Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
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Every one of 5,360 lines we hold for Liam Byrne, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 24 of 108.
“Following is the full text of the petition: [The petition of residents of the United Kingdom, Declares that Raihan Ahmed caused death by dangerous driving, drove without a licen c e or insurance and failed to stop at the scene of the crime; notes that the actions of Raihan Ahmed led to the loss of Ghulam Nabi’s life; further that under his current sentence Ahmed could be out on the street in under two years whilst the family and community grieve for the rest of their lives; declares that a longer sentence will act as a greater deterrent to others. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to request that the Attorney General refer the unduly lenient sentence to the Court of Appeal.] And the petitioners remain, etc. [P002703]”
“On 29 August, Ghulam Nabi was walking to his job as a bus driver so as to donate his Sunday earnings—he worked on Sundays—to charity. Suddenly over a bridge sped a driver, Mr Raihan Ahmed, driving so fast that all the wheels of his vehicle were off the road. He hit Mr Nabi and killed him. Mr Ahmed was driving a stolen vehicle, without a licence and without insurance, yet was sentenced to just a couple of years. This is not justice. Some 1,300 people have signed a petition in similar terms tabled by my colleague, Councillor Majid Mahmood of Birmingham City Council. The petition states: The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to request that the Attorney General refer the unduly lenient sentence to the Court of Appeal.”
“That means campaigning until we get a strategy in place to tackle the harm from alcohol.”
“That means a person can buy the recommended weekly maximum of 14 units for £2.68—less than the price of a cup of coffee. In Scotland and Wales there is minimum unit pricing, which is working—it is driving down addiction rates—and the Government should learn from it. Equally, alcohol advertising needs to be curtailed. Finally, we thought that under the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) we were making progress. Funding for the NACOA helpline was put in place, as was funding for pilots. Inexplicably, at a time of surging alcohol misuse, the funding for those programmes has stopped. We assume that that is an error and we look forward to meeting the Secretary of State to talk about reinstating that funding. We know that we cannot change things for our parents, but we are damn well going to change things for our children.”
“We want: to ensure that there is a strategy for children of alcoholics; properly funded local support; better support for families; better education and awareness for children; a plea for the Government to help lead a change of public attitudes; better education and training for those who work with children; minimum alcohol unit pricing; to curtail the promotion of advertising on alcohol; and the Government to take responsibility for reducing rates of alcoholism. We want a strategy for reducing the harm of alcohol. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton wanted to highlight the points made about minimum alcohol pricing. If he were here, he would have highlighted that in some ciders a unit of alcohol costs just 19p.”
“Alcohol-specific deaths have soared by more than 20% over the course of lockdown, and 40% of crime is linked to alcohol, yet we still do not have a strategy to combat alcohol-related harm. To help Ministers, children of alcoholics across the country united to draw up our first manifesto for change, with a simple set of 10 messages therein. It has a beautiful instruction from his grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, himself the child of an alcoholic.”
“In our last survey, that had gone up to half—but that means that half do not have strategies in place—and more than 90% of local authorities were cutting budgets for drug and alcohol treatment despite some having rising admissions for alcohol accident and emergency cases. Half of councils saw referrals for alcohol treatment going down, not up, yet we still do not have a strategy for alcohol harm. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton wanted to make the point that almost three people an hour die of alcohol-related causes. Alcohol-related harms now cost us £27 billion a year. People from the most deprived communities are 60% more likely to die than those in richer communities.”
“He was brilliant, charismatic, a fighter for love and a fighter for decency. But he was in the grips of an addiction for which there was no help. What was true for him is now true of thousands of children. What is so appalling is that one in five children in this country are in that predicament—they are children of parents who drink too much. More than 60% of care applications involve the misuse of alcohol or drugs. Parental alcohol misuse accounts for nearly 40% of cases where a child is killed or seriously injured. Children of alcoholics are more likely to become addicted to alcohol, to develop eating disorders and to take their own lives. That is why we need a strategy to combat the harm of alcohol. When we started our work in 2016, we discovered that not one local authority had a strategy for children of alcoholics.”
