Renewed Calls by Christians for Action on World Deby

Thousands of Christians will converge on Birmingham this month to mark the tenth anniversary of the Jubilee 2000 chain, which marked the beginning of public protests to end Third World debt.

Hundreds will travel up from Oxford, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, some of whom were at the first event in May 1998, when 70,000 people linked hands around Birmingham’s International Convention Centre during the G8 summit of world leaders.

Local charity, Christian Concern for One World (CCOW), which serves the diocese of Oxford, credits the event – one of the first large-scale protests the UK had seen – with helping to change the landscape of debate on the injustice of global poverty.

Ten years ago more than 1,000 campaigners travelled from the diocese by car, bus and even steam boat to join the chain.

Canon Christopher Hall was co-ordinator of CCOW in 1998. He recalls: ‘Half the people there had never been on a demo before. St Martin’s in the Bullring was packed to the doors and beyond…  Jubilee 2000 was a tipping point for the churches and for global justice. Bono told George Bush at the White House in 2006 that the example of Martin Dent and Bill Peters, the two Anglican founders of the campaign, had brought him back to Christian faith.

‘24 million signatures, a Guinness record, were collected. Locally, Christian Concern for One World collected over 10,000 signatures. By 2002 $34billion of debt had been relieved, making each signature worth £1,000. Spending on health and education in some debt-burdened countries had doubled or trebled.’

He called for further action to eradicate remaining debt, saying: ‘Millions of people around the world still struggle under a massive debt burden. Much wider debt cancellation is urgently needed for global justice’.

Jess Worth, from Oxford, has been an active campaigner for cancellation of Third World debt since the Jubilee 2000 Chain.

She remembers attending the event in her father’s wedding suit, dragging raggedly dressed, manacled student friends along to symbolise unfair treatment of the developing world by rich Western countries.

‘No one could have believed how massively successful the event would be, with such overwhelming support. It was really the first time that the root causes of the debt crisis in developing countries was brought clearly to public consciousness.’

Martin Conway, chair of the diocesan board for social responsibility, says he will be returning to Birmingham to press for further action from Western governments on 18 May.

This year’s event will celebrate what the campaigns have achieved on debt in the last decade, and demand further action.

Mr Conway said: ‘While the International Monetary Fund was willing to bring forward in some cases the steps in the long process they had agreed for nations to deserve certain reductions in respect of their debts, all too many of the poorer nations are still trapped in seemingly endless and unfair annual payments, in all too many cases having already paid in interest far more than they had been persuaded to borrow in the first place.’

You can add your voice to the Jubilee Debt Campaign in a number of ways, from joining a local action group, to signing up as a Jubilee Congregation. To find out more, or go to www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk.