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Welcome to North East Call to Action on Global Poverty and Climate Change - NE-CAP. (Prior to September 2010 we were known as MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY North East).

NE-CAP continues to promote the aims and activities of the national MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign that formally disbanded in 2006. That is, we call upon people in the North East - from Tees to Tweed - to join us in demanding that our government, and indeed the governments of the world, should act to alleviate poverty for the world's poorer countries by:

• Trade justice
• Dropping the debt
• Providing more and better aid
• Curbing climate change
• Promoting Fairtrade

Latest news, planned events and activities

The events listed below are organised by us, or by groups or individuals affiliated to us who have asked for their event to be included in this listing.

NE-CAP announces new patrons - April 2012

We are delighted to announce that the following people have become patrons of NE-CAP.

Helen Goodman, Labour MP for Bishop Auckland;
John Grundy, Writer & Broadcaster;
Rt Revd Justin Welby, Bishop of Durham.

See here for a press release and comments from our new patrons. A full list of patrons is on the right of this page.

The Benefits of Debt Cancellation

In 2011, David Golding, Development Co-ordinator of NE-CAP visited Tanzania and Zambia. You can see a video of his trip here where he sees for himself, and shares with us, the benefits of debt cancellation. This is a great illustration of how campaigning really does make a difference.

Submission to the Leveson Inquiry - March 2012

Leveson Inquiry welcomes NE-CAP’s Development Co-ordinator’s major submission

Full submission here

The Leveson Inquiry was set up as a result of the ‘phone hacking scandal, but its remit was far wider than this, namely, to investigate the ‘Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press’. Dr David Golding CBE, NE-CAP’s Development Coordinator, has made a major submission to the Inquiry, albeit ‘in a personal capacity only’, and this has been welcomed and will be published as part of the Inquiry’s evidence.

David says, “The impetus for my submission was originally provided by recent articles on international aid in the Daily Mail and the material I presented on this subject is largely the content of an Open Letter sent to the Editor of the Mail on 14th December, 2011 (correspondence relating this is still ongoing).

“I stated to the Inquiry that I believe the issues I was raising are far more important than that involved in the abuses which led to the setting up of the Inquiry, however serious that may be. It was my contention that the behaviour of the press relating to some of the great issues of the day not infrequently constitutes gross professional misconduct, by involving blatant distortion of the facts and demonstrating utter contempt for the responsibility to provide well informed and balanced treatment.”

In addition to the matter of international aid, two other examples dealing with quite different issues are cited (namely HIV/AIDS denialism and climate scepticism), to illustrate the fact that this serious problem is both long- standing and endemic within large sections of the press.

David received the following response: “Thank you for your submission/ witness statement to the Inquiry. We are very grateful to you for taking the time to assist the Inquiry. The information that you have provided is relevant to the Inquiry and we therefore would like to publish it as part of the Inquiry's official record… This will not require you to give oral evidence to the Inquiry. [shame!] Instead, your submission will be published on the Inquiry's website.”

News Release - March 2012

LibDems confronted by 'Skeletons in Government's Cupboard' in good-natured protest

Delegates to the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference on Saturday 10th March 2012 were surprised to be confronted, not with a demand for a change in policy, but with 'Drop the Debt' campaigners dressed as skeletons urging them to implement the policies they have already decided upon! Dr David Golding CBE, who arranged the protest on behalf of the regional global poverty grouping, North East CALL TO ACTION (NE-CAP), says, "Many of the delegates may have welcomed our presence, because we were NOT there to protest about the NHS!" All this under the somewhat bemused gaze of a competent but tactful police presence.

The action was mounted to support campaigners in Egypt, for example, whose position is that "Egypt's debt is Mubarak's debt. It is not the Egyptian people's. We never had any say in the dictator's policies, let alone borrowing to buy arms". Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has admitted that some of Egypt's £100 million debts to the UK comes from military sales to Mubarak, and much the same applies to debts owed by many other countries - these are the 'skeletons in the government's cupboard'!

95% of the debt owed to the UK by developing countries - whose peoples are suffering the most by far from the fall-out of the global financial crisis - is owed to UK Export Finance, a government agency for which Vince Cable, is responsible.

David Golding states that, "I reminded delegates that they have always been great supporters of Jubilee Debt Campaign and that their official policy couldn't be better if I had written it myself! This should have been music to their ears, but will have aroused fears in some that they could finish up as being seen to have broken yet another promise. To expect poor countries to repay debts when we can't even say clearly how and why those debts were incurred is as absurd rationally as it is unacceptable morally."

