Press Release sent on Sunday 18 April 2010.
SSP leader Colin Fox used World Poverty Day to slam Alistair Darling for failing to keep promises he made to the world's poor.
Campaigning in the Wester Hailes district of the Chancellor's Edinburgh South West constituency, Mr Fox told us 'Here in one of the poorest areas of Britain's second richest city the evidence of Alistair Darling's failure to keep his promises to children and pensioners in need is all around us.
In June 2005 as the huge 'Make Poverty History' protest snaked through this city the eyes of the world were on Edinburgh. Alistair Darling made grand rhetorical promises that day about combating primary deprivation and lifting the burden of debt. Today on 'World Poverty Day' our attention is drawn to how little he has made on what were in fact very modest promises made at the G8 in Gleneagles. Gordon Brown admits the shortfall in the aid actually delivered to the world's poor was £13.5billion. Oxfam tell us that money could have saved the lives of 2million women in the developing world who have died in childbirth since 2005 or sent another 72,000 children to school.
For his part Alistair Darling provided the City of London with £200bn in 'quantitative easing' in 2009. This money could have wiped out the entire debt of the developing world in one fell swoop. Choices like these tells us everything about New Labour's priorities. They are not my priorities, not those of the 250,000 who joined me on that march through Edinburgh back in June 2005.
Labour clearly has no intention of combating poverty in West Africa or Wester Hailes. They prefer to bail out bloated, blackmailing bankers. The malnourished and impoverished women and children of the 3rd world and here at home they abandon to the markets.
On World Poverty Day I ask people to think carefully about who is to be trusted to help lift the world's poor and deprived out of hell because Alistair Darling and New Labour have made it eminently clear they are not.'
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