David Williams, Labour's Parliamentary candidate for Crewe and Nantwich, is urging local people to go online and back a new campaign to turn a promise to tackle global poverty into a law. The www.globalpovertypromise.com website is part of a campaign to put the Government’s promise to raise international development aid to 0.7% of national income by 2013 into legislation. David Williams said, “people tell me they are proud of what Labour has achieved and the help given to people living lives of poverty in developing countries. We’ve campaigned to Make Poverty History and kept our promises through this global recession. I am urging people to go online and join me in backing ‘globalpovertypromise.com’.”
Douglas Alexander, Labour’s International Development Secretary, said, “Aid increases and debt cancellation have helped to get 40 million more children into school, while the number of people with access to AIDS treatment has increased from just 100,000 to over 4 million. The proportion of the world’s population living in poverty has fallen from a third to a quarter thanks to a combination of both aid and trade. “The Tories say they want a consensus on international development but when you scratch the surface, you find that they have changed their branding but not their beliefs. When they were last in Government, the Tories halved the British aid budget while Labour has trebled it. Now they refuse to back our plan to put our promise into law.”
- Last year alone, Labour’s Department for International Development helped train over 100,000 teachers, vaccinate more than three million children against measles, provide a million people with clean water, protect seven million people with anti-malaria bednets and give more than 12 million people access to better sanitation.
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More on Labour’s international development policy •
More about the Government’s international development work
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