Ahimsa Day Celebration October 15th 2008
Portcullis House
House of Commons, London
Keynote Address By Lord Puttnam
It’s a great privilege to have been allowed the opportunity to ‘set out my stall’ this evening.
Let me start by admitting that, in addition to the chequered career you’ve just heard referred to, I have for many years worn the clothes of a quasi-politician and a Labour one at that!
Long before I was appointed to the House of Lords I’d been deeply involved in the discussion and formulation of public policy, particularly as it concerned cinema and the broad communications industry of which that forms just one part.
For over thirty years I’ve been a witness to, and sometimes even a practitioner of the complex ‘trade-offs’ that public policy so frequently involves.
I emphasise ‘trade-offs’ because, to a greater extent than is sometimes realised, these tend to lie at the heart of democratic politics, whether that be the politics of climate change, of education, or of media ownership.
For me, the defining trade-off of the 21st century will be that between our rights, and our responsibilities. By which I mean, it is absolutely inevitable that, individually and collectively, we are going to have to sacrifice some of our rights, and accept that our growing responsibilities are likely to increasingly outweigh them if we wish to create a genuinely sustainable society – that’s to say ‘sustainable’ socially, politically and environmentally – and at the same time successfully alleviate global poverty.
I’d like to start with a few broad reflections on ‘globalisation’.
When I was a young man, in the mid-nineteen sixties, the Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase ‘The Global Village’.
I’d like to start with a few broad reflections on ‘globalisation’.At the time it seemed an attractive, if slightly whimsical concept.
But almost forty years later, the possibility of any successful response to challenges such as the climate change, or the current ‘economic meltdown’, should have established to even the most hardened cynic that, like it or not, we do now live in a world which is, to a quite extraordinary degree, inter-dependent. Unless, of course, you wish to cling to the views and values of Vice Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin!
And we have become inter-dependent in ways that not even a visionary like McLuhan could have ever quite anticipated.
You only have to go back a couple of years, to recall the quite unprecedented response to the ‘tsunami’ by millions of ordinary people across the world to believe that it is possible to build a ‘platform’ of global compassion and understanding that’s significantly broader and deeper than most of our leaders have ever previously thought possible.
And I stress ‘a platform to build from’ because that particular response was, if you like, living proof that globalisation has the potential to be far more than merely the establishment of a ‘marketing monoculture’; a sterile marketplace in which, to quote Neal Lawson of the pressure group Compass, “freedom is defined only as the ability to shop – not to change the very nature of the world in which you live!”
Surely, the ‘economic tsunami’ we have all witnessed over the past few weeks should have powerfully reinforced that message. The so-called ‘invisible hand’ of the market has wreaked all too visible carnage around the world – with very real consequences for people’s jobs, houses, quality of life; impacts which will unquestionably be felt, not just in the developed markets of the West, but in different ways across the whole of the globe.
As ever, those who will suffer most will be those with the least resources and support to weather the ‘fall out’. It certainly won’t be the former chairman of Lehman Brothers. I do not feel his pain! Nor frankly, do I want to hear anything further from him or any of those other ‘masters of the universe’ who turned out not to be quite so smart after all.
I beg you – watch the John Bird/John Fortune exchange on “sub-prime” markets [You Tube] and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the madness we’ve all been dragged into.
But whilst writing the quasi-corruption of that system, it’s my hope that a concern for the welfare of their victims, reinforced by the power of images on television and the internet, might enable us to more clearly define a form of common global identity; to recognise that, unlike them, we do inhabit a single ‘moral universe’ – irrespective of any political and ideological differences, be they constructed or real.
In a speech delivered in 2004 when he was Chancellor, Gordon Brown, put it like this:
“It is precisely because we believe, in a moral sense, that we have obligations to others beyond our front doors and garden gates, responsibilities to others beyond the city wall, duties to others beyond our national borders as part of one moral universe – precisely because we have a sense of what is just and what is fair – that we are called to respond to the hunger of the hungry, the needs of the needy, the suffering of the sick, whoever and wherever they are. We cannot claim to be fully human unless we care about the dignity of every human being.”
For me that passage brilliantly captures the moral imperative which both drives and underpins the work that I, and all of my colleagues do at UNICEF.
We are all interdependent – not just economically, but morally as well.
We do all have obligations to one another.
Our challenge is to seek out ways to act on those obligations.
That sense of our moral interdependence makes me determined to address the ‘blight’ on humanity which any thinking person, once confronted with the reality of real poverty, finds offensive and unacceptable.
