Traidcraft plc AGM, St Chad’s College, 22 September 2007 

I am absolutely delighted to be here this morning.  Thank you for the welcome you have given to me and Leng, and for the privilege of speaking to you.

I wonder if you have noticed as I have how strongly children feel about fair trade.  Gallions Primary is a remarkable school in my constituency, in the middle of a modern but rather troubled housing association development.  The school is a beautiful oasis of tranquillity – and every single child learns to play the violin or the cello.  Every class is named after a kind of music favoured by the children in the class and I was invited in to meet the Hip Hop class of nine year olds earlier this year.  The children had been studying the campaign against the slave trade and wanted to lobby me on what the Government was doing against modern day slavery.

One of the children, Samaya, quite a small Muslim girl with a headscarf, had written to BBC News Round about what they were doing, so they came down to and they filmed Samaya interviewing me.  Typical journalists, they said to her afterwards: "Well, he’s a politician, did you really believe what he said?"  She replied: "Yes, I did believe him.  I looked into his eyes."  So she’s my friend for life! 

A few weeks later, as an extension of their campaign they invited me to a fair trade café in the school.  And a few weeks after that, Samaya and seven of her classmates turned up on Newsnight giving a hard time to the General Secretary of the confectionery and chocolate makers trade association about slowness in improving conditions on cocoa plantations in Africa.  The General Secretary was not expecting too much trouble from a group of primary school children.  In fact, however, she would have found Jereamy Paxman easier.  Unwisely, and unexpectedly in a corner, the General Secretary tried condescension.  It didn’t work.  She under estimated the children’s passion and their knowledge.  Those children make me feel very optimistic about the future, and about future commitment to your work in particular.

The fair trade revolution

Like the children, I think fair trade can be a revolution – the growing realisation among the wider public that what we buy and how we produce can literally change the world.

You have a vision: 'for a world freed from the scandal of poverty, where trade is just and individuals and communities can flourish.'  Like all visions – it looks to a world, not as it is, but as it can be - as it should be.  And you can point to changes for the better on a big scale which have happened because of what you have done as supporters of Traidcraft, the organisation which has made fair trade a reality in Britain.

Of all the newspaper articles I have read this year, one of those I enjoyed most – a real shaft of joy amongst the cynicism and the tawdryness – was an article in the Guardian in February, which many of you will have read, about the impact of fair trade on St Lucia.  Sainsbury’s has committed to buying only fair trade bananas – 100 million of them from St Lucia.

"Today", said the article, "the island where bananas are not so much a crop but a way of life is celebrating.  Just about every St Lucian banana sold for export now commands a premium price and European supermarkets are queuing for more.  Money is going into run-down schools, the banana sheds are being repaired and the farmers can scarcely believe the turn round in their fortunes."

That has only happened because of you.  Sainsbury’s would never have made that decision without what you have done.

The source of the revolution

Where has this revolution come from?  Fair trade as a moment of significance was started in Britain by Traidcraft.  At the time, the idea of supermarkets stocking fair trade goods would have been absurd.  You changed that.  Traidcraft has been sustained by an army of committed volunteers selling its products – for example on church bookstalls.  That is the reason why the fair trade movement first survived, and then prospered.  If it had been down to the supermarkets, it would never have happened. 

I have been aware of Traidcraft since it started, but I only became a regular customer when a church hall in my area opened up a small Traidcraft stall, run by a volunteer in an unused space on a Saturday morning when I did my regular surgery.  I became hooked – and by the way I love blueberry Geobars.

I was very struck by a figure in the Traidcraft annual report.  It says that 80% of the volunteers on whom the company still depends are from the churches.  It just so happens that the organisers of the Jubilee 2000 campaign and of the Make Poverty History campaign told me that 80% of those who made up human chains, sent in postcards to MPs, turned up at the great demonstration in Edinburgh for the G8 summit two years ago – 80% of them also were from the churches.

Sometimes people give the impression that the churches don’t make much difference any more.  I beg to differ.  Today – as perhaps not for a very long time – activism rooted in faith is having a huge, creative and positive impact on our national life.  I know it doesn’t always feel powerful – but it is.  And I look forward to lots more from this new movement in the future.

Let me give a couple more illustrations – and, first, tell you about a friend I met when she was working at the Treasury as one of the Chancellor's special advisers and I was a new Treasury minister.  We were working on tackling social exclusion.  She had previously been Chief Executive of the Council for One Parent Families and had a particular interest in involving the voluntary sector, and I wanted to encourage faith-based organisations to contribute. We worked quite closely together. Then I went off to another ministerial job and she later joined the Refugee Council.

