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


Will Hutton
Sunday October 3, 1999

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.

Just glance at the blessing the Pope gave to the Jubilee campaigners before the IMF/ World Bank meetings this year. The Catholic Church, he said, has always taught there was a 'social mortgage' on all private property. 'The law of profit alone cannot be applied to that which is essential for the fight against hunger, disease and poverty' In this context, he insisted, debt relief was urgent; it was a precondition for the poorest countries to make progress in their fight against poverty - and creditor nations had an obligation to God to act quickly.

The Pope, like the Church of England, is simply following the injunction of the Bible, and in particular Leviticus Chapter 25, a passage that makes Das Kapital look tame. Leviticus tells its readers that God designed the world to be in harmony, and that every seven years creditors should offer debtors a remission - or repayment holiday. But every seven times seven years (49 years for the arithmetically challenged) there should be a Sabbath's Sabbath; a complete dismantling of the structures of social and economic inequality. Debts should be forgiven completely, slaves freed and land forfeited for non-payment of debt returned to its original owners, a principle endorsed both by Exodus and Deuteronomy. The Bible is unambiguous.

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.

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