This is a ‘blight’, which means, for example:
– 1 billion children (that’s half of all children on the planet) deprived of at least one of their most basic rights; for example that of an elementary education, clean water, the most primitive forms of health care – let’s just call it by its real name – survival!
– Almost three quarters of those children, that’s to say 700 million young people, are deprived of two or more of those rights.
It is clearly indefensible that we allow all or any of this to continue.
The statistics are grim enough. But experience tells me that statistics alone entirely fail to capture the tragedy and the horror of what you see on the ground.
Despite the best endeavours of some brilliant and deeply committed people – many of them working for the global NGOs – progress on alleviating poverty has been at best mixed, and in some cases, utterly inadequate.
Sustainable progress is going to require nothing far short of a transformation.
And at the heart of this transformation must be action, commitment and leadership by governments.
The main threats to childhood that NGOs like as UNICEF seek to address – such as lack of education and endemic poverty – are not only in many cases man-made, they are actually exacerbated by man. We can only tackle these threats by making difficult, targeted and very deliberate choices. The type of choices that, at least for the present, are simply not being made.
Making those choices requires judgement, backed by accurate and timely information, and on that subject I’d like to say a word or two about the role of the media.
What could the media be doing in helping us to more intelligently address these incredibly complex issues?
Because there is undoubtedly a vital role for a responsible media to play.
The link between the inter-connected world I talked about at the outset and the role of informed journalism was recently extremely well advanced in a speech by the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hilary Benn. He said this:
“…let’s be straight about it – we share this small and fragile planet with a growing number of our fellow human beings.
What happens in one country increasingly affects those who live in other countries.
We will not have a safe and secure world unless we do something about poverty, injustice and inequality.
And we can do something… It is the media – the mirror that we hold up to ourselves – that has an enormously powerful part to play in helping to make this happen.”
He went on to say:
“If you by any chance doubt the media’s potential to make a difference, then just reflect for a moment on our own history.
On the part that reporting played in our own development. In the 19th century, it was the people who got on their horses – and on the trains – and who travelled the length and breadth of the land to report back to society on the conditions in which so many people lived;it was they who helped to change the face of Victorian Britain… This was great social reform, born of great reporting…
And I think we are now witnessing exactly the same process happening on a global scale, in which great reporting has the same potential to help us – together – to change the face of the world. It’s one of the reasons why this thing we call international development has moved from the margins of politics two generations ago, to the place it occupies today – right at the heart of the big political debate of our age.”
I’d simply add this: a responsible media, well led and well motivated, must, once and for all, re-establish its position as a force for good in helping to bring about a serious global awareness of the importance of alleviating poverty across the world.
The challenge for all of us is to retain reasonable levels of optimism in what seems to be an increasingly challenging world.
And that word ‘challenge’ brings me to the greatest challenge of all – that of ‘Climate Change’.
A little under a year ago, the Prime Minister said this of the impact of climate change:
“…it is not overdramatic to say that the character and course of the coming century will be set by how we measure-up to this challenge”.
And in response to the sobering report a few days later from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel, one of Germany’s leading environmental scientists was quoted in the New York Times as saying “the world is already at or above, the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions.”
For three months last year, I had the privilege of Chairing a Committee of both Houses of Parliament scrutinising the world’s first ‘Climate Change’ Bill.
What I came to realise through my work on that Committee, and the evidence we took from all over the world, was that failure to address the present rate of increase in carbon emissions will ensure, in the most literal way possible, that the ‘sins of the fathers will be visited upon generations to come’, and that this would be true, in differing degrees, right across the world.
More than anything else the Climate Change Bill is about personal and collective responsibility – about morality – a word that suddenly seems to be making a long-overdue and extremely welcome appearance in many Parliamentary debates and discussions, especially those involving ‘economic matters’!
In fact climate change is also the most vexed kind of moral issue, precisely because it is also about economics.
It’s a debate that is, or should be, requiring us to make ‘moral’ decisions that are more likely than not to have a price tag attached.
In that respect, it bears an uncanny resemblance to another piece of legislation which also addressed what was primarily a moral issue; but one which, at the time, appeared to have immense economic repercussions!
This was a Bill, the 200th anniversary of which we all celebrated last year – a Bill which led to the abolition of the slave trade.
I find it fascinating that, two hundred years apart, we find ourselves faced with the same timeless question – do we have a duty of care towards our fellow human beings – ‘are we our brother’s keeper?’
And in both cases the same economic question, ‘what is the real cost – the true cost – of the energy we use to drive our economy?’
Two hundred years ago slavery was a, or maybe even the primary source of energy; an apparently cheap and infinite generator of power; regarded by many as the foundation stone of British commerce and British prosperity.