Then last year we met up again.  She told me that, travelling around the country for her work, visiting refugee support organisations, to her surprise because nobody had told her this was the case, it became clear to her that, right across the country, quite a number of the local projects working to help asylum seekers were in fact church-based projects.  In particular, and this is the key point which underlines my argument, she noticed that many of the people who were giving so much, often sacrificially, to help individual asylum seekers, were Christians.  This made her wonder if she had really understood what Christianity was about.  About two years ago, and with a fair amount of trepidation, she took the step for the first time of going to a church near her home in North London. 

She was made to feel at home.  The church was advertising what they called an Alpha course.  She decided to sign up.  The course had a profound impact.  At the course weekend away, she made a personal commitment to Christ.  In the summer term she completed a one-year MA in Theology & Religion at this college while also chairing for the Government the Third Sector Consultative Forum and this term she is planning a PhD.  She is Maeve Sherlock and she is with us this morning.

Today, she says, if anyone had made the connections for her between Christianity and speaking up for the poor and oppressed, she would have become a Christian long ago. 

Here is another example of the kind of thing I mean.   You will know of the New Deal – the programme to help people who are out of work, especially young people, and especially those who have been out of work for some time.  It was designed from the outset to involve a range of partners working alongside the government agency Jobcentre Plus.

In the West Midlands, the Church of England diocese of Birmingham tends to pick up the New Deal participants nobody else will touch.  On one occasion, they were asked to find a New Deal placement for a young man who was due in court shortly to be tried for 117 offences of burglary.  He was placed on a project to decorate a church complex in Edgbaston – and he turned out to be a superb painter, a skill he had developed while imprisoned at a young offender’s institution.  He struck up a friendship with the part time church administrator, who was also the husband of the vicar at the church, and when the time came for him to go to court for his trial, the administrator went along to speak up for him and to ask the court that, despite all these dreadful offences, he should be given another chance. 

The court, perhaps rather surprisingly, agreed.  The young man was given another chance.  The painting project was completed and to an extremely high standard.  And the young man has since apparently started up with a couple of others a painting business of their own.

And at the ceremony to mark the conclusion of the work, one of those who turned up was the young man’s mother.  She sought out the church administrator and she said to him; "When you went to court to plead for my son to keep his job, you saved his life".  And that for me is another powerful example of the kind of positive impact which is common when people of faith are involved in the lives of their community – worshipping, yes, but also serving the community.  Because they bring invaluable qualities in their service that modern Britain urgently needs.

And its not just Christians who are saying that.  Neal Lawson of the left-leaning think tank Compass wrote a piece earlier this year which I largely disagreed with.  It was a stinging attack on ministers like me.  But his key point I did agree with and is I think a key truth about modern Britain:

"They don't just talk," he wrote.  "They do.  Religious communities are among the increasingly few places that bring people together as citizens rather than as consumers - fighting for a living wage and against poverty.  For me, as an atheist and a full-time politico, this is unsettling. … I am a secularist and believe in the disestablishment of church and state - in particular, I want to see the end of faith schools.  And, of course, religion has been the cause of terrible deeds - although none perhaps in recent years as abhorrent as those of atheists.  But in words and deeds, in the world I see around me, the positive role faith plays far outweighs the negatives."

Not everyone agrees

Of course, not everyone in Britain believes that.  There is today an aggressive secularism abroad, arguing that faith is not just wrong, but dangerous.  Plenty of people think that faith plus politics is guarantees conflict and perhaps violence.  And they don’t have too far to look to support their case: Belfast, Baghdad, Beirut. 

Polly Toynbee’s articles in the Guardian.  Richard Dawkins’ best selling book.  Neal Lawson’s article, incidentally, described "The God Delusion" – correctly – as, and I quote: "just a gratuitous tirade against faith".  But views like those of Richard Dawkins are widely expressed and influential in Britain today.

But the Government does value faith

But in Government we recognise increasingly that faith communities are sustaining families, building cohesion, reaching the disadvantaged, communicating positive values into the heart of communities the length and breadth of Britain.  And we need more of that, not less.  And so in the reshuffle in June, Gordon Brown appointed me a Labour Party vice chair with specific responsibility for liaison with faith communities. 

Such is the glamour of ministerial life that, on leaving Durham, I am heading for a bed and breakfast in Bournemouth for the Labour Party next week, and this year, for the first time, Harriet Harman – as party chair and deputy leader – and I will be hosting a faiths reception.

And incidentally, far from being in conflict, there is a great deal of scope for communities of different faiths to work together.  That does not mean a dishonest pretence that really we all believe the same thing.  Nothing positive can come out of that.  But rather a recognition that the values which are created by our distinctive faiths have a great deal in common, and provide a very strong basis for mutual trust and for working together for justice and against poverty. 