For further information, contact Dr David Golding CBE, Development Coordinator of NE-CAP, at David.Golding@ncl.ac.uk

Notes for Editors:

It is official Liberal Democrat policy to "conduct our own audit of all UK government debts, ruling invalid any past lending that was recklessly given to dictators known not be committed to spend the loans on development". Jubilee Debt Campaign and NE-CAP are asking for just that - in other words, for an open and impartial audit of these old debts. Many of them may well turn out to be all right, but some are probably anything but.

More photos of the event:

pic5   pic6   pic7   pic8   pic9   pic10   pic11   pic12   pic13   pic14   pic14a   pic15   pic16

Up and coming Christian Aid events
Christian Aid have a number of events coming up soon in the North East. Details here.

Click here for a full list of current, future and past events.

Occasional papers / articles for thought and debate

An open letter to the Dail Mail on International Aid
From David W. Golding - December 2011

I was deeply disturbed to read the articles and editorial on international aid on 3rd December 2011. [ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2069343/Foreign-aid-law-plan- Ministers-want-commit-Britain-billions-handouts.html ] Surely, even the slightest concern for fairness, or the smallest concern to help your readers come to a balanced judgement on this issue, would have led you to include information on the benefits provided by aid (as confirmed by independent studies by the World Bank, for example), as well as the matters to which you object. In their absence, the impression given, I hope mistakenly, was that of sheer spite - of spite, indeed, towards the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet.

But I’m getting ahead of myself! On 12th May 1789, ‘a sickly shrimp of a man’, William Wilberforce MP, gave his first speech in Parliament on the slave trade. “I will not accuse the Liverpool merchants,” he said. “I will allow them to be men of humanity… and I verily believe that if the wretchedness of any one of the many hundred Negros stowed in each ship could be brought within their view, that there is no one among them whose heart could bear it.”

Likewise, I will not ‘accuse you’, but allow you to be a ‘man of humanity’ and, likewise, ‘verily believe’ that if the wretchedness of the people to whom you would deny aid could be brought home to you, your heart too ‘could not bear it’. For example, in the early 2000s, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, economics advisor to the United Nations, was visiting the main hospital in Malawi, and the doctor suggested he stepped into the medical ward. Sachs recalls that:

“There was no medicine in the medical ward. The ward had 150 beds - there were 450 people in the ward. These 450 people were fit into a room with 150 beds by putting three people in or around each bed. Two people were lying head to toe, toe to head, in each bed – strangers sharing a death bed. Alongside or underneath the bed there was somebody on the ground, sometimes literally on the ground or sometimes on a piece of cardboard, dying beneath the bed. The room was filled with moans. Family members were sitting by the beds, swabbing dried lips and watching their loved ones die.” Of AIDS, of course.

Of the three examples you cited, one was completely unrepresentative (48 Pitcairn islanders – in the immortal words of John McEnroe, “You cannot be serious!”), and one based on error – the Land Rovers for Mugabe were not financed by the aid budget, but by the ECGD, a department charged with promoting British exports. The other one (India) is admittedly debatable, although I believe our aid is put to good use there.

You failed to mention that the financial crisis, for which the rich countries (reckless bankers, incompetent governments, and irresponsible consumers alike) are entirely to blame, has pushed an extra 100 million people back into absolute poverty. These are not people whose children cry themselves to sleep at night because of hunger, but people whose children are too weak to cry. So once again, as with Third World Debt, "Those who could be blamed the least, the poorest people in the poorest countries, are suffering the most." (The late Cardinal Basil Hume)

Furthermore, as I pointed out above, you did not so much as breath a word about the hundreds of millions of people who are receiving real and life changing benefits from aid and debt relief. For example, since 2000, the number of AIDS patients receiving life- saving drugs has risen 100-fold to nearly 7 million – and that means that tens of millions of children will not be left orphans in a cold and callous world! That includes 75% of those in most need in Malawi, so that conditions in the medical ward described above have been transformed. Treatment to prevent infection of babies with the HIV virus during birth (a fairly simple procedure) has risen from about 5% to over 50%.

Similarly, an estimated extra 42 million children, most of them girls, are attending primary school. Smallpox – a hideous disease – has been eradicated; and polio has been cut to 1,600 cases, a reduction of over 99%. Healthcare is now free for pregnant women in several African countries – increasing the number receiving it by half a million each year in Ghana alone. In Bangladesh, vaccination for the six common childhood diseases (it costs little more than a pound) has gone from 10% to 70%, child mortality has been more than halved (as in several Africa countries) - and the fertility rate has been reduced by more than 50%! As Salil Shetty, Director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign, put it last year, "Instead of just lamenting that Africa might miss the MDG targets, we should be celebrating the real changes that have happened in the lives of millions of poor people”.