As with our energy industries today, it appeared to represent a large and vital component of the economy.
At the time of its abolition, the Slave Trade and its associated activities were reckoned by those opposing the Bill to account, quite astonishingly, for well over a quarter of this nation’s GDP – which helped drive one of the central arguments deployed by the anti-abolitionists – that over-hasty action could only prove ruinous for the nation’s economy.
In exactly the same way, today’s counterparts, the dominant energy interests, argue that any ‘over-hasty’ commitment to change will prove economically catastrophic – if change is necessary, they argue, let it be incremental, gradual – leave it to ‘light-touch’ regulation and the self-correcting mechanisms of the marketplace and it will all come out right in the end!
In the last few weeks, that particular line of argument has suddenly begun to appear pretty threadbare.
The true price of slavery, the human price, was ignored by the anti-abolitionists because it was not them, or their friends, or even their communities that were paying it. It was someone else – and that ‘someone else’ didn’t have a vote!
It’s exactly the same today, with the debate surrounding the use of fossil fuels.
Those who refuse to acknowledge the mounting costs of climate change do so because they are not – yet – the ones being required to pay the price.
Of course climate change is likely to affect every one of us in the long run, but it’s already having a devastating impact on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth – in places as far apart as Bangladesh, and Mexico, not to mention many parts of Africa. (Last week, in downtown Damascus, I watched women and children with every imaginable type of plastic container queuing up to get drinking water from a bowser – the City is running out of water!)
So, just as the real cost of slavery was displaced on to those least able to pay, so the real cost of our profligate use of fossil fuels is displaced on to those least able to absorb it – the poor; the already disadvantaged; those who do not have the power to effect change themselves; nor the power to vote for change in countries such as ours which, for all the rapid industrial growth elsewhere in the world, are still the real wastrels of energy and resources.
Let me try to draw together what may appear to have been a somewhat disparate set of thoughts.
Rather shamefully my old industry, filmmaking, left it to an ex-vice president, Al Gore, to lift the lid off the global emissions crisis; yet without doubt the talent exists – not just in Hollywood but also here in the UK and Europe – to develop narratives so compelling that the world could be forced to wake up and stop pretending that this is all just another scare story – an avoidable nightmare a little like the millennium bug – remember the millennium bug?
Well, please believe when I assure you – this is not the millennium bug!
Our children and grandchildren will be rightly puzzled, maybe even angry, if our generation simply walks away from the responsibility this impending crisis imposes upon every one of us.
We do live in troubled and increasingly challenging times. And all of us have a duty, in our different ways, to accept the responsibilities this imposes.
For at the heart of everything I’ve said this evening lies a moral dilemma that has to be wrestled to the ground.
Like most moral or ethical questions, it comes down to a relatively simple choice.
Each of us, as citizens, have to decide to get honest – not a little bit honest; not honest abroad but dishonest at home; not honest in ‘willing the ends’ but dishonest in ‘denying the means’ – but properly honest.
And we’re entitled to expect the same degree of honesty from those, within for example this building, who would seek to lead us – and take decisions on our behalf.
Of course there will be a price to pay, hopefully a modest price – Sir Nicholas Stern’s report published in the autumn of 2006 gave us a pretty good idea of what that price might be.
The wholly unacceptable alternative is to shut our eyes and continue to protest either innocence or ignorance of the real cost of what most of us sincerely thought of as the acceptable price of ‘progress’ – throughout the whole of the 20th century.
But should we choose to close our eyes to all of this – then our children, and our children’s children could well be asked to pay a truly crippling price, a price that will make a mockery of the comforts and pleasures that we today take for granted – and they will quite justifiably curse us for having been knowingly irresponsible in jeopardising their future happiness.
I’d actually go further, should we fail to get to grips with this impending crisis, there’ll be no need to ask ‘for whom the bell tolls’; it will be tolling for every man, woman and child on this, once beautiful, planet.
And this time around we will have only ourselves to blame.
I’ve no way of knowing the degree to which I may or may not have convinced you of the legitimacy or urgency of my argument; whether or not you find my message welcome, or even acceptable?
But in every sense, what lies ahead will involve collective responsibility.
It won’t be easy to navigate our way through it, and the sunlit uplands certainly won’t be achieved overnight, but with discipline and commitment I believe we can achieve a “sustainable” future.
If I may, I’ll finish with a few words that were attributed to the American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“In whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever the course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you’re wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics may be right.
To map out a course of action, and follow it to an end, requires the courage of a soldier.
Peace has its victories too, but it takes brave men and women to win them.”
Thank you very much for listening to me.