News from Labour Matters

Gordon Brown calls for action in flood-hit Pakistan

Gordon Brown has written movingly in The Huffington Post of his support for a huge, co-ordinated response to the recent Pakistan floods:

I have proposed a global reconstruction corps to offer civilian help – engineers, doctors, builders – to build homes, rebuild the schools, staff the hospitals and get agriculture and industry moving again. We have set up a British corps – and a global volunteer corps is more important and imperative than ever. To make it effective on the ground in Pakistan we need of course an agreement with all Pakistani parties that they will use and work with a Reconstruction Corps.

But we do have to ask ourselves one big question: If we cannot be moved to do more when 20 million people are stranded, some under water, all homeless, then when will be do more? If we cannot the answer the summons of a global ethic that, no matter how distant we are all neighbors – if we cannot see that when we see people dying on our TV screens – when will we as a global community rise to our shared humanity? In words we have heard before, if not now, when? and where and how?

Read the full article.

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