The Prime Minister delivered a speech to the TED Global conference in Oxford on 21 July 2009.
Read the transcript
Can I say how delighted I am to be away from the calm of the Westminster environment?
This is Kim, the nine-year-old Vietnam girl, her back ruined by napalm, and she awakened the conscience of the nation of America, to begin to end the Vietnam War. This is Birhan, who was the Ethiopian girl who launched Live Aid in the 1980s, 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued, and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world. This is Tiananmen Square, a man before a tank became a picture that became a symbol for the whole world of resistance. This next is the Sudanese girl, a few moments from death, a vulture hovering in the background, a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty. This is Neda, the Iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in Iran only a few weeks ago and she is now the focus, rightly so, of the YouTube generation.
And what do all these pictures and events have in common? What they have in common is what we see unlocked and what we cannot see. What we see unlocked: the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community. What these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others, however distantly. What I think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves. What these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions, across all faiths, across all continents - a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted, see injuries that need to be corrected, see problems that need to be rectified.
There is a story about Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, going to see Ronald Reagan in America in the 1980s. Before he arrived Ronald Reagan said - and he was the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister - ‘isn’t this man a communist?’ The reply was, ‘no, Mr President, he’s an anti-communist,’ and Ronald Reagan said, ‘I don’t care what kind of communist he is!’ Ronald Reagan asked Olof Palme, the Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden, ‘well, what do you believe in? Do you want to abolish the rich?’ He said, ‘no, I want to abolish the poor’. Our responsibility is to let everyone have the chance to realise their potential to the full.
I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith and people of no faith. But I think what’s new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to organise and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society.
Go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from William Wilberforce and all the protesters. They protested across Britain. They won public opinion over a long period of time. But it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful. What could they have done with the pictures they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people’s hearts and minds?
Or if you take Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who created Save the Children 90 years ago. She was so appalled by what was happening in Austria as a result of the First World War and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of Austria, that in Britain she wanted to take action, but she had to go house to house, leaflet to leaflet, to get people to attend a rally in the Royal Albert Hall that eventually gave birth to Save the Children, an international organisation that is now fully recognised as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world. But what more could she have done if she’d had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately?
Now look at what’s happened in the last 10 years. In Philippines in 2001, President Estrada: a million people texted each other about the corruption of that regime, eventually brought it down and it was, of course, called the ‘coup de text’. Then you have in Zimbabwe the first election under Robert Mugabe a year ago. Because people were able to take mobile-phone photographs of what was happening at the polling stations, it was impossible for that Premier to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do. Or take Burma and the monks that were blogging out, a country that nobody knew anything that was happening until these blogs told the world that there was a repression meaning that lives were being lost and people were being persecuted and Aung San Suu Kyi, who is one of the great prisoners of conscience of the world, had to be listened to. Then take Iran itself and what people are doing today, following what happened to Neda, people who are preventing the security services of Iran finding those people who are blogging out of Iran changing their address to Tehran, Iran, and making it difficult for the security services.
Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organise internationally. That in my view gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world. Foreign policy can never be the same again. It cannot be run by elites; it’s got to be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging, who are communicating with each other around the world.
200 years ago the problem we had to solve was slavery. 150 years ago I suppose the main problem in a country like ours was how young people, children had the right to education. 100 years ago in most countries in Europe, the pressure was for the right to vote. 50 years ago the pressure was for the right to social security and welfare. In the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, apartheid, discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and sexuality; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns by people to change the world.
I was with Nelson Mandela a year ago when he was in London. I was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation of new resources for his foundation. I was sitting next to Nelson Mandela - I was very privileged to do so - when Amy Winehouse came onto the stage and Nelson Mandela was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and I was explaining to him at the time who she was. Amy Winehouse said, ‘Nelson Mandela and I have a lot in common. My husband too has spent a long time in prison.’ Nelson Mandela then went down to the stage and he summarised the challenge for us all. He said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain, the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid. He said that there was a greater challenge ahead, the challenge of poverty, of climate change, global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society.
We are the first generation that is in a position to do this. Combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate and organise globally with the challenges that we now face, most of which are global in their nature. Climate change cannot be solved in one country but has got to be solved by the world working together. A financial crisis, just as we have seen, could not be solved by America alone or Europe alone; it needed the world to work together. Take the problems of security and terrorism and, equally, the problem of human rights and development: they cannot be solved by Africa alone; they cannot be solved by America or Europe alone. We cannot solve these problems unless we work together.
So the great project of our generation, it seems to me, is to build for the first time out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organise together, a truly global society, built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society and make for a different future. We have now, and are the first generation with, the power to do this.
Take climate change. Is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem, where we know also that that will mean we have to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that, when we want to create a global carbon market, but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem? One of the things that has to come out of Copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate-change agenda. One of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have to persuade people around the world to change their behaviour as well, so you need that global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations.