“That is why support from organisations such as the National Association for Children of Alcoholics is life-changing. It is not just a helpline; it is literally a lifeline. That is why we must do better in putting a strategy in place to combat the harm of alcohol. I am not sure that I would be here without NACOA’s help, and that is why I say a profound thank you to Hilary Henriques and her team—Piers, and Josh Connolly. I also thank the amazing patrons Calum Best, Tony Adams, Camilla Tominey, David Coldwell, Sophie K, and so many others. I speak for all involved in our movement when I say a profound thanks to Her Royal Highness Princess Catherine for her leadership in supporting Forward Trust and the Action on Addiction alliance of which NACOA is so proud to be a part. My father was an inspiration to me.”
“Not long after I got into the Cabinet—it was a moment of immense pride for me and I wanted to show my dad how proud he should have been of the work that I put in—he came to our office at the Cabinet Office; it is a grand place. He was too drunk to stand. It was utterly humiliating and we had to bundle him out as fast as possible. I came to see that nothing I could do would ever be good enough, and nothing I could do would stop him drinking. Every child of an alcoholic can tell scores of stories just like mine. Those who helped me process trauma taught me that you have to build an integrated picture of the past with the good and the bad, the light and the dark. For children of alcoholics, the pieces of the puzzle that you try to put together are so sharp that they cut you, and you bleed.”
“It was only through getting in touch with the National Association for Children of Alcoholics that I discovered that I was not alone. I grew up knowing all the feelings that every child of an alcoholic becomes all too familiar with: trying to make yourself invisible to disappear from the shame of some terrible public incident; the chronic insecurity; the co-dependency of supporting others, in my case, my mother, from the age of eight; the bouts of violence, luckily, in my case, occasional; the hospital visits; and the trouble with ambulances. There is the pervasive sense of guilt. Am I doing enough? Is my father okay? Is he eating? Is he starving? Or is he on a floor somewhere? There is the drive for perfection: the striving to please someone who does not really seem to care.”
“So I hope that this debate encourages more of us in this place to speak out and talk publicly about the things that people have said to me in the Lobbies and the corridors, because we have a wrong to right, and that wrong is that we have no strategy for tackling alcohol harm. My work on this issue goes back to 2015 and the election of that year. David Cameron, the Prime Minister at the time, was busy waving my famous leaving note at the Treasury. It was something that caused me immense public shame. But what I could not talk about at the time was the intense private shame that I was going through nursing my father in the final days of his life at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow. He died on the morning of St Joseph’s Day. After his death, and after that election, I fell to pieces.”
“I have now lost count of the number of our colleagues here who have approached me in the Lobbies and corridors to say, “I too am the child of an alcoholic”, but, for whatever reason, they are not able to speak out. I almost did not speak myself. I did so only through the spiritual guidance of Father Gerry, God rest his soul, at St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham, who helped show me that if, by speaking out, I could effect change, then I was doing the right thing: that in fact what I would be doing is honouring the boy that became the man that became my dad. My father was the child of an alcoholic and he had no help available to him.”
“I watched those people die from alcohol and I watched how this terrible disease cascades down the generations, causing chaos, pain and distress in its wake. In the all-party children of alcoholics group, which I co-chair, we have come together because we know that we have to try to break the silence in order to break the cycle of the disease cascading down any more generations to come. We know too that we have to normalise the conversation, and that means that we have to help organise the conversation. That is why, for us, this debate is so important. There are so many people, and so many Members of this House, who are still bound in fear with stigma and shame that stops them speaking out.”
“I am grateful for the chance to contribute to this debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee. It is a real privilege to follow the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas). In my remarks I will speak for myself, but I will also try to say a few words for my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), who, as was mentioned, is with his family and his father Mike, who is receiving palliative care after treatment for lung cancer. I know I speak for all of us when I say that all our love, prayers and best wishes go to my hon. Friend and his family. This debate is profoundly important. It is important for many people, such as the hon. Member for St Ives. It is important for many of those who are hon. Members and, like me, children of alcoholics. I am the son and the grandson of alcoholics.”
