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HB: … I don’t know if this is one of the things you wanted to talk about…. Obviously we’ve done a lot in terms of responding – the first search and rescue team to get into Pakistan came from the UK and it’s DIFD that organises that. So the earthquake struck at the 3:50 in the morning our time on the 8th. The duty officer in our emergency team had received a phone to say this had happened. He then comes into the office, the rest of the team come in – we offered emergency assistance to the government of Pakistan, they said yes. As soon as they said yes the search and rescues teams – because these are volunteer teams from all over the country – they’d been put on standby as soon as the news came through of the earthquake. As soon as the Pakistanis said yes, we said, right East Midlands airport – we chartered a jet and 75 search and rescue personnel, their heat-seeker equipment, their dogs, and the back of the plane full of blankets from our stores in Marchington, left the runway at East Midlands airport twenty two hours after the earthquake first struck.

We’ve done a good job because there is the most extraordinary team of people working in DIFD because to organise all of that you have to know exactly what you are doing. In the same way when the Bam earthquake struck on Boxing Day 2003, they chartered a DC10 on Boxing Day and got the search and rescue teams off.

MK: That is amazing.

HB: It is, and they are very, very impressive individuals. And then immediately following that, tents, plastic sheeting, blankets – we have some stores in Marchington in the East Midlands, we had some stores in the Middle East, and we had some stores that we could call down on in within Pakistan itself – a call down arrangement with the manufacturers. So we got tents and blankets in, the RAF helped to fly things in…. well on the first day, actually, there was another appeal by the World Health Organisation for $500000 for immediate medical needs and we said on the day, “Right, Britain will pay for half of that.” So the WHO then gets to work knowing it has got the cash. And then we did with the Disasters Emergency Committee which represents all the main aid agencies, on the Monday so that’s two days afterwards, I said to them, “Right we are going to the same arrangement we had during the Tsunami – anything that you want to fly to Pakistan in relief supplies, we will pick up the cost of getting them there and that means every penny you raise goes on relief supplies.” And we funded I think about 70 flights.

MK: Wow. What is the budget of your department?

HB: Well, the total budget this year will be just over $5 billion. But obviously that’s our development and aid programs. But we have a separate budget for dealing with humanitarian emergencies – Britain is the second largest giver of humanitarian aid in the world, after the United States of America which is the largest.

MK: But in the percentage of their GDP isn’t the US the lowest?

HB: Yes, in terms of their overall aid, they are. They are about 0.2%.

MK: I thought it was 0.14% of GDP in 2003 which ranks dead last among all the worlds nations.

HB: They are the biggest in cash terms but they are not very big…

MK: Do you find that problematic? Is it something you think should change?

HB: In the end it is for the American government and the American people to decide how much they give in aid. We are demonstrating what we think as the UK by what we do, and this government is demonstrating what we think ought to happen because we’ve got a sharply rising aid budget and we are committed now to reach the 0.7% UN target in 2013 which makes us the first government in British history to commit to a date to achieve it. So that represents real progress, but I think it is important that we all play our part and contribute and that’s what last year the G8 was all about.

But, as you will know, there has been a number of disasters – the Tsunami, the food crisis in Niger, the food crisis in Southern Africa, the food crisis in the Horn of Africa, and then the earthquake. And one of things I’ve been doing over the last year and a bit is drawing on our experience at dealing with these crisis to try and get some reforms within – I don’t know if you have been following this – within the international system. One is this new Emergency Fund within the UN know as the SURF because one of the weaknesses of the system currently is disaster strikes, UN shouts, “Help!” and then it says like the WHO, “Can we have some money to provide medical supplies, can we have some money for this that and the other.” This is not a very sensible system – I think the UN should have some resources to get to work straight away. What the SURF will do will give them that and already we have 10 countries that have committed $170 million for this current year and the SURF is going to be launched in about a months time which will mean the UN has got some money to get on with it. And the second argument for the SURF is that some crisises are much better funded than other crisis’. So you have, I mean the Tsunami the response was extraordinary, but you can go to other parts of the world where there is a humanitarian crisis not quite on the same scale of the Tsunami because of the number of people who died and the number of countries affected, but very little funding comes in for that. Is that right? No it isn’t. So the second purpose of the SURF is to enable the UN to do some evening out and I’m glad to say that the UN General Assembly adopted that as a proposal in I think it was November and are going to launch the SURF, as I say, in about a months times. So that’s all happened within a year and there are some other changes that are taking place as well, I don’t know how interested you are in that?

MK: I am very interested in that. I’ve been reading recently when you’ve been in the news about engaging with corrupt governments. You say you have to, why is that? Why is there a moral imperative to do it?

