BOB GELDOF'S SPEECH

Light the Flame Rally - 2^nd December 2000

Hello, I 've been banging on about Third World debt since 1985, and frankly I thought it was a fairly opaque and obscure economic issue, until Bono called me up in the middle of last year and said he wanted to talk to me about it and I told him it was too boring. He rang me back the next day and tried to make the conversation more interesting, I was reluctant to get involved with this conversation because Claire Short had asked to see me about three years ago and she said 'do you think there's anyway that we can take this issue and make it a populist one?' I said 'No'.

The great victory that you achieved in the last 12 months in particular is to make this still obscure financial argument at least to the global structures that are in place obscure. Your great victory has been to take this opaque financial argument and make it the conversations of kitchens and taxis and drawing rooms around the world. That's your victory (applause). And of course the consequence of all those conversations is that those great structures do lie in fear of you today. And they do attempt now to address the serious agenda that is less to do with the opaque financial arguments and more to do with how we begin to negotiate and talk and respect each other.

During my conversation with Bono, we worked out that there was very little that we could do, that in effect the people of Jubilee 2000 had organised something so immensely powerful that it was already moving the great powers and the great minds of the financial institutions. The best we could use was our access so we sat down last summer to do a grind course in economics, and grind is the correct word! He can't be here of course tonight, but he sent me another of these missives which I've been trying to throw in the dustbins for the last twelve months, and he wanted me to read it out to you. It's from the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, have you ever seen the Four Seasons? (laughter). I mean, one night there could eliminate the debt from Skid's country in Nigeria, anyway, here he is, the uber-rockstar:

"The Jubilee 2000 office maybe closing today, but their case for the worlds poorest remains open. It has been the biggest grass-roots movement since anti-apartheid and the broadest movement of people power on the globe since Civil Rights in the sixties. The challenge ahead is to restructure the entire relationship between the world's developing and developed economies. This is the future for this network of activists, bankers, politicians, popes and popstars. I wish I was with everyone today, but I couldn't get the sick note, love Bono." (applause).

As for me, I'm overwhelmed by what you've achieved. Today with Gordon Brown's announcement which is not only a personal achievement for him, but is a great, great achievement for Great Britain because no longer is the fourth richest country on the planet a nation of spivs, debt collectors bailiffs and meter men. Today, after a year of your effort, you can genuinely think of your self as the moral centre of this country and as a result of this, move forward to Genoa in Spring next year, where we will demand, unlike in Okinawa substantive change in the way this planet is run and in our relationship with the poorest people. These institutions have every reason to fear you tonight, every reason. You are now lead by the government of this country. We have to back them and we will demand activism from all of you again going into Genoa.

The lessons of the last year have been that change is profoundly slow and it is profoundly slow because of the structures that govern this world. Ann Pettifor is going to lead a think tank, Jubilee Plus to deal specifically with this problem between the creditors and the debtor nations and we know that there is a grotesque imbalance between the two and as part of the job to address that balance and think of new ways to run this planet because frankly it doesn't work the way it's happening now.

So you lead the fight, you lead the fight, you did that. You give voice to the mute, you did that. You give courage to the frail, you did that. You gave succour to the weak, you did that. You refuse to accept that the credit worthiness of a person was what determined their nature as opposed to their value as a human being, you did that. You said that there was no shame in poverty, the only shame is our insistence upon it and that can't go on for very much longer (applause).