Take the financial crisis. If people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that starts in New York or starts in the sub-prime market of the United States of America. If people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many, many times until it ends up in banks in Iceland or the rest in Britain and people’s ordinary savings are affected by it, then you cannot rely on a system of national supervision. You need in the long run for stability, for economic growth, for jobs, as well as for financial stability, global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible. So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility, not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years.
Then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries and the rest of the world, the poorest part of the world. We do not have the basis of a proper partnership for the future, and yet, out of people’s desire for a global ethic and a global society that can be done. I have just been talking to the President of Sierra Leone. This is a country of six and a half million people, but it has only 80 doctors, it has 200 nurses, it has 120 midwives. You cannot begin to build a healthcare system for six million people with such limited resources.
Or take the girl I met when I was in Tanzania, a girl called Miriam. She was 11 years old, her parents had both died from Aids, her mother and then her father. She was an Aids orphan being handed across different extended families to be cared for. She herself was suffering from HIV, she was suffering from tuberculosis. I met her in a field, she was ragged, she had no shoes. When you looked in her eyes, any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future, but there was an unreachable sadness in that girl’s eyes and if I could have translated that to the rest of the world for that moment, I believe that all the work that it had done for the global HIV/Aids fund would be rewarded by people prepared to make donations. We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture, so that Africa is not a net importer of food but an exporter of food.
Take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many countries around the world. Burma is in chains, Zimbabwe is a human tragedy, in Sudan thousands of people have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent. In the Rwanda children’s museum, there is a photograph of a ten-year-old boy and the children’s museum is commemorating the lives that were lost in the Rwandan genocide where a million people died. There is a photograph of a boy called David. Beside that photograph there is the information about his life. It said David, aged 10. David, ambition to be a doctor. Favourite sport, football. What did he enjoy most? Making people laugh. How did he die? Tortured to death. Last words said to his mother who was also tortured to death, ‘Don’t worry, the United Nations are coming’. And we never did and that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty in Rwanda and we never did. So we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and humanitarian aid, but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden states of the world.
So my argument today is basically this. We have the means by which we could create a truly global society. The institutions of this global society can be created by our endeavours. That global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary for these institutions to work, but we should not lose the chance in this generation, in this decade in particular, with President Obama in America, with other people working with us around the world, to create global institutions for the environment, and for finance, and for security and for development, that make sense of our responsibility to other peoples, our desire to bind the world together and our need to tackle problems that everybody knows exist.
It is said that in Ancient Rome that when Cicero spoke to his audiences, people used to turn to each other and say about Cicero, ‘Great speech.’ But it is said that in Ancient Greece when Demosthenes spoke to his audiences, people turned to each other and didn’t say ‘Great speech.’ They said, ‘Let’s march.’ We should be marching towards a global society. Thank you.
Question
Thank you so much, Prime Minister. That was fascinating and quite inspiring. So you’re calling for a global ethic. Would you describe that as global citizenship as an idea? How would you define that?
Prime Minister
I think it is about global citizenship. It is about recognising our responsibilities to others. There is so much to do over the next few years, that is obvious to so many of us, to build a better world, and there is so much shared sense of what we need to do, that it’s vital that we all come together: but we don’t necessarily have the means to do so.
So there are challenges to be met. I believe the concept of global citizenship will simply grow out of people talking to each other across continents, but then, of course, the task is to create the institutions that make that global society work. But I don’t think we should underestimate the extent to which massive changes in technology make possible the linking up of people across the world.
Question
People get excited about this idea of global citizenship, but then they get confused a bit again, when they start thinking about patriotism and how to combine these two. You’re elected as Prime Minister with a brief to bat for Britain. How do you reconcile the two things?
Prime Minister
Well, of course the national identity remains important, but it’s not at the expense of people accepting their global responsibilities. I think one of the problems of a recession is that people become more protectionist, they look in on themselves, they try to protect their own nation, perhaps at the expense of other nations. When you actually look at the motor of the world economy, it cannot move forward unless there is trade between the different countries. And any nation that would become protectionist over the next few years would deprive itself of the chance of getting the benefits of growth in the world economy.
So you’ve got to have a healthy sense of patriotism, that’s absolutely important, but you’ve got to realise that this world has changed fundamentally, and the problems that we have cannot be solved by one nation alone.
Question
Indeed. But what do you do when the two come into conflict, and you’re forced to make a decision that either is in Britain’s interest, or the interest of Britons, or citizens elsewhere in the world?
Prime Minister
Well, I think you can persuade people that what is necessary for Britain’s long term interests - what is necessary for America’s long term interests - is proper engagement with the rest of the world, and taking the action that is necessary.
There’s a great story told about Richard Nixon. 1958 - Ghana becomes independent, so it was just over 50 years ago. Richard Nixon goes to represent the United States government at the celebrations for independence in Ghana, and it’s one of his first outings as Vice President to an African country. He doesn’t quite know what to do, so he starts going round the crowd, and starts talking to people in the crowd, and he says to people in this rather unique way ‘How does it feel to be free?’ And he’s going round: ‘How does it feel to be free? How does it feel to be free?’ And then someone says ‘How should I know? I come from Alabama’.