HB: Well it depends what you mean by engage. The fact is corruption has got to be dealt with. Why? Because corruption affects poor people most of all – studies show that poor people spend more of their income as a percentage on paying bribes to teachers to teach, police officers not to harass them, in order to be able to sell you goods, than better off people. That’s the first point, secondly, corruption gets in the way of investment – what do developing countries want? They want investment. Why do they want investment? Because that is how they are going to get jobs, income, better lives, tax revenue to pay for schools, hospitals and drugs that will save peoples lives. It’s just basic and fundamental. It’s how we did it and they want the same chance.

MK: But you’re saying that you should still give aid to corrupt regimes though?

HB: No, but then I will come on to what we’ve done. We give our aid in different forms depending on our judgement. So let’s take Kenya. I made a speech exactly about this last night, which in the third in a series I’m making the in the run-up to our White Paper which is going to be published in the summer and it is all about this issue. Take Kenya. We don’t give direct budget support to Kenya – we’ve already taken that decision. Why? Because of the risk of corruption. Direct budget support is when you give the money to the government – it goes into the governments accounts and the government then determines what its priorities are. Now, in doing that it is a particular form of partnership. In the right circumstances, it’s the right thing to do because in the end developing country governments should be accountable to their own people, they need their own rules, they need to take their own decisions. You can run a parallel system in a country – French hospitals, British schools and German water wells – but that ain’t going to solve the problem in the long-term. So building the capacity by technical assistance, helping with reform, money, is the right thing to do. But where there is a serious risk of corruption we use other means. Now, in the case of Kenya we are funding primary education and some people have said, “Well because there is a problem of corruption in Kenya we should take our aid away.” I think that’s wrong, after all, is it the fault of the Kenyan people that there is an endemic problem of corruption? No it isn’t. Should the Kenyan people be punished i.e. their schools not getting the refurbishments or the textbooks that our money’s going to pay for? Is that really sensible? I don’t think it is sensible.

The point I’m making is that you have to use the different ways you can give aid according to the judgement of the circumstances and that is why we don’t give Kenya direct budget support but we do give money that goes to primary education. And one change the Kenyans have made is that previously money for the education budget went from the ministry to the regional office and from the regional office to the school, and some got lost in between. They’ve changed the system so that now the money goes straight from the centre to the schools bank account, first thing, reducing opportunities for a diversion en route. And the second thing is schools now publish money they get for supplies and equipment, so basically everything apart from salaries because they are paid directly, they are published on a board outside the school and I visited a school in Kenya three weeks ago and there was “Income come in” and “This is what we spent it on” and that then allows parents and the community to say, ‘Well, why did you spend it one that?” and that kind of thing. So it’s about transparency, it’s about shedding light.

MK: Did you severe the aid to Ethiopia recently?

HB: Yes. Well, I’ve said because of the concerns we have about the government there – the deaths, the arrest of the opposition, the locking up of those who won seats – I said to the Prime Minister… Just to go back a stage: In developing a relationship with our partner countries, there are three basic principles that we have both got to sign up to: 1. That we are both committed to reducing poverty. 2. Committed to upholding human rights and international obligations. 3. Committed to good governance, fighting corruption, making sure the money goes to the purpose it was intended. Three basic principles. There is a big debate, as you know, in development about conditionality and this is what we are discussing. But our approach to conditionality is clearly on that ground – what we don’t do anymore is say, “Well you must privatize your industries for our aid, you must open up your trade” – we don’t do that…

MK: The IMF still attaches conditions.

HB: The IMF does still attach conditions. The World Bank has undertaken a review of its conditionality, adopted new principles. We are waiting to see what difference that is going to make but the studies that have been done show that the World Bank is making less use of conditionalities, less number of conditions, now than was the case previously.

MK: Do you think that is because that model has been proven not to work?

HB: Well I think two reasons. One is, yeah, the evidence is mixed about the benefit of those approaches. Secondly, I think for economic policy in the end all the governments have an obligation, obviously, to manage their economies effectively. If you let inflation rip, the poorest people suffer most. If interest rates are high people can’t afford to borrow to invest. So what I’m interested in, and that links to the first of our principles, is, what is the impact of decisions that developing countries make about how they choose to spend and how they run their economies on reducing poverty? And in particular, what is happening to their health and education budgets? Because if we were giving direct budget support and health and education spending were going down, well why would you want to do that? Because all you would be doing is helping to pay for other choices. So we wouldn’t do that in those circumstances and that is why we have developed a range of different ways of giving aid – from one end of the spectrum which is direct budget support to the other end of the spectrum like Zimbabwe, a very badly governed country, we don’t give any aid to the government but we do 1. Help to feed the population through the World Food Program and 2. We have an HIV and AIDS program working through NGO’s. Same argument in relation to Kenya – should the people of Zimbabwe suffer from withdrawal of aid because there is bad governance? No they shouldn’t but we work in different ways. And the point I made in the speech last night is we need to be clearer about the different choices we are making in different places. And in the case of Ethiopia it was because there was breach of one of the principles – human rights and upholding international obligations – that I said, “Right, we were going to give you direct budget support this year, now we are not.” Now what we are looking at is how to spend that money in a different way to get it direct into health and education and clean water for exactly the same reason in relation to Kenya. The final thing I would just say about Kenya is the governments got a big test on with… have you followed the Katongo dossier?