“I wonder whether the Minister could share with the House her forecast timeframe for that addiction strategy and, in so doing, perhaps recognise that there are significant differences between addiction to drugs and alcohol, not least because one is legal and the other is illegal.”
“How can we now believe the plan he has set out?”
“I want to follow up on the question asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). I want to understand the new east-west division that the Secretary of State has set out today. As I understand it, our constituents moving from Leeds to Manchester will travel by high-speed train south of Leeds, then change trains to get a train to Nottingham Parkway, and then get on a new high-speed train from Nottingham Parkway to Birmingham. I think that is what the Secretary of State set out. Since we approved this plan in Cabinet, China has built 23,500 miles of high-speed line. This Tory Government have built none. We have had a review every year and the Secretary of State has just destroyed the plans. Hundreds of millions of pounds in Birmingham is predicated on being at the heart of a network, not a mish-mash.”
“We have made a degree of progress this week on taking unfortunate money out of politics. Now we need to take the next step and clean up the laundromat of British political party funding. In the wake of the Intelligence and Security Committee report on Russia last year, will the Lord President confirm that no British political party should be taking cash from suspicious fortunes made in Russia and Uzbekistan? Can we have a debate in Government time as soon as possible to crystallise a cross-party consensus on this critical topic?”
“The Prime Minister probably admits that the weakest link of the deal was the lack of progress on defunding the polluters. The catchily-named GFANZ—Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero—initiative disappointed many. That now means that 1,400 of the world’s 2,000 biggest companies do not have net zero targets. Their combined turnover is nearly $15 trillion, but most pension savers are funding them, because the information is not there in their accounts. When will that great deficit be fixed?”
“Last week’s Budget was a step forward, but if we strip out the re-announced money, we see that it was actually £1 billion less than the Mayor asked for. That shortfall jeopardises our potential to build the 8-mile tram line through east Birmingham, so will the Minister meet me and other Members from east Birmingham so that we can explain to him the cross-party ambition to build the line? We cannot connect what are the poorest communities in the country with the wealth created by High Speed 2 without the tram line, and we cannot level up what is, in effect, the fifth-biggest city in Britain without it.”
“As Chair of the G7 and of COP, the Prime Minister will know that the world community is $20 billion short of what is needed for the vaccination programme, and we have missed the target of $100 billion promised for climate finance. The International Monetary Fund has given the world a shot in the arm with $650 billion of special drawing rights, which the Prime Minister helped to push for. The UK has been given £20 billion, more than the entire community of low-income countries put together, but why are we being so slow and sluggish in recycling that money back to the IMF so that it can be put to good use? We are behind France and America; we are a laggard when we should be leading.”
“Can the Secretary of State just explain to the House why, if the global Britain fund is forecast to be so successful, the Office for Budget Responsibility has downgraded our trade forecast?”
“I want to clarify that point, because it is potentially quite significant. The characteristic of a Lawson-esque tax system is, of course, that capital is taxed at the same rate as income. Is that what the hon. Gentleman is advocating?”
“After all the agony of loss that the country has been through, we deserve better.”
“The Mayor of the west midlands, my friend Andy Street, is down with covid at the moment. We wish him a speedy recovery. However, many of us were pretty sick when we looked at the settlement for the west midlands. The budgets for the levelling-up fund and the towns fund put together give us the fourth worst settlement in the country—£217 million behind the north-west. In the levelling-up fund announcement last week, £33 a head for the west midlands is the fifth worst settlement in the country. Our transport budget is a £1 billion less than we asked for—one of the worst per capita settlements in the country, as the West of England Mayor was quick to point out. This was a Budget for anaemic growth, rising prices, rocketing taxes, record debt, red tape that ensnares our traders, flat living standards and increased poverty.”
