would also be astonished to see how such plenty has not made us happy, how we do not have time for each other, how even study and learning is reduced to a means to earn money, and how success is measured purely in material terms. It seems to me this kind of society that focuses only on the acquisition of material wealth does not make people happy and fulfilled.  People need something larger than their own selfish needs to believe in and to motivate their lives. I want to suggest this evening that as we enjoy material plenty but increasingly experience a lack of fulfilment and meaning, a commitment to a more just and safe world order should become a stronger focus of our ideas, our politics and our life commitment.

In fact, I think on this issue – both the immorality and the threat to the future from current levels of poverty and inequality – most people are concerned and aware that the world is unfair and unbalanced and that this endangers our future. On this, the people are ahead of their political leadership. But people are not clear what can be done in order to put things right. When I became Secretary of State for International Development in 1997, there was much talk of compassion fatigue. It was suggested that people had seen too many pictures of starvation and suffering and would no longer respond. I therefore set in place regular surveys of British public opinion.  They showed that very large numbers of people saw current levels of poverty and inequality as one of the most important issues facing humanity. Growing numbers saw such poverty as a threat to their own future. But when asked what they could do to put things right, they suggested they should give more to charity. Clearly charitable giving is a good thing, but it is not an adequate response to the imbalance of the present world order. Similarly, one of the big new movements of our age is the anti-globalisation movement. It is a powerful new movement spanning the world which is concerned at the levels of poverty and inequality. I am sure that the people who turned up at demonstrations against trade talks in Seattle, World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington, meetings of the G7 in Genoa, and even EU summits in Sweden were very sincere but in my view their analysis was very weak.  Stopping globalisation – which is no more than an increased integration of the world economy – is neither possible nor desirable.  Managing this era and ensuring the wealth, knowledge and technology we have is used for the benefit of humanity and most importantly to give a better life to the poor of the world, is the issue.  Making globalisation work for the poor should be the focus, not railing against historical change that is inevitable and could be beneficial.

So my conclusion is that people do care and they do understand the threat to the future, but they do not know what to do. We are living in an era of very poor political leadership – focused on sound bites and media manipulation and of limited intellectual quality.  The Cold War ended in1989 and most of us felt happy that the Berlin Wall came down and Nelson Mandela was released from prison and we thought there would be a new era of reduced defence spending and more justice and mutual respect. We did not understand then how big a challenge the end of the Cold War would be to the international system. And the reality is that instead of making progress we have been floundering.  Domestic politics is less concerned with justice and the quality of life and seems to be obsessed with market solutions to all questions.  At the same time, and the world is becoming ever more disorderly and divided, people are feeling disillusioned about politics and politicians and losing hope for progress in the future.

This is, I think, a deeply worrying state of affairs. Current levels of poverty and inequality, growing environmental degradation and the misconception of the ‘war on terror’ are creating a very dangerous future.  We need a ferment of discussion and a new clarity of ideas in order to understand this era and shape it in a better way. This is the duty of all of us as moral beings, as political actors and as intellectuals. And, as we are meeting in a University, let me remind you of what Dr Ambedkar said in another era of great ferment and change.

He said:

“In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class.  This is the class that can foresee, advise and lead.  In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action.  It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class.  There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends on the intellectual class.  If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises.”

So there is a challenge to our universities and intellectuals. But let us be clear, we no longer need to think separately in our individual countries, this is a worldwide crisis and we need a worldwide debate and the new information technologies make this possible in a way that it was not for previous generations.  This is one of the advantages of globalisation.

Let me turn now to the scale of the challenge.  There are 6 billion of us sharing this earth.  The growth in world population is a reflection of progress in reducing poverty but it is also a major part of the explanation of the strain on the planet.  In 1900 there were a little over 1 billion people and demographers tell us that that was about equal to the number of people who had ever existed since humans evolved 160,000 years ago in the area we now call Ethiopia.  By 1960, there were 3billion people, now there are 6 billion and by 2050 there will be 9 billion people and then population levels are likely to stabilise.

As I have said, population growth is a consequence of development.  In 1700 there were about 10 million people in the UK.  As life improves, children survive and people live longer.  Population grows and then stabilises.  This wave of change is flowing across the world and will lead to a population of 9 billion. 

Another very important change is taking place.  World population is urbanising.  For the first time in history, more than half of us are living in cities and the projection is that this will reach 65% in another 15-20 years.  I think this is likely to be significant.  Urban populations can organise and agitate much more easily than the rural poor.  I suspect the poor of the massive urban slums that are growing across the world will be less compliant than were their rural grandparents.

Of the 6 billion of us, 1.2 billion – 1 in 5 – is abjectly poor, with insufficient to eat, no access to education or healthcare.  These are the people that live on less than $1 per day for all their needs.  And let us be clear, this is not $1 in cash, it is the local purchasing parity equivalent of what $1 would buy in the US – which is very little indeed.  2.4 billion people, nearly half of humanity live on less than $2 per day.  Half of humanity has no access to sanitation – a cause of humiliation as well as risks to health in our increasingly crowded world – and one in 5 people does not have access to clean water.

All of this is very daunting and depressing, but the picture is not all negative.  In the last 50 years more people have lifted themselves out of poverty than in the previous 500 years – more children survive, fewer women die in childbirth, more are literate, more have clean water.  There has been great progress but there are more people than ever before and therefore more poor people.  We know what needs to be done. We know how to make progress but we need to scale up our efforts to prevent a massive growth of the numbers living in poverty.  90% of the 3 billion new people who will be added to the human family over the next 30-50 years will live in developing countries.  If we do not make better progress, they will be born into a growing sea of terrible poverty in a globalising world where they see but are excluded from the material wealth that 20% of us enjoy.  It is hard to believe that such a world is politically let alone morally sustainable.