MK: Oh, yeah, yeah.

HB: Yes. Now the finance minister resigned earlier this week but I think what all of us are looking for is, you know, a clear indication from the government of Kenya that the dossier, which clearly presents a prima facie case for the Kenyan legal system to deal with that, that they are taking this seriously. And in the end it has got to be the Kenyan people who have got to be the judge of whether they think that’s happened or not.

The one other thing I would just say about corruption is we also do quite a lot to work to support anti-corruption work in developing countries, and commissions. So we help to fund the anti-corruption commissions in Sierra Leone, in Nigera – where Mr. Rivadu who is in charge there is doing a good job – because you need the law, you need the capacity to implement it, you need the will to implement it. And then our part of the bargain if money is stolen and comes here is effective means of dealing with money laundering, identifying the resources, dealing with anyone with UK or any UK citizens who engages in bribery. So we’ve both got responsibility.

MK: What do you think of the IMF-friendly economy that the UK and US is trying to leave in Iraq – the privatized, flat-tax economy… You know there is flat tax there? And they’ve privatized all the main industries…

HB: Well they haven’t quite actually. That’s not the case.

MK: Doesn’t the constitution say that they don’t have to be nationalized?

HB: Well if you are talking about oil then that isn’t the case and that’s of course Iraq’s most important natural resource. The fact is that there is now a sovereign Iraqi government and it is for the sovereign Iraqi government to decide what they want. It really is. What Iraq needs more than anything else is stability because if Iraq can get political system and the political process is moving forward, we are waiting for the new government to be formed following the elections, then this a country with a proud history, highly skilled and educated population, natural resources and if they get the stability then investment will return and life for the Iraq people will improve.

MK: What do you think about the stuff that came out yesterday in the Guardian, that Tony Blair had promised Bush that he would support even before he got legal advice…

HB: I haven’t read that in detail but I have to say, lots of people have said lots of things and I don’t think there is anything new in this. The truth is: The real answer to the question why did we take the decision that we did, is because on the 18th March 2003 a majority of the House of Commons voted to do it. That’s the answer to the question and there have been a number of inquiries that have gone into this and in the end – and I respect those who take a different view, some people are fundamentally opposed to what happened and some people voted in favour of what happened and in the end no inquiry is going to reconcile those differences, I just don’t think that is the case. In the end people made a political choice.

MK: But do think Blair knew he was going to do it a year before he made the speeches in the House of Commons saying, “If Saddam leaves Iraq we won’t go to war, he just needs to give up his weapons.” Do you think he was saying that ingenuously?

HB: That is not a questions that I can answer because I can only answer for myself and the decisions I took. People may disagree with the decision but I don’t accept that people acted in bad faith, I’m very clear about that. In the end, it’s a political judgement that people made. The one thing I would say is that, even people who were bitterly opposed to the conflict, what should now be happening in Iraq and where we should be putting our support and effort is very clear because the future of the country will either be determined by those who are letting off the suicide bombs and killing ordinary Iraqis as well as the Coalition soldiers or it will be settled by the democratic process. And having been to Iraq three times in the last two years, it is quite humbling when you meet people who are putting their lives on the line every single day to do what you and I are doing now which is having a conversation and expressing different views. And I happen to think that the people of Iraq have just as much right as we do to determine their future via the ballot box and that is what we have been working jolly hard to achieve. To be honest, I find the silence on the part of some who opposed the war when it comes to speaking out clearly against the suicide bombing, I find that frankly unforgivable… What did you think at the time of the conflict?

MK: I didn’t agree with conflict because I thought the law of unintended consequences, I didn’t know what would happen. I also thought it would make terrorism worse by inflaming Muslim sentiment. But I agree with you about the parts of the left that have come out in favour of the resistance. If the left wanted them to blow up Coalition groups, OK I don’t agree with that, but you can see where it is coming from. But these people are blowing up Iraqi trade unionists, democrats, and children.

HB: Absolutely, or trying to blow up people organizing the election… Is that legitimate?

MK: No it’s not.

HB: No it’s not legitimate.

MK: Not at all. There has been a lot of it – I don’t think it is a morally defensible position, to be honest… I believe to an extent that the British Labour Party probably had good intentions about liberating the Iraqi people, but do you think the same is true of the Bush administration….

HB: [Pause]

MK: The people behind Bush, was it a genuine, altruistic act, do you think?