What the International Development Department doesn't care to flag up (I wonder why? ) is that the real recipients of 'foreign aid' are the rich countries! Unfair trade rules, tax dodges by big corporations, and debt repayments, each cost poor countries far more than they get in aid. And those things don't take into account our habit of 'poaching' many of their brightest and best trained people, nor the impacts of climate change, for which we are entirely responsible. ‘There should be a law against it!'

In conclusion: "Telling lies to Bob [Geldof] and me is one thing. Putting their signature on a G8 communique and lying to their citizenry is another matter. Breaking promises to the most vulnerable people on earth is real infamy." (Bono) It is indeed. We didn’t have to make these solemn pledges to ‘the most vulnerable people on earth’, but we did make them and we should keep them!

David W. Golding CBE PhD DSc DCL

Notes on specific points raised by the Daily Mail:

Those 48 Pitcairn islanders: I don’t suppose the British Government knows what to do with this handful of British citizens living on a large rock in the South Pacific, and I certainly don’t! Inevitably, keeping them supplied isn’t cheap on account of their geographical isolation. However, to use them to denigrate British aid more widely is simply absurd.

Aid to India: This is obviously debatable in view of the scale of this country’s expenditure on its military (and its space programme!), although I understand that good work is done with our aid in the provision of schooling. However, our past responsibilities for this country have to be born in mind. Furthermore, it may well be that DfID has set up worthwhile projects in the past and doesn’t want to walk away from them. Capricious funding is the bane of aid for development, with money often being wasted because of a lack of on-going commitment, and DfID may be trying to avoid this pitfall. [In contrast, debt relief provides a dependable source of funding into the future and is a superior method of assistance.]

“Charity should begin at home”: Of course it should, but it shouldn’t stop there – otherwise none of us would lift a finger for anyone outside our own family circles! In any case, developing countries are not in receipt of charity, but of a multiplicity of injustices, as I outlined above. The irony is that ‘enlightened self-interest’ - an intelligent concern for our own welfare, and that of future generations - will lead us to take vigorous action to reduce the obscene chasm which has opened up between rich and poor globally. Such a world is a dangerous and unhealthy one, as well as being morally indefensible. As an African proverb puts it, “No one can sleep soundly, knowing that his neighbour is hungry”.

“Pensioners could freeze to death this winter”: There’s an ‘easy answer’ to this, indeed, several! (1) Action should be taken to ban ‘regressive’ tariffs, which result in higher prices for people using smaller amounts of fuel as a consequence of the imposition of standing charges and price reductions for higher levels of fuel use. After all, we don’t face a standing charge when we visit the petrol station, nor do ‘gas guzzlers’ qualify for cheaper fuel! Better still, by far, would be the introduction of ‘progressive’ tariffs, for example, with everyone getting a small, free ‘fuel allowance’, with a flat rate thereafter. This wouldn’t cost the Exchequer a single penny. (2) A national drive on home insulation would combat fuel poverty; reduce future imports of fuel; create substantial numbers of jobs; and curb carbon emissions – a win/win/win/win outcome! It could be paid for by reversing the Government’s measures favouring motorists, given that the overall cost of motoring has fallen substantially over the past decade. [See “Cars are a cheap option” by the author.] (3) According to the independent, highly respected IFS, the financial changes announced since the election (as distinct from those initiated by the previous government) have been regressive – i.e., hitting the poorest hardest. This bias should be reversed.

“Corrupt regimes and vanity projects”: It’s sad to see these dreary old prejudices being trotted out week after week. Of course, we should take the government to task when it fails to be vigilant regarding the use of aid and there’s always room for improvement, but these sweeping and destructive slanders help not at all.

If we wait till impoverished societies sort out their problems with corruption before tackling poverty, we’ll wait forever, because extreme poverty is one of the main engines of corruption. As Professor Jeffrey Sachs explained, “Good governance raises incomes, but also, and perhaps even more important… higher income leads to improved governance. A more literate and affluent society is better able to keep the government honest… second, a more affluent society can afford to invest in high quality governance” – for example, pay civil servants, teachers, police, etc., a living wage.

During my visit to Tanzania and Zambia earlier this year, it became abundantly clear to me that, despite the high levels of corruption in those countries, large numbers of decent and able people are doing good things there. I visited a secondary school which had been built by entirely by the local people, with the exception of the timber and metal roof - that had been provided by the government. I asked the Deputy Head, “How long did you have to wait for them to do it?” He replied, “About a month”! I visited a clean, spacious and apparently well staffed hospital, and I saw numerous new pumps providing clean water in remote valleys. In each case, these developments were made possible by the provision of aid and debt relief.