“What we have heard today about the universal credit taper cut making up for the removal of the £20 uplift is absolute nonsense. The poorest people in this country will be £280 worse off as a result of the Government’s decisions. That is the reality. The net sum of the measures is a catastrophe for social mobility in this country. Once upon a time, the Conservative party boasted about its social mobility credentials; not any more. It now takes five generations for someone born in the poorest cohort in this country to rise up and make even average wages. The gap between private school and public school funding is now so big that it would take £55 billion to fix it. The Conservative party should never again be trusted on social mobility. My final point is about the west midlands.”
“While other countries around the world are going for trade, the OBR looked at the magnificent new global Britain fund that we have heard about and downgraded our trade forecast. The current account deficit, which has been about 3% to 3.5% for some years, is now forecast to be 4% to 5% or 5.5%. A red-tape Brexit has ensnared our traders in so much bureaucracy that exports to the EU will fall by 15%. Because growth is bad, taxes are up—we have the largest tax rise since the 1950s. In a couple of years, the average family will pay £3,000 extra in tax, thanks to the Prime Minister. Taxes are going up, not fairly, but affecting ordinary working people and we therefore have flat living standards. This decade is now the worst for pay rises since the 1930s. Of course, because we have a Tory Government, the poorest will be hit hardest.”
“It is shame that the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) is not in his place because he put his finger on the nub of the debate. A strategy for growth should have been at the Budget’s heart, yet the International Monetary Fund and Office for Budget Responsibility took one look at the Budget and downgraded our growth forecast. Our long-term growth is something like two thirds of what it used to be. The IMF, which has looked out over the next four years, says that we in the UK, for all the Chancellor’s measures, will have the worst recovery from covid in the G7. It is not surprising. While other countries around the world invest in science-led growth, what did the Chancellor do last week? He chose that moment to defer science spending by two years.”
“I only intervene because I am sure that the Minister does not want to lead the House astray. The Resolution Foundation is very clear in its analysis that three quarters of the 4.4 million people on universal credit will be negatively affected and the bottom fifth of people will be £280 a year worse off as a result of the £20 uplift being stripped away. I am sure that she would want the record to reflect that.”
“The economies of the new silk road will be two and a half times the size of the Atlantic by 2050. Our interest and our duty is in getting involved and delivering justice for Kashmir now.”
“That is quite a treasure, but are we seriously saying here, in this House, that for $15 billion we will look the other way on human rights abuses? The world of trade is built on trust, and we cannot trust countries that break their agreements, break international agreements and perpetrate the human rights abuses we see in Kashmir. Finally, how can we pretend that this is a bilateral issue? This is no longer a bilateral issue. The changing of the facts on the ground broke the Simla agreement. Human rights is always a multilateral issue. There have been nearly 300 international conflicts since 1945 and nearly 200 of them were settled through international brokering—think of Holbrooke in Yugoslavia and President Carter in Israel and Egypt. We need a trilateral solution.”
“Detaining people without trial for years on end, as we have heard today, is not a concern: it is an abuse. Beatings and torture: that is not a concern; it is an abuse. Troops who shoot dead labourers without trial or suspicion: that is not a concern; it is an outrage, and we should be angry in this House. Abuse after abuse; outrage after outrage; offence after offence: it is about time we started telling the truth in this House about what is going on in Kashmir. Secondly, the Government can make it clear to both India and Pakistan that there will be no trade deals unless human rights are observed. We know that the prize for an India-UK deal is significant, at up to $15 billion over the next nine years.”
“I thank the Backbench Business Committee for scheduling this debate and I am grateful to the all-party parliamentary group on Kashmir for its work. I want to make three very quick points, but the bottom line is this: if this Government are serious about the rules-based order—you never know, they might be—then it is time for them to step up the fight for justice for Kashmir. There are three ways in which this can be done. First, we must say what we mean and mean what we say. All of us will have seen in Hansard that there is now a new trope, cliché, turn of phrase or diplomatic nicety: “We are aware of human rights concerns.” Well, firing pellets indiscriminately at children is not a concern: it is an abuse. Detaining thousands of people without trial for up to two years, including former chief Ministers, is not a concern: it is an abuse.”