HB: Well, in the end the decision was taken to enforce the repeatedly-made-clear will of the UN and it was taken also on the basis of intelligence that was available at the time and I think people acted in good faith and out of political conviction. Now, we now know what we know about the intelligence but you talk to those Iraqis who lived, you know, for thirty years under Saddam and a number of them have a very, very clear view that at least now Iraq has the chance of a better future. And it’s quite…

MK: But what I’m interested in the fact that people in the Bush administration – like Rumsfeld – were friends with the guy in the 1980s which doesn’t really add up in this whole equation of them wanting to spread democracy, to that extent…

HB: Well…

MK: Because that was realpolitik but I’m not sure they have made some sort of conversion.

HB: Well I have to say that I really do welcome the fact that there is now more talk about the importance of democracy in the world, including the States. Yeah, things have happened in the past that when we look back on them, you know, were not very good – and that includes the UK and lots of other countries. Well, you think of the Cold War – the Cold War led both sides to back those who they regarded as their allies. As a principle clearly the spread of democracy is a good thing and I fundamentally disagree with those who have both in the relation to Iraq and in relation to Afghanistan, said, “Oh, these countries are not ready for democracy, you can’t impose it,” – absolute nonsense because you see those pictures of women queuing to vote in Afghanistan – we’ve just had the Afghanistan conference in London, President Karzai and a number of his minister came. And the fact is if people have the opportunity, all human beings want the chance to have a say about how they are governed. And I do believe that his is a fundamental and universal principle and we should certainly encourage and support it and, in particular, we should encourage the brave people who are standing up for the principles of democracy against those who don’t believe in it.

MK: I don’t know too much about the situation in Afghanistan. Is it going well there?

HB: Well I think this is a country that has been brutalized and impoverished by a generation or more of conflict. Since the overthrow of the Taliban, 3.5 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan which is a very important indication because people don’t go back unless they think something has changed or life might be better. There are now a lot of children in school, a third of the children in school are girl – as you know, under the Taliban it was illegal to teach girls. Now, the economy is doing OK, it’s growing, but there are big challenges, the first is security, and the second is economic development, and the third is how you move away from the poppy economy that significant parts of Afghanistan find themselves wedded to. And then you have the Taliban who are still trying to impose their views on people in the most brutal way – in the south teachers have been murdered. Why? Because they insist on teaching girls in school and I think the right to an education for all children – girls and boys – is another fundamental human right. So they’ve got an enormous challenge but what I think the Afghanistan conference this week has demonstrated is that the international community is sticking with the elected government. They’ve elected a President, they’ve elected a parliament and local council, there are women in the parliament. This is progress but it’s an enormous and it’s going to take time.

MK: Where do you draw the line, then? As you say, Afghanistan is better now than under the Taliban by an gauge. Would you support the invasion of any dictators country? Blair’s whole thing is that it has be practical… Is it practical to go into Iran?

HB: Well there is an issue to do with Iran and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which is being dealt with through the UN and that is right and proper. In the case of Afghanistan, the international coalition that took the military action was motivated principally by the fact that Afghanistan was where those who committed 9/11 were trained and nurtured and, well, the world was not going to stand by and allow that to continue and rightly so.

I think there is an issue which the world the is trying to grapple with which is: what do you do about states where the people who live within that state are being brutalized or traumatized or being subjected to genocide or crimes against humanity? Because, while international law has been very clear in saying, “If you invade another sovereign country, that’s a clear breach of international law,” we have been working towards an understanding that actually brutalizing your own people shouldn’t mean the world says, “Well, that’s an internal matter and we can’t do anything about it.” And that is the whole “responsibility to protect” principle which was adopted by the Millenium Summit in September is all about. Now, implementing that is another question because one, you have to have global will, and, two, you have to have the capacity to do something. So, take a practical example: Sierra Leone. When the Westside Boys and others were chopping peoples arms off, now Britain went in. Some people have said at the time, “Well this looks a bit colonial,” but Sierra Leone now has peace and stability – the UN peace keeping force that came in afterwards, NAMCIL, has just left because the country is now stable. If you talk to people in Sierra Leone they are profoundly grateful – they lived with this mayhem and murder.

Take Kosovo as a second example. There wasn’t even a UN resolution because the Russians vetoed any action in relation to Kosovo. Was it wrong of those who got together – the US, the UK and others – to go and stop Muslims from being murdered? These are very difficult questions. Was it wrong for that to happen?

MK: Well it’s the whole moral relativism thing, isn’t it?

HB: It is!

MK: But, then, do you think we need to reform the institutions if countries like Russia can veto an action that is quite patently a moral action. Do you think the institutions should be changed so people can’t do that? Or, there needs to be strict guidelines about what situation there needs to be before you go into a country?

