The Big Deal
This blog, penned under the damp skies of late October, was meant to be a sunny – and probably rather inconsequential – tale about a recent trip to Mallorca and its quaint railways. You may still get this story later in the year, when skies are even gloomier and autumn colour has turned to a wintry tracery of bare twigs.
But for now Terroir has been diverted onto the more serious matter of Climate Change. So what happened? Two meetings (one planned, one serendipity) collided.
Concern Worldwide (https://www.concern.net/) had invited Terroir South to an event entitled ‘Ending extreme poverty – whatever it takes’. (As an aside, they didn’t actually know that they had invited Terroir blog, it’s just that the one of us who supports their work with a monthly contribution was on their mailing list.) As the event was also scheduled to take place in the House of Commons, it was hard to resist.
Concern Worldwide was founded in Ireland, in 1968, in response to famine and conflict in Biafra. Today, with offices in Dublin, Belfast and London, its reach is, as it says, worldwide. As we sipped wine and dropped canapé crumbs on the floor of the Churchill Room, we weren’t quite sure what to expect: maybe a disturbing film of poverty in action in East Africa, or perhaps a hard sell to raise funds for flooded Pakistan? Absolutely not, it was much more grown up and down to earth than that.
We were audience to a panel discussion on ‘the root causes of and key issues impacting extreme poverty’. On the panel were the director of the Somali NGO consortium, Concern’s Country Director in Kenya, and the Director of the Humanitarian Policy Group at the ODI (the London based Overseas Development Institute, and tactfully acknowledging any ‘white male’ comments – he was the only one who qualified).
The discussion (moderated by Martine Dennis, a broadcast journalist with credentials from Sky News, BBC and Al Jazeera), was a wide ranging view of the reality of translating cash into realistic aid to help communities help themselves in their struggle with extreme poverty. A big thank you to Concern World Wide for educating us in these realities. For one of us, three issues stood out: conflict, crisis and - climate change
As it happened, this was not the first reference to Climate Change which we encountered that evening. On the train to London, we were joined - totally unexpectedly - by a longstanding friend who heads up one of England’s ‘National Landscapes’ – perhaps more familiar to most as ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty’. Following the usual ‘how are you and how are the kids’ conversation, one of us was suddenly plunged into a questionnaire on climate change, as the train rattled through the London suburbs. It was turning out to be a bizarre evening.
What was the takeaway message from this evening? For one of us it was a rush of pure relief that climate change is really being taken very, very seriously by at least some of our planet’s community. That rush of relief came as a surprise and a shock. It made us realise just how inured we had become to the apparent lack of investment in viable actions to tackle climate change. So, please, support groups like Concern Worldwide and any other organisations which take these responsibilities seriously and creatively.
As a postscript, we arrived in Westminster early and spent 20 minutes in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons. It was fascinating of course. The wall mounted digital screens make it so easy to work out what’s going on and who is speaking. We watched part of the ping pong discussion on the second reading of the Employment Rights Bill, which was then interrupted by some deft choreography, to allow Katie Lam, MP for the new Weald of Kent constituency, to give her maiden speech. Part of her constituency lies within the High Weald National Landscape and although she made much of this Area of Outstanding Beauty (‘the weald of Kent boasts hundreds of square miles of the most gorgeous countryside’ (https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2024-10-21b.46.0#g79.2) there was no mention of climate change.
At least the walk through the Commons’ caverns and Westminster Hall wonderland (below) was splendid.
