Debt-relief campaign Jubilee 2000 can now claim its great victory, thanks to Leviticus

• Will Hutton (Saturday October 02 1999 – The Guardian)

 So who said religion was dead and there was no God? Certainly not the 41 heavily
indebted poorest countries after President Clinton’s pledge last week to forgo all $6
billion debt owed to the US, a challenge the rest of the industrialised world will have to
match.

The poorest may now start the next millennium unencumbered by debt. The Jubilee 2000
campaign has proved to be one the most effective ever mounted by any pressure group; it
may secure an end that four years ago seemed a pipedream – the cancellation of the
unpayable debt owed by the world’s poorest countries.

But it owes its success and inspiration to the Bible. I doubt many readers know the Old
Testament books of Leviticus, Exodus and Deuteronomy any more than I do, but without them
there would be no Jubilee 2000, no debt campaign and no international public pressure. At
the end of an increasingly secular century, it has been the biblical proof and moral
imagination of religion that have torched the principles of the hitherto unassailable
citadels of international finance – and opened the way to a radicalism about capitalism
whose ramifications are not yet fully understood.

…….

The idea was simple. Israel’s rich landowners had to be reminded that private
property was not theirs – it was God’s – and they had to accept that there was a
social mortgage, as the Pope puts it, on their autonomy of action and capacity to build up
wealth careless of the social consequences. The distribution of income and wealth had
periodically to be equalised to restore God’s harmony every 49 years. And once that
was done, horns would sound ‘the Jubilee’ throughout the country.

Ann Pettifor, the director of Jubilee 2000, although a lapsed church-goer, freely
acknowledges that her campaign was named after Leviticus’s Jubilee and also the
crucial role played by the support of evangelical Christians and the organised churches
alike. It was a small evangelical group, Tearfund, which citing Leviticus, appealed to
their members for contributions to keep the nascent campaign going in the dog days of
1996, and it has been the financial contribution, time and energy of the churches that
have given the campaign its spine, notwithstanding Bob Geldof.

It has also reinforced its political impact. The Bible-worshipping Republican Right and
American moral majority know Leviticus, too. They might oppose increasing US contributions
to the UN, IMF and World Bank, but obstructing debt relief is another matter. It incurs
God’s wrath, so that one of Jubilee’s stoutest advocates in Congress is the
extreme right-winger, Congressman Bachus. Clinton is showing his usual canny political
instincts and the betting is that his proposal will stand.

But as Jubilee 2000 knows well, until Clinton’s announcement this week, it had
done little more than get the G7 countries formally to acknowledge what was happening
anyway; the debt was not being repaid. At the World Economic Summit in Cologne this
summer, the decision to cancel $100bn of debt was welcomed, but it was only an admission
of reality. The US Treasury, for example, had already secretly written off 90 per cent of
its debt; all that happened at Cologne was that it went public.

Clinton’s willingness to write off the last 10 per cent is in effect new money.
And although Chancellor Gordon Brown, mindful of the religious passion with which his
father, a former minister, supported Jubilee 2000 (he knew Leviticus, too), has been one
of the leaders in forcing the pace on debt relief, he is now on his mettle if he is to
match it. For Britain, unlike any other G7 state, makes no distinction in its
public-accounting system between current and capital spending; we make the caveman’s
judgment that it is all cash and not worthy of differentiation.

This is one of the chief reasons for the abysmally low rate of capital investment in
the public sector, but, paradoxically, it is also the reason Britain has been able to take
the lead, first under Chancellors Major, Lamont and Clarke and now Brown, in arguing the
case for debt relief. Writing off old loans costs us nothing in public-accounting terms
because the capital transaction was counted (madly) as a current, cash expenditure that
formally we never counted on seeing again. Our international liberalism, cancelling debt
obligations that we never accounted for and are not receiving anyway, is thus completely
cost-free.

But when it comes to new money, we have to account for the write-offs. Already, there
are profound fears in Whitehall and Jubilee 2000 that Brown will only be able to find the
$2.4bn of new money to match Clinton by raiding other budgets as he has for Britain’s
support to Kosovo. If so, Jubilee 2000 will have to get its supporters to link hands
around Whitehall, as they did in Birmingham last year. New money should mean new money;
there should be no robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Nobody argues that debt relief alone will solve world poverty. Economic development is
a much more subtle process. But it is a beginning and it challenges one of the bedrocks of
contemporary capitalism in a fundamental way. Private property and private finance are not
independent of the world community – they are embedded in it. There cannot be a fatalistic
view of the distribution of income internationally if it means unacceptable suffering.
Creditors have social obligations apart from the insistence that they should eventually be
repaid. If this has radical implications abroad, they are scarcely less radical at home;
there is the moral basis for a new social settlement. The Left of Centre should take note;
it is no longer Morris, Keynes and Beveridge who inspire and change the world – it’s
Leviticus.

Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.

From the Australian Offices of the Jubilee 2000 Debt Coalition www.jubilee2000.org.au and TEAR Australia
(Christian Action with the World’s Poor)

PO Box 289, Hawthorn 3122, AUSTRALIA

Ph: (03) 9819 1900, Fax: (03) 9818 3586.

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