On top of this, we have the serious problem of global warming – which is now accepted as a reality by all international experts, but not by the government of the most polluting nation on the planet.  This will have major consequences in changes in climate and increased turbulence in weather patterns in all countries, but as ever the poor will suffer most.  To take one example: Bangladesh will increase its population by 50 per cent and lose one third of its territory as the seas rise over the next 30 years.  Where are these people to go?  How will they be able to live and survive?

And of course we are desecrating the abundance of nature that this planet provides for us.  Fish stocks are declining, deserts are spreading, forests are being destroyed.  All of this cannot easily be put right, but with a big effort the loss of environmental resources could be reversed.  But we are not responding to these risks and the environmental loss is likely to get worse and the effects of global warming more serious in a world of rapidly growing population.

A few years back, I was hopeful that we were beginning to develop an international determination to take action.  At the United Nations General Assembly meeting which was called to mark the beginning of the new millennium and attended by more Prime Ministers and Heads of State than any previous UN meeting, the world agreed to work together to reduce poverty.  All countries committed themselves to meeting the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, which meant halving poverty, getting all children into school and reducing infant and maternal mortality by improving access to healthcare, clean water and sanitation.  Following this the IMF, World Bank, Regional Development Banks and OECD all signed up to the targets.  Obviously halving poverty was not enough, but the targets would mean 1 billion people lifting themselves out of poverty.  They would be replaced by 1 billion new poor people, but at least the world would have learned to work together to systematically reduce poverty.

This agreement was important partly because it created a new focus and determination to reduce poverty and also because it underlined the fact that people need better income, education healthcare and sanitation to sustainably improve their lives.  It was also important that all the countries had agreed on what needed to be done.  There should be no more problems of donors of aid forcing countries to act against their own best judgement. All were now agreed on what needed to be done and how to measure success in reducing poverty.

And then on September 11 2001 two airliners were flown into the World Trade Centre in New York and nearly 3000 people originating from 40 countries died.  The first reaction of the world was to stand together in response to such a serious crime.  The UN Security Council passed a resolution requiring all countries to share information, tighten up on money laundering and co-operate to take action against those who had taken the lives of innocent civilians in this way.  The General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution of concern and support.  Le Monde produced its headline “We are all Americans now”. The whole world stood together in solidarity with America in the face of such a monstrous crime.

And, it is now being forgotten, but the first instinct of the US was to act in co-operation with the rest of the world through the multilateral system.  Thus, talks to launch a new round of trade talks had failed in Seattle but at Doha in November 2001 the world agreed to launch a new round and the agenda was focused on making trade rules fairer for poor countries.  At the UN meeting on financing development in Monterrey in Mexico in March 2002, the world agreed on the need for a mixture of free market and state responsibility to create the conditions necessary to reduce poverty. The rich countries also agreed, after a decade of decline, that financial support for development would be considerably increased.  And then at the UN meeting on Environment and Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in September 2002, the world agreed that environmental resources must be fairly shared to encourage development for the poor and sustainability for the planet.  In the face of the attack on America on September 11 2001, the first response of the world was to stand together and to commit to a continuing focus on co-operation, justice and poverty reduction.

But then the disastrous decision was taken by the US to launch an ill prepared war on Iraq and the Prime Minister of the UK misled his country into supporting that war.  The consequence was to split and weaken the UN, undermine international law and the commitment to multilateral action.  It has also strengthened Al Qaeda, created a growing divide between the Muslim world and the West and fanned the flames of Islamophobia.  The Muslim world, with the support of most people worldwide are angry about the terrible suffering and chaos inflicted on the people of Iraq which comes on top of US failure to require Israel to respect international law and support the Palestinian people’s right to establish an independent Palestinian state on the lands that Israel has occupied since 1967.

So now the world is in very grave trouble and to our shame the UK is part of the problem.  Our earlier achievements in helping build the new consensus focused on the reduction of poverty and the implementation of the Kyoto agreement have been sidelined.  The UK cannot be committed to unconditional support for an extreme right wing US administration that has little respect for international law or international agreement and be committed to a more just world order.  The people of Britain and elsewhere in the world need to debate the changes taking place in this era and decide which foreign policy they wish to adopt and insist their governments reflect their views.

We in the UK must also draw on our experience of Northern Ireland.  In the early stages of the British response to the upsurge of IRA violence in the 1970s, a repressive Prevention of Terrorism Act and the introduction of internment without trial acted to increase anger and resentment and therefore as a recruiting sergeant for the IRA.  Britain learned from experience that all paramilitary movements depend on support from the people from whom they arose.  If the people are mistreated, insurgency grows.  Once such movements are in place, they are difficult to defeat but progress depends on a strong commitment to justice and a righting of the wrongs that led to support for violence.  It is in this way that we are now approaching the end of the use of violent resistance in Irish history.  These lessons must be applied to the Middle East.  We must insist on the establishment of a Palestinian state, a hand over of power to a genuinely independent Iraqi government, the withdrawal of coalition forces and their replacement by forces invited to Iraq by the Iraqis and the removal of all WMD from the Middle East, including Israel’s nuclear weapons.  There would then no longer be any need for the US to prop up corrupt and authoritarian governments in the Middle East, they could instead provide peacekeepers to ensure that Israel and the new Palestinian state could begin to live in peace side by side.  And then the world could get back to the urgent task of focusing on the reduction of poverty and the reversal of the loss of environmental resources.  All of this could be done, but I fear as yet the right leadership is not in place and therefore we are likely to see decades of violence and terror and suffering.

We must not settle for this and therefore should remind ourselves of the words of Dr Ambedkar

“For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent.  What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.”

And beyond that he told us what we must do which is to educate, agitate and organise.

Clare Short MP, 24 September 2004