Gordon gets it

Former Labour Chancellor and Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has always shown a concern for the developing world. When Labour won the general election in 1997 he took the lead on debt relief to Africa. Now he is advocating a radical approach to solving the migrant crisis by proposing a global winfall tax on the world's richest countries.

Tory Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, meanwhile, on manoeuvres in the United States today in preparation for a future Leadership challenge, is questioning whether the world's 780 million migrants are legitimate refugees. Rather than doing the boring slog at home she, like her own Leader - and previous ones such as Liz Truss and Boris Johnson - would rather strut the world stage, grandstanding and gladhanding as far from home as possible. So much more glamourous, after all, than ploughing through the bulging departmental red boxes.

In contrast, Brown has always appeared (often to his own detriment it must be said) to be a details man, more interested in getting it right than engaging in political showboating. He now says that countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Norway, who benefited hugely from a "lottery style bonanza" last year, as the price of oil soared, should be subject to a $25bn (£20.4bn) levy in order to boost prospects of a deal on a long-promised climate fund for the world's poorer countries.

His intervention comes ahead of the COP28 summit in Dubai in November. Quoting figures from the International Energy Association (IEA), he said global oil and gas revenues had soared from $1.5tn (£1.2tn) before the Covid pandemic to an unprecedented $4tn (£3.3tn). "To put these extraordinary figures into context" he said "$4tn is 20 times the entire global aid budget. It is an income so big that it exceeds the entire GDP of the United Kingdom. These producer states have done literally nothing to earn this unprecedented windfall. It represents one of the biggest ever transfers of wealth from poor to rich nations." Brown added that the high price of oil and gas had been the main factor in potentially pushing an estimated additional 141 million people around the world into extreme poverty.

I have often written about my feelings on this subject but it is good to have the validation of someone of the moral integrity and political gravitas of Gordon Brown. I believe politicians are deceiving the public if they fail to acknowledge that the only way to control migration, be it economic or refugee, coming from the Global South, is to address the problems in the Global South - the so-called 'push factors'. While North and Sub-Saharan Africa particularly are beset by existential climate crises, environmental collapse, political corruption, war, disease and famine of course millions will seek to flee to Europe - why would they not?

Brown is right: the Global North, and especially the petrostates, need to invest the obscene amounts of money that have fallen into their laps, through no efforts of their own, into the Global South. And it is an investment, not charity and emphatically not a loan. It is not only morally right (not a huge incentive for most governments admittedly) it is enlightened self-interest in order to safeguard the future security and stability of the developed world against uncontrolled, and ultimately uncontrollable, mass migration.

Fail to act now and the disposessed will keep coming - in their millions.

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