HB: Well, I think the adoption of “responsibility to protect” by the UN in the autumn has set out a very clear principle and it is then about the United Nations, which is the best and only hope that we’ve got for resolving these problems, to demonstrate that it is capable of A. living up to the Charter adopted 60 years ago, and B. doing something about these kind of conflicts when they happen. Now, you can see some good examples of the UN seeking to do that – you look at the UN force in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is. I think, the largest peace keeping operation that the UN is operating currently. Now there is a country which has been through a very, very difficult time, it’s still difficult in the east. But MONARCH, the UN force, is doing a good job and it’s supporting the political process, so there has just been a referendum on the constitution, there are going to be election this year, 23 million people registered to vote in the DRC. There is a fragile transitional government but it has gone from mayhem and war to approaching the first proper democratic elections in most peoples life time in the DRC, and the UN has played an important part in that.

You look at Darfur. Now, in Darfur what has been happening is that Africa has been taking the lead through AMISS – the African Union Mission – and we’ve been supporting that very strongly. I made the point about will and capacity – what the AU has done is to generate some additional capacity – so there is 6,700 troops – but now there security situation there is deteriorating, having improved, and that’s because the rebels, as well as the militia bandits, are increasing the levels of violence and the UN has got a number of things to do. We’ve fought very hard to get a sanctions committee set up, that’s currently looking at a report – I think it’s very important that the sanctions committee if it has evidence against individuals who are breaching the ceasefire or behaving in other ways that are not compatible with the resolutions that the UN has laid down, that action is taken against them. We have got the agreement of the UN to refer what has been going in Darfur to the International Criminal Court. Hugely significant, hugely…. And the US in that case abstained because the US has a fundamental position to the ICC…

MK: Why is that?

HB: Because they don’t think that another body should have the right to try Americans… I mean this is all public, this is the position they have made clear. But the fact that the UN agreed and the US, I think abstained, did not oppose that resolution, was very important, because Britain, having being one of the strongest supporters of the ICC, and we now what’s happening in Darfur referred and they are investigating; we have the activities of the LRA – the Launch Resistance Army in northern Uganda… I don’t know if you’ve followed that?

MK: No, I haven’t.

HB: Well, this is a very strange organisation – it has more of the characteristics of a cult, but it has kidnapped people, forced them to become soldiers, committed the most terrible atrocities in northern Uganda, and five leaders of the LRA have now been referred to the ICC, they haven’t been arrested yet. But these are quite significant changes and what I think we are seeing is a process here of the world moving from the era when people said, “It’s a civil war, we can’t do anything about it,” to recognizing that wasn’t good enough, to trying to fashion the institutions that could do something about it, the political world but crucially the means to do something about it. And I think that this is really important and from a Development Minister point of view this matters enormously because, which are the poorest countries? Why is Sudan so poor? Why is the Congo so poor? Why is there great poverty is Sierra Leone? Why is Afghanistan poor so that one in four children die before they are five? Answer: In part, because of conflict. And therefore peace and stability is the absolute foundation stone of any development. Therefore as someone who cares about development one of the things I’ve learnt in this job is: we have to find effective ways as a world…

MK: What did you make of, from a Development Ministers point of view, the G8 summit? The debt relief deal etc…

HB: Did we make poverty history in 2005? No we didn’t. Did we make real progress? Yes we did. Because if we’d sat here exactly a year ago and I’d said to you, “Now what do you think the chances are that is May the EU will agree to double its aid by 2010? That in July the G8 will build on that and say that global aid will rise by $50 billion a year by 2010 and half of that - $25 billion – will go to Africa and, incidentally, the $25 billion extra for Africa by 2010 in aid being exactly what the Commission for Africa recommended in its report that came out in March. Do you think it will be possible for the G8 to reach agreement on a multilateral debt cancellation deal for the poorest countries of the world that could potentially deliver $55 billion worth of debt written off irrevocably – debt owed to the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank – for between 18 and 38 of the worlds poorest countries? Do you think it will be possible to get agreement that we should now aim to get AIDS treatment to everyone who needs it in the developing world – or as close as possible – by 2010, building on the 3 by 5 initiative of the World Health Organisation? Do you think you will get the G8 to sign up to the principle of free basic education and free health care where countries want it? Do you think we will see an international finance facility for international immunization launched which we hope will save four million children’s lives over the next ten years? Do you think the UN might sign up to “responsibility to protect”? Do you think the UN might agree to establish a peace building commission? Do you think that the General Assembly will back a new humanitarian fund to make sure that the UN has got some…?”

Now, you might have said, “Phoar, that’s a bit of a tall order, do you think you can really do that?” Every single one of those things has come to pass in the last twelves months. So it’s a long answer to the question but it makes the point and why did it happen? Because of politics. The politics of leadership and the UK undoubtedly has played a really important part of that and, you know, to have a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who are absolutely passionate and committed to development really makes a difference. And a lot of people – the Make Poverty History campaign, the Global Coalition around the world, people demonstrating, writing letters, watching Live 8, you name it – in whatever way people contributed. What I described as a tide of humanity that said, “Come on, you can do something about this.” And I think it’s really important to tell the truth about we were able to achieve because then people see, well it is possible to make progress, and that encourages people to go on and do more. And it shows, which I passionately believe, you know, politics does change things. In an era when people are sometimes cynical – and I worry about cynicism enormously because cynicism isn’t going to get a single child vaccinated, a single child into school – what do you do with you cynicism? What do you do? Are you going to go home and say, “Forget it”? Well if you are going go do that, well we’re not.