“We have no strategy, no updates, no clarity, no leadership and nothing to say to our constituents, citizens of this country about to lose the people they love most. These Ministers are not only risking the lives of those abroad; they are breaking the hearts of their family members here at home. The good people of Afghanistan stood with us and it is about time we stood with them.”
“I have to say that that is in contrast to the council in the constituency of the Minister with responsibility for Afghan resettlement, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who was in her place a moment ago. I am told that that local authority has supported just one asylum seeker since 2016. Can that really be true? We have no details of the new scheme. We have no updates on the 1,400 cases we have filed for. We have no clarity on the resources that our city needs to provide help. We have no leadership to pull together councils in this country to provide proper support. We have no notice of the so-called “contingency hotels” that are popping up at very short notice. We have no answers to the challenges we put to Serco.”
“We were told: “This threat is directly facing all my family”. Another let us know that they had already received a warning letter from the Taliban and they were now in fear of going out to find food. A constituent said to me, “How is that family going to feed their children when they dare not venture into the street to get food?” She said to us that their siblings “can’t even go outside to provide food for their kids because…Taliban is after my whole family”. All of us in Birmingham are extremely proud of the way in which our city has stepped up—we are a city of sanctuary and we are very proud of it. Some 1,600 refugees are currently being supported in our city, and I want to put on record my thanks to Councillor John Cotton and his team for their extraordinary work.”
“Worst have been the cases where family members here in Birmingham have had to listen to their loved ones screaming in terror down the phone and having nothing to do, nothing to say, no update, no comfort to give. One constituent said: “I literally am on the phone...hearing them scream and cry and beg for help. I have no other choice but to listen and cry dreading if they will be found by the Taliban…they have already executed his brother. I’ve tried calling various immigration numbers, but still of no help.” Another constituent talked of the cold fear that comes as the Taliban go door to door, hunting those who worked with the fallen regime. One told us how their father was a high-ranking colonel and former Afghan national army instructor, and their sisters were helping women to become literate and learn their rights.”
“Never has the old saying been more true: a failure to plan is a plan to fail. This Government failed to plan and these Ministers are now failing. They are failing people in Afghanistan and their loved ones here in this country. I put on record my heartfelt thanks to those who went in to serve, to help and to aid those in need, and I put on record my thanks to all our caseworkers and staff, my own included. My staff are now supporting 1,400 people in Afghanistan, the loved ones and family members of people in Birmingham, Hodge Hill constituency. The stories they have heard have been heartbreaking, yet the Government cannot and will not even give us the courtesy of updates on that trauma.”
“This is a renegade act by a renegade Government and I will be voting against the motion tonight.”
“The IMF thinks that we need about $200 billion extra in spending to protect the world against covid and $250 billion of extra investment—climate-friendly investment—to help safeguard the recovery. How will this aid cut help with that great global project that we must attend to in the years ahead? It will not; it will damage the world’s efforts to get there and it will damage our efforts to help persuade others to get to that big target. It is 36 years to the day since we celebrated Live Aid, an example of how we in this country set out to lead the world to help the world’s poorest. On this day of all days the Government are set to surrender that leadership. We cannot have a rules-based order if we have a Prime Minister who continues to shred the rules.”
“We are boasting about our soft power superpower status and then slashing into the budget that delivers that soft power. A country’s values are judged by its budget, and this aid cut tells us everything we need to know about this Government’s priorities. The second point is that this aid cut will cost lives and it will cost livelihoods. The Prime Minister sailed into the G7 very proud of his declaration that he wanted to jab the world and make sure that, by the end of next year, the world would be safe from covid. However, by the end of the G7, the IMF said that we were about $23 billion short of what we needed for a global vaccination programme. This aid cut will not help that; it will hurt that effort to jab the world. Moreover, we have a significant problem now getting the world back on its feet after this pandemic.”
