Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is the new voice of the developing world
What springs to mind when you think of Bridgetown, Barbados? I am instantly taken back almost 30 years to April 1994 when that fine servant of Surrey and England, Alec Stewart, scored two magnificent hundreds against the West Indies in a test match victory that showed – at last – that the finest team in cricket history was invincible no more. Reaction subscribers will have their own memories: perhaps of our late Queen knighting Sir Gary Sobers during her 1975 visit, a Gordon Greenidge square cut or just Barbadian beaches, sunsets, rum and hospitality.
But Bridgetown is beginning to mean a lot more than cricket and sunshine and the current Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, is why. Mottley is a lawyer and career politician from a family of politicians and has spent a long time at the centre of Barbadian politics. Prime Minister since 2018, having been first elected as an MP in 1994, she is left-wing, immensely popular and currently runs an effective one-party state. This is what happens when you win 73 per cent of the vote in a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy as she did in the 2022 election. Mottley was the driving force behind Barbados becoming a republic in November 2021 – although she remembered to secure her father, a distinguished Barbadian jurist, a knighthood (a KCMG since you ask) along the way in 2019 – and has only increased her public appeal since.
The world has noticed Mottley too. Motivated by her personal outrage at the unequal and uneven distribution of Covid-19 vaccines between the developed and developing world, Mottley gave an inspired speech at the UN General Assembly in September 2021 in which she called for global leadership around inequality and climate change. This morphed into the Bridgetown Initiative which Mottley’s government issued ahead of COP27 last year.
The Initiative has three main strands: firstly, to provide emergency liquidity to stop the debt crisis in developing countries in its tracks; second, to increase multilateral lending by $1 trillion to fund climate resilience and social development in developing countries; finally, to issue $650 million of guarantees to boost private sector investment in climate transition initiatives
These are, as they say, big potatoes – a break-up of the Bretton Woods system is constantly mentioned – and yet it’s hard to deny the justice of what’s being asked for: developing countries have made the least contribution to the creation of climate change but are due to pay, by far, the biggest price.
The recently elected President William Ruto of Kenya made the point in his own inimitable fashion at the recent New Global Financial Pact Summit in Paris when he said: “We don’t want to say that the North is the one that brought about this problem. They are the emitters. That is also true, but we don’t want to go there. Today we are all in shit.”
Before he reached for expletives – and it’s not surprising he’s frustrated given the insidious effects of climate change in Kenya – Ruto made a critical point around debt: that developing countries pay as much as eight times the interest on their debt as developed countries. How they are supposed to pay back these debts with tiny tax bases and few fiscal levers is a mystery. Yet global banks charging massive fees, often based in London, continue to flog Eurobonds on behalf of their government clients, safe in the knowledge that the IMF will eventually come to the rescue. More importantly, how can these governments fund anything beyond the most basic public services if paying interest bills forms the majority of their public spending? And that’s well before they think of spending anything on climate transition and mitigating climate change.
These injustices are why Mottley’s agenda has hit home. And the recognition of the need for a compensation fund for historically low-emitting countries at last year’s mostly underwhelming COP27 may end up being more significant than it felt at the time. COP28, despite being held in Dubai, is likely to be a lot more impactful than the Glasgow and or Sharm el-Sheikh predecessors and the Bridgetown Initiative and climate finance will be at the heart of that. And so will Mia Mottley: she’s charismatic, vocal, eloquent, a mere 57 years old and can choose how long she wants to be Prime Minister of Barbados for. We’ve heard a lot from her over the past year; expect to hear a great deal more.
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