MK: But in a way cynicism has a place in terms of questioning motives.

HB: Ah, no! Cynicism does not have its place. Skepticism…

MK: Right.

HB: It’s a very important distinction. Skepticism, accountability, not taking things at face value, asking, querying, pushing, lobbying – every single one of those has its place. But if we fall prey to cynicism, as a world, we are completely lost. Completely.

MK: It’s easy to get cynical these days.

HB: Why is it easy to get cynical?

MK: Because the world is in a crisis. I think my age seem to think it is crisis.

HB: What are you going to do about it? That’s my point.

MK: I said it’s easy to get cynical – I didn’t say it was a good idea to get cynical because we can change things. But we also have cynicism because what we say really doesn’t matter, in terms of making decisions, big decisions. You don’t need to be cynical because you know you have quite a lot of power. Whereas if you have no power it’s easy to be like, “It’s not worth me doing anything because it won’t change anything.”

HB: Well where do you think those changes I just ran through in the course of 2005, where do you think the power for that came from?

MK: Individual agency.

HB: Well without this tide of humanity pushing it wouldn’t have happened. I mean there is no question about it. Now, you need to ally that to the political process, you need political leadership so the fact that the Prime Minister said, “Right Africa is going to be the centerpiece of the G8,” that’s leadership and a lot of pushing and a lot effort resulted in that outcome. But supporting that – part of it – the key to the success of all of that was people who didn’t say, “Oh well I can’t do anything about it,” people who said, “Well we can do something and we are going to say to our political leaders ‘now, come on, come on, come on, you can do something.” I think people shouldn’t underestimate the capacity to change things. You take debt: go back 25 years – there was no debt relief for developing countries at all, none. So people might have said, “We’re powerless… there’s nothing we can do because no-one pay any attention,” and if anyone discussed it Finance Ministers would say, “Yeah, I know it’s a problem, it’s such a shame we can’t do anything about it.” Here we are $70 billion worth of Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt relief later, on the cusp of potentially $55 billion worth of debt cancellation and it’s already begun because the first tranche of 19 countries are, as we speak, having their outstanding debts owed to the IMF wiped out, because the IMF is the first of the three to get going. How did we get from big problem but not possible to do anything about it to where we are today? And the answer is because people weren’t prepared to take, “Can’t do anything about it,” for an answer and it was a political process and people lobbied and campaigned and politicians took up the cause or led the cause or whatever. And that’s what we end up with. So it’s really important that we just recognise what does change, how it changes and the part that individuals by combining together can actually play in changing things. It’s a really important message.

MK: Yes, it is but if you look at the anti-war effort where there was a massive young people mobilization. It was the most politicized I’ve ever seen people my age – they really thought it was a bad idea. I’m not saying we were right – I think we were right, obviously – but the fact that it made no difference gave you a sense of disappointment and an idea that things couldn’t change. If a government wants to do something it will do it regardless…

HB: But hang on. The vote in the House of Commons on the 18th March, it was a hugely important vote. It was the first time that parliament had had a vote on military action – absolutely the right thing to do. OK that’s the first thing – the second thing is look at how people voted on all the parties: some voted for and some voted against. One couldn’t look at the debate in the Commons on the 18th March – and people took it incredibly seriously because this is a very important decision – nobody can say that the different views there were in the country – those who were protesting against, those who thought it was the right thing – weren’t represented in parliament that day, they were. People say, “Why did we go to war?” The answer is because parliament voted to take that decision and if you didn’t like what we did, you have a remedy that the Iraqi people didn’t have at that time because they’ve lived in a dictatorship – which is, you vote! And we have an election after that and in the end, as an individual, you make your decision and that is what democracy is all about.

MK: Well we didn’t really make a decision because the Conservatives were even more pro-war than Labour. So in terms of actually having a vote that counted… You could vote for the Lib Dems but they were so wishy-washy about it.

HB: But the point is you do have choice.

MK: Nominal choice.

HB: No, no, no. I wouldn’t say you have a nominal choice, you have a choice. People change governments! They do!

MK: Yes if we’d changed the government we would have changed it to a government which had exactly the same policy on the war – maybe not generally, but on the war. But there wasn’t a choice on that issue. On other issues there were. You are are saying you had a choice at the election. You could vote for the Lib Dems who had no chance change of ever forming government or you could vote for the main opposition which are the Conservative who were even more effusive in their support for George Bush.

HB: But in saying a party has no chance of forming a government – it’s because people aren’t going to vote for them and that’s called democracy, to be fair.