...........................

“Cars are a cheap option”
Published in ‘Metro’, 20th December, 2011. [Wording excluded from published version shown in square brackets.]
From David W. Golding

I see the motoring lobby is up to its usual tricks decrying the news that only a third of drivers’ taxes is spent on roads (Metro, Friday Dec 16). In its comment, the AA failed to mention the widespread damage to health which results from urban traffic, or the enormous carbon pollution of the world’s atmosphere.

Furthermore, although fuel has become more expensive in terms of cost per litre, motorists are paying only about 1% more for their fuel than they were in 1980, when the price is adjusted for inflation, on account of the greater efficiency of present day engines, according to a Which? study in April 2011.

It’s the overall cost of motoring (purchase as well as running costs) which really matters to drivers [and the Government’s own figures show that] this is down about 14% in real terms over the decade. So much for “turning the clock back on social mobility”, as the AA claims. [In contrast, bus and coach fares have risen by about 24% over the same period.] In reality, its poorer people who rely on public transport who pay through the nose.

Dr David Golding CBE, Newcastle University

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Climate Change - Point & Counterpoint - added Dec 2009
A paper by David Golding
An abridged version is also available here.

Amnesty International Dignity Campaign - added July 2009
A paper by Peter Sagar

Environmentalism and spirituality - added April 2009
A paper by Peter Sagar

Carbon Fast - Carbon Diet - added March 2009
A paper by David Golding

Climate Change - A brief outline of the strength of the scientific consensus - added March 2009
A paper by David Golding

Is Environmental Concern 'A New Morality'? - added March 2009
A paper by David Golding

The Real Global Warming Swindle - added July 2007. This is a continuation from the article in the Climate Change Special Edition newsletter 2007. By David Golding

Carbon Offsetting - added May 2007
A paper by David Golding

I count - added May 2007
A personal look at his own carbon offsetting by David Golding

Is the Trade Justice Movement politically biased?
Written by Dr David Golding, November 2006.

Honorary Degrees Acceptance Speech by Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer
The speech that he made during the honorary degree ceremony of Newcastle University in January 2007 ends....
" I say to this great audience today, at this historic ceremony that we will remember for years to come: 'Have confidence and have faith. Hold fast to the belief that it can and will be said of our generation that we built a movement on ethical foundations that had the vision, had the courage and had the moral strength and the greatness to do the right thing; that we will continue to work unflinchingly and unfailingly to build justice in our time and indeed to Make Poverty History' ".

NE-CAP and MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY North East in the press....

• Article in Northern Echo 29th June 2006
• Letter published in the Newcastle Journal, August 2006
• Article in Hartlepool Mail, 17 October 2006
• See here and here what the BBC said about the 'Stop Climate Chaos' rally on November 4th which was attended by a North East contingent.
• The sage event of 8th January 2007 was covered in the Newcastle Journal and the Newcastle Chronicle.
• Article in Local News Guardian 17th July 2008
regarding climate change.
• Content of article published in Local News Guardian in May 2009 entitled 'Pupils help promote climate change strategy'
• Content of letter published in Metro News 15th February 2010
regarding foreign aid.
• Content of letter published in Evangelicals Now (May edition 2010)
regarding climate change.
• Content of letter published in Idea, the magazine of the Evangelical Alliance (May/June edition 2010)
regarding climate change.
• Article in Northumberland Gazette 11th November 2010
regarding roadshow event.
• Content of letter published in The Guardian 26th March 2011
regarding fuel duty and climate change.
• Content of letter published in The Guardian 22nd July 2011
in response to a leader entitled, “David Cameron in Africa, Resolute on Aid”.

And a letter from Downing Street, July 2006. In this letter the prime minister encourages campaigners to "...keep up the pressure...". We agree as, although there has been progress, there is still plenty to achieve to Make Poverty History.

NE-CAP has the following aims and objectives:

• To continue to promote the aims of the national MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign of 2005, with its emphasis on 'Trade Justice, Drop the Debt and More and Better Aid', in accordance with the manifesto of MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY.
   
• To promote urgent action to curb climate change, given that "The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor....within all countries". (Third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
   
• To promote Fairtrade, and support the wider work of relief and development NGOs (non-government organisations).
   
• To support all those in the Tees-to-Tweed region seeking to promote the above aims.
   
• To work with other organisations having similar aims, and network with groups in other areas.
   
• To encourage other areas in the country to set up local groups to promote economic justice.

The full constitution can be found here.