Duplicity

Tonight is the leader’s debate mark 2. Foreign policy is under scrutiny, and so it seems a good time to look at this little quirk of Tory behaviour:

A bill was passed a couple of weeks ago in the wash-up, which will stop so called vulture funds.

These are defined by the International Monetary Fund as companies which buy up the debt of poor nations cheaply when it is about to be written off and then sue for the full value of the debt plus interest – which might be ten times what they paid for it.

Proposed by a backbencher, the bill gained wide public support, including with Cameron and the Tory party. But on the first attempt to pass it, a group of three Tory MPs went into a huddle, and one of them shouted “objection”, thus scuppering the bill.  This caused frustration as there had been plenty of time to object before the voting stage, all concerns raised had been dealt with, and based on some Conservative objections, the bill had already been watered down. The frustration was exacerbated by the duplicitous way in which the MPs registered the objection, meaning that no one person could be identified.

Cameron, would-be defender of the world’s poor, who as part of his “big Society” bunkum has pledged support to the developing nations, declined to name the MP despite mounting pressure prior to the bill finally being passed.

Talking about global poverty, he mentions health and education, maternal and infant mortality, and says “we will not stand by while …. poverty continues to blight our world”.

Strange then that he didn’t feel the need to speak out on the objector to this bill.  One of the consequences of vulture funds is that when countries are forced to pay back the inflated bills, their health and education budgets are inevitably one of the few reserves that these poor countries have to ransack, in order to line the pockets of wealthy Western bankers.

Reason #8 Indifference to the suffering of the world’s poor.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 8:58 am and is filed under 2010 General Election. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.