“That was a great speech and it is a pleasure to follow it. The House does not need a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury to lay out how today’s motion is a con job, but I shall explain it anyway. The Red Book published at the most recent Budget shows that public sector net debt will not fall until 2024 at the earliest, but there is no way that a Chancellor or Chief Secretary would ever make a judgment about whether it was falling sustainably on one year alone, which means that this cut is now forecast to stretch way into the next Parliament. Yet the sums we are talking about are just 0.14% of the national debt stock. This comes at a time when we are putting up defence spending by £24 billion yet cutting aid spending by £4 billion.”
“We need the Foreign Secretary to do a better job of fixing that imbalance now, in the comprehensive spending review. If he cannot do that, he needs to hand the task to the House of Commons. Let us have a vote and we will fix it for him.”
“We need the Foreign Secretary to have credibility in those talks, and reversing this cut would help give him that credibility to rally resources around the world to do what the world needs to do to reverse the first rise in extreme poverty that we have seen this century. The final point is that we judge a nation’s values by the numbers in its budget. Right now, we are putting up defence spending by something like £24 billion; we are cutting development spending by £4 billion. We are cutting the budget to prevent conflict and increasing the budget to prosecute conflict. We are even cutting aid in places where we drop bombs, like Iraq and Libya. That is just morally wrong. I know that these things are a balance, but right now we have got the balance wrong.”
“We need to recycle them; we need to revise the old voluntary agreements that entail half of that money being held back; and we need to maximise the amount of money that goes into grant rather than soft loans. We need Britain to be a force helping to lead those debates. Furthermore, we have a big decision to make, as a world community, on replenishment of the International Development Association. IDA20 replenishment has been brought forward. The framework that was published last week has significant changes that involve prioritising investment in human capital—absolutely critical when we hear what is happening to education and girls’ education around the world.”
“The second point is that we need these aid cuts reversed because we need the Foreign Secretary to reacquire some credibility in order to rally the global resources that we need to tackle the pandemic and its aftermath. The World Bank thinks that we need about $200 billion extra to tackle covid-19 around the world, and $250 billion extra to reinvest in climate-friendly infrastructure in poorer countries. This week, we took a big step towards finding those resources. The executive board of the IMF basically signed off on a plan to issue $650 billion of special drawing rights. That would channel about $27 billion in extra resource to the poorest countries. But the real prize is the $623 billion of SDRs that go to richer countries.”
“As chair of the international Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & International Monetary Fund, I just wanted to throw three points into this debate. First things first: we must reverse these cut because they are damaging the global effort to vaccinate the world. The Prime Minister sallied into the G7 talks in Cornwall with grand talk about getting the world vaccinated by the end of next year, but when the dust had settled on the G7 communiqué, the IMF revealed that we are two-thirds short of the grant finance that we need to vaccinate the world—that is $23 billion. When I asked the Prime Minister a week or two ago where that money was going to come from, he just brushed it off. That is not good enough; we need answers, and reversing the cuts in aid could help us to provide those answers.”
“Like many others, I want to speak because I deplore these cuts in aid, which have been discussed this afternoon with so much analysis and eloquence. These cuts will have consequences; these cuts will cost lives. I like the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), a lot, but I thought he was being almost ridiculously polite about the strategic incoherence that we now confront, because these cuts in aid deface, they demean, they damage the global Britain strategy that was set out just a few weeks ago in the House of Commons. We cannot have a Prime Minister who asks for a rules-based order and then orders the Treasury to break the rules and cut what we actually helped construct—the 0.7% aid target.”
“The original Atlantic charter made a commitment to banish from the world “fear and want”—curiously missing from the redraft—but the Prime Minister’s ambition to vaccinate the world by the end of 2022 is the right one. The IMF’s assessment of the deal done on Monday, however, is that two thirds of the grant financing needed to vaccinate the world is still missing—that is $23 billion. The question for the Prime Minister is: where is that money going to come from and when?”