Traidcraft puts a lot of effort into lobbying us in Government, and does it well.   We won’t always do everything you want.  But we do want to listen to you.  We see you as contributing powerfully to a climate for progressive change. 

Cancellation of the debts owed to Britain by the poorest countries.  The decisions of the G8 at Gleneagles which will benefit the poorest countries for years to come.  Repainting rundown schools in St Lucia.  It has been people like you who have made those things possible.

You influenced the new Company Law Act

As Minister for Competitiveness, I am the minister responsible for company law.  Your annual report records the contribution Traidcraft Exchange made to the debates in parliament about the content of what is now the Companies Act 2006.  It quotes Michael Gidney as saying about your campaign "MPs were so inundated with campaign cards that they just had to act!"  You sent us about 100,000.  And you know it is amazing how influential those postcard campaigns can be.

When I was a Minister at the Treasury working with Maeve in 1999-2001, and Gordon Brown was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, we heard a lot from Jubilee 2000.  On one occasion they formed a human chain around the Treasury building.  In another phase they organised people to send in one pound coins sellotaped to the back of postcards to demand that Britain should cancel the debts owed to us by the poorest countries.

We received thousands of these postcards.  On one occasion, one came in from a Mrs Brown in Scotland.  Somehow, someone in the Treasury postroom managed to work out that this was from Gordon’s mother!  And in due course, thanks to the pressure from that movement, Britain did cancel the debts of the poorest countries. 

And we changed the Companies Act in response to your campaign.  Key changes take effect in ten days time, on 1 October.  I was at the Institute of Directors on Thursday to explain them.  The audience was about 120 people who had achieved the status of Chartered Director, an accreditation which recognises the demands placed on directors in today's economy, and for the first time provides a benchmark of the professional knowledge and experience needed to help companies fulfil shareholder expectations.

The concept of 'Enlightened Shareholder Value' enshrined in the Act recognises that directors will be more likely to achieve long term sustainable success for the benefit of their shareholders if their companies pay appropriate regard to wider matters such as their impact on the local community where they operate, on the environment and on the well being of their employees. 

Our aim has been consistently to improve corporate reporting on environmental and social matters without imposing an onerous bureaucratic burden.  Here is another example of Traidcraft blazing a trail, because Traidcraft was the first plc to do social reporting.  The legislation requires directors to report on social and environmental matters which are material to an assessment of the business, but it is for the directors to make the judgment of what is material.  We were determined to avoid promoting a box-ticking mentality, requiring the recording of information for the sake of it.

So, under the Act, directors of quoted companies will need to ensure they report on environmental, employee, social and community matters, as well as – and this was the Traidcraft amendment – contractual and other relationships, in their Business Review "to the extent necessary for an understanding of the development, performance and position of the company’s business".

The Business Review is a key initiative for encouraging directors to provide useful, forward-looking information for shareholders, without imposing disproportionate burdens on the business in compiling it.  And having explained that to you in the same terms that I explained it to my audience of chartered directors in London on Thursday, I welcome the discussions between Traidcraft and the Institute on guidance for directors on how best to discharge these new reporting obligations.

It is the first time that 'community', 'environment' and 'supply chain relationships' have been mentioned in UK company law in this way, and Traidcraft has played an important part in getting us there

Conclusion

So I hope you will continue:

• To develop powerful new ideas and communicate them effectively;
• To invest in people, like those producers we have been introduced to this weekend;
• To develop new markets and partnerships.

When City of London dealers are buying fair trade coffee from Starbucks and chocolate from Tesco Express, the challenges for small producers like Traidcraft are pretty clear.  But it is through partnerships – like the new one with Marks and Spencer – and in working with new products that Traidcraft will be able to continue to deepen and widen the fair-trade revolution.

This year, along with children from Gallions Primary School, we have marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.  The campaign which led to that was inspired by faith.  It wasn’t drawn exclusively from the churches – my hunch is that probably about 80% of those involved were inspired by their faith to take part.  It was the world’s first mass, democratic political campaign.  It inaugurated the era of progressive politics in Britain.  It opened the way to every popular, progressive campaign since.

If our aim is a new world – free from injustice and poverty - we need active input in our communities from people whose starting point is faith.  And Traidcraft is a very good example of what can happen when we get it.

Because vision and values alone will not achieve a revolution.  It requires ideas, people and hard work.  That is what you have provided.  That is why your work is revolutionary – changing the way business is done and changing it for the better.

I wish you well – as you look this weekend at past successes and future challenges – and as you plan how to deepen and widen this revolution in the years ahead.

Thank you.