MK: I got a statistic from a report called “Paying the Price” that said, “despite the fact that a group of seven nations are richer than they have ever been, they are spending only half as much in real terms on development assistance as they did in 1960.”

HB: Well I mean the reason we use the UN measure is because it looks at you development assistance as a proportion of your national wealth. That’s what the 0.7% is….

MK: So we are 0.7%?

HB: No we are not. We are at 0.36% and we are on our way up towards 0.7% because we have a commitment. We’ve never reached 0.7% as the UK. The highest we ever got to was 0.51% and that was at the end of the last Labour government in 1979. And then between 1979 and 1997, the Conservative government halved our aid as a proportion of our national wealth – it cut it in half.

MK: Do you think if the Conservatives win the next election they will reverse all the gains you and the Labour government have made?

HB: Well they say they are committed to this now and insofar as the Conservatives genuinely recognizing the terrible mistakes they mad in the past, as far as development is concerned, I welcome that because it shows that Labour by what it’s done has moved the politics to where it is. But people will also remember the last time they actually had the chance to do something about it, they halved the aid budget as a proportion of our national wealth and people don’t forget that very quickly. So I think the problem for the Conservatives is to persuade people that they’ve really changed and that’s a judgement for the electorate to make.

MK: I was just going to finish with talking about Leeds. The 7/7 bombers came from Leeds. Do you think the city has made a good recovery?

HB: Well I think the response immediately after the bombings was – particularly in Beeston and Holbeck which are in my constituency, Hyde Park I’m just on the border – was deeply impressive and I think should give us real encouragement because people were determined to stick together, to be united, to say, “Look what these individuals did does not in any way represent what the community of Beeston is about, what the people of Holbeck, what the people of Hyde Park are about.” And although those individuals may have come from the community, they were not of it in terms of what they chose to do because whatever arguments people have got with foreign policy – frankly strapping a bomb on your back and blowing up commuters on their way to work in London is unforgivable – it’s absolutely unforgivable.

But the other thing I would say, there was a profound sense of shock and disbelief – particularly on the part of those who worked with the individuals, had watch them grow up. But I think everyone absolutely stuck together. And the other thing that people were determined to do was not allow anybody to come in from outside and stir it up and I pay real tribute to the police because they’ve been acutely conscious of that risk and there was just one incident when a group of individuals turned up at the Broadway pub to cause trouble in the immediate aftermath. That police dealt with that extremely effectively and there hasn’t been any trouble of that sort and there was a fear there would be. But I think that demonstrates the extent of unity and determination that there is within the community. Not to say that they are communities without their problems – of course they have their problems. But there is a lot of really fantastic, really fantastic people working in all parts of my constituency and it’s a pity those who have never heard of Beeston associate it with the bombers because the real Beeston is a completely different thing.

MK: Even the bombers – and this is hard to say – but I’ve read interviews with the their family and their friendsand I got this whole idea of the “banality of evil” – they didn’t seem to be an evil bunch. This poses a conundrum because this kind of ideology can infect young, quite good minds which seems like a contradiction…

HB: [Silence]

MK: OK, do you think the BNP have made significant gains since then in terms of stirring up racial tension? They have got a lot of publicity recently because of the trial of Griffin and Collett…

HB: Well if one makes a judgement on the basis of votes in the general election, they didn’t do particularly well in Leeds and I welcome that very much. I just think we have to take on – politically, in terms of argument, in terms of the way in which communities relate to each other – got to take head-on the notion that it’s somehow acceptable to divide us on the basis of our race, the colour of our skin, our religion, because Leeds is a city that has been built on migration from within the UK and from elsewhere. You think of the Irish community that came here in large numbers in the 19th century and helped to build the fabric of the city that we see around us and are a settle part – the Afro-Caribbean community, those who come from Pakistan and India. The city depends on these people. If all the people who have come to Leeds in the last fifty years didn’t turn up in the morning, buses wouldn’t be driven, lectures at university wouldn’t be given, patients wouldn’t get treatment in the hospital. The fact is, people who’ve come to settle in Leeds play an absolutely fundamental part, alongside everybody else, in making this city the extraordinary, vibrant place that it is. And we just absolutely cannot allow ourselves to be divided. It’s not to say that that process of change doesn’t bring with it, you know, tensions and it is important that we speak honestly to each other about that, but there is no place for those – there shouldn’t be any place – to those who seek to divide us on the basis of difference.

MK: How much do you think the governments words about asylum seekers – you know the Blunkett terminology of “swamping” and the asylum issue has been played on a lot by the government – do you think that has contributed to it?

HB: Well I wouldn’t accept the premise actually…

MK: Really?

HB: No I wouldn’t. The fact is, Britain has a long and honourable tradition of giving shelter to those who are fleeing persecution. We really do, and we continue to give shelter.

MK: Often Blair has kowtowed to the right-wing press by making speeches about “Being strong on asylum” etc.

