Last night, Hilary Benn attended Rachel Reeves’s book launch. In his foreword to a 2021 report for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Benn wrote: “When we were elected in 1997, the amount of aid we gave as a proportion of our national income had halved over the preceding 18 years and was just 0.26%. By the time we left office, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7% target. This was down to the political leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who brought the lives of the world’s poorest people into the heart of Whitehall.”
Without acknowledgment, Reeves writes: “When Labour was elected in 1997, the amount of aid the UK gave as a proportion of our national income had halved over the preceding 18 years and stood at just 0.26%. By the end of Labour’s time in office, in 2010, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7% target. This was down to the political leadership of Blair and Gordon Brown – and their first secretary of state for international development from 1997 to 2002, Clare Short, who brought the lives of the world’s poorest people into the heart of government.”
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
This is the funniest story in ages.
ReplyDeleteYet it gives us an insight into how these people would behave in power.
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