News from Labour Matters

Brown calls on the UN not to fail the poor

Gordon Brown has called on the UN to do more for the World’s poorest nations at a special one-day UN summit. Warning that the developed countries were failing to meet their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), he said that “our greatest enemy is not war or inequality or any single ideology or a financial crisis; it is too much indifference.”

“Our global leadership itself is being questioned and let us face the shameful truth that while we have made huge advances – 40 million more children at school, 3 million children living who would otherwise have died, 3 million getting treatment for AIDS -the 2015 goal to cut maternal in infant mortality will not be met even in 2020 or 2030, not before 2050,” the Prime Minister explained, but added that there are still 75 million children in the world not attending school, and the goal of providing education to every child will not be met on present trends in 2015 or 2025 or even in 2100.

“I say to the richest countries of the world the poorest of the world have been patient, but a hundred years is too long to wait for justice,” he said.

Later speaking at the UN General Assembly, the Prime Minister also said that the world had entered a period of “global turbulence”, and that leaders had to “build a new financial order”.

“For the first time in human history we have the opportunity to come together to create a new global covenant and a true global society.

“Our history is not our destiny. It is what we choose to make it,” he said.

“Let history record ours was a true global response to the world first global crisis.”

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