HB: There is a real issue. Again, I wouldn’t accept the premise when you talk about kowtowing. There is a real issue – the asylum seeker system exists for a purpose and rightly so – that’s why we signed the 1951 Convention and that is why we are committed to it. And that is to provide shelter to those fleeing persecution. Not everybody who claims asylum is in the end found to need that and the issue then is what do you do about those individuals who have been through a process, had an appeal and so on, and are then found not to need protection. Because if they end up staying what was the purpose in having the asylum system in the first place and, secondly, you then run the risk of undermining public support for the principle. So that’s the issue which the government is trying to grapple with and, the third thing I would say is that in communities that see very rapid change – you know, change in the nature of the population, there are issues that arise out of that, there are tensions and difficulties and it’s important that we are alive to that because it’s about how we adapt to change as human beings. So that is a real issue and it’s important that we are open and honest about that but on the basis that we are not going to be divided on the basis of our race or our skin colour or our ethnic origin or our background, we are going to uphold the principle of asylum and we are going to try to operate the system in a fairer way, including dealing with the terrible backlogs that we had to deal with because that wasn’t fair either – people would be in the country a very long time before they finally get a decision, and that’s not right. One of the changes we’ve made is to take decisions quicker so people know, Yes you are entitled, No you are not….

MK: You don’t support the Conservative idea of putting them on an island?

HB: I certainly do not and I’m afraid it’s a fantasy island because they’ve never identified where this place might be. If you want to be taken seriously as a political party, you’ve got to have serious policies and that is not a serious policy.

MK: I was going ask you finally about the rise of anti-Americanism and, to an extent, anti-British sentiments in the Middle East. I find it – especially with what you have been saying about the altruistic goals and the fact we are spreading democracy and human rights and, as you say, all things humans want – why are these aims being met with such animosity where they are being exported to?

HB: Well I’m half American.

MK: Your mum?

HB: Yeah, my mum came from Cincinnati. I think the first thing one needs to distinguish is between how people feel about the politics of particular government wherever they are in the world and a whole nation. It’s a very, very important distinction to make, first of all. Secondly, there are unresolved conflicts about which people feel very strongly and the biggest of those is, of course, the Middle East. And I have many constituents who feel passionately about this – what I would say is that in the end the international community can and does play its part to try to encourage peace to come to the Middle East, but we’ve learnt from conflicts all over the world, including learning from our own conflict in Northern Ireland – in the end you do need to have leaders on either side who are prepared and willing to do what needs to be done to reach an agreement and that involves compromise and that involves saying to your countries, your own movements, “I know the pain, the suffering, the hurt of the past but this is what we should now do in order to get an agreement,” – everybody knows there has to be a two-state solution, an independent democratic Palestine living alongside Israel, everybody wants security.

MK: So you support the dismantlement of the West Bank settlements?

HB: Well in the end a deal is going to have to…. I mean, the road map talks about no more building of settlements, obviously there’s been the withdrawal from Gaza which is undoubtedly a step forward, there is no question about that whatsoever. A final peace agreement is going to have to deal with the question of the settlements – it’s not for me to set out what those negotiations are going to be. The fact is the parties are going to have to reach an agreement which will provide a lasting solution. But the point I’m making is that, yes, some people think that Britain and America and others in the international community aren’t doing enough to solve the problem, I’m just making the point that you can’t solve the problem without that essential ingredient which is the desire on the part of those directly involved to try and reach a peaceful agreement.

I just think we need to understand each other better and therefore talking, dialogue and so on and so forth, is important. And when people say, you know, “Western policy is about attacking Muslim,” it’s just not true. After all, go back into Kosovo, what did we do when we went into Kosovo? Why did we go into Kosovo? To stop Muslims being killed nightly on our television screens.

MK: That’s what Galloway said when came to Leeds recently….

HB: What did he say?

MK: That Blair was anti-Muslim or something like that.

HB: Well I absolutely, fundamentally disagree.

MK: He’s a demagogue in that respect. He was playing to crowd.

HB: Is that it?

MK: I was going to ask one more. What do think about the Israeli security wall in the West Bank? Do you support it?

HB: The security barrier is a symptom of the problem. I mean Britain’s position is very clear: where the wall is built on Palestinian land – that’s not right and we are very clear about that. But it’s a symptom of the problem. It’s a symptom of the failure to resolve the conflict…

MK: But isn’t it also a symptom of the expansionist aims of Israel? Hasn’t Israel cut 8% of the West Bank off?

HB: They have indeed and that is why….

MK: And Dov Weiglass has said this will become putative border.

HB: Well that’s why the British governments position is absolutely clear on that. That building on Palestinian land isn’t one. But it’s a symptom of the problem – if you have a solution, you won’t need a wall…

MK: But the Israeli solution is surely to make that wall into a border… Well we’ll see won’t we…

HB: We will see. It all depends on the negotiations.

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