That was the 1950s. Now what is remarkable is that civil rights in America were achieved in the 1960s, but what is equally remarkable is social and economic rights in Africa have not moved forward very fast, even since the age of colonialism. And yet America and Africa have got a common interest.
I was in Abuja in Nigeria a few months ago. I was actually there, and Bono was there also, and we were in a classroom of school kids, and Bono was asking people what they wanted to be. And some said they want to be engineers, and doctors, and nurses, and teachers and everything else; not one wanted to be a politician, I may say. To Bono’s surprise, not one wanted to be a pop singer either.
But this classroom in Nigeria was dilapidated. It was broken down. The kids were three at a desk. It was terrible, overcrowded conditions that were facing these kids. And then they told me that, up the road, near Abuja, was a madrasah that had been organised by an Islamic group, an extreme group, offering free education, offering a good school in terms of its facilities, but the price of that was indoctrination. And we have got to realise that if we don’t link up with those people who are sensible voices, and democratic voices, in Africa to work together for common causes, then the danger of Al Qaeda and related groups making progress in Africa is really big.
So I would say that what seems sometimes to be altruism in relation to Africa, or in relation to developing countries is more than that; it is enlightened self interest for us to work with other countries. Open trade is an absolute essential of this new economy, because people will not get the benefits of it otherwise. Help for those people who are in developing countries is absolutely essential for security reasons, for moral reasons, of course, but also for economic reasons: to build a world economy that works for the future.
And I would say that national interest and, if you like, what is the global interest, to tackle poverty and climate change, do in the long run come together. Whatever the short run price for taking action on climate change, or taking action on security, or taking action to provide opportunities for people for education, these are prices that are worth paying so that you build a stronger global society where people feel able to feel comfortable with each other and are able to communicate with each other in such a way that you can actually build stronger links between different countries.
Question
We’re in Oxford, which is the home of philosophical thought experiments, so here’s one I just want to draw out on this issue. So you’re on vacation, at a nice beach, and word comes through that there’s been a massive earthquake, and that there’s a tsunami advancing on the beach. One end of the beach there’s a house containing a family of five Nigerians, and at the other end of the beach there’s a single Brit. You have time to call out to one house. What do you do?
Prime Minister
Modern communications. I do agree that my responsibility is first of all to make sure that people in our country are safe, and I wouldn’t like anything that is said today to suggest that I am diminishing the importance of the responsibility that each individual leader has for their own country. But I’m trying to suggest that there is a huge opportunity open to us, that was never open to us before: to have the power to communicate across borders allows us to organise the world in a difference way.
And I think, look at this tsunami, it’s a classic example - where was the early warning systems? Where was the world acting together to deal with the problems that they knew arose from the potential for earthquakes, as well as the potential for climate change? And when the world starts to work together with better early warning systems, then you can deal with some of these problems in a far better way.
I just think we’re not seeing at the moment the huge opportunities open to us by the ability of people to co operate in a world where either there was isolationism before, or there was limited alliances based on convenience, which never actually took you to deal with some of the central problems.
Question
I think this is the frustration that perhaps a lot of people have - people in the audience here. We love the kind of language that you are talking about, it is inspiring, a lot of us believe that has to be the world’s future, and yet when the situation changes, you suddenly hear politicians talking as if, for example, the life of one American soldier is worth countless numbers of Iraqi civilians - and when the pedal hits the metal, the ideas can get moved away. And I’m just wondering whether you can see that changing over time - whether you see in Britain that there are changing attitudes, and that people are actually more supportive of the kind of global ethic that you talk about.
Prime Minister
I think every religion, every faith - and I’m not just talking here to people of faith or religion - has this global ethic at the centre of its credo. And whether it’s the Jewish, or whether it’s Muslim, or whether it’s Hindu, or whether it’s Sikh, the same global ethic is at the heart of each of these religions. So I think you’re dealing with something that people instinctively see as part of their moral sense, so you’re building on something that is not pure self interest. You’re building on people’s ideas and values - perhaps they are candles that burn very dimly on certain occasions - but it is a set of values that cannot, in my view, be extinguished.
Then the question is, how do you make that change happen? How do you persuade people that it is in their interest to build? After the Second World War, we built institutions: the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the Trade Organisation, the Marshall Plan. There was a period at which people talked about an act of creation, because these institutions were so new - but they’re now out of date. They don’t deal with the problems. As I said, you can’t deal with the environmental problem through existing institutions, you can’t deal with the security problem in the way that you need to, you can’t deal with the economic and financial problem. So we have got to rebuild our global institutions, and build them in a way that is suitable to the challenges of this time.
And I believe that, if you look at the biggest challenge we face, it is to persuade people to have the confidence that we can build a truly global society with the institutions that are founded on these rules. So I come back to my initial point. Sometimes you think things are impossible. Nobody would have said, fifteen years ago, that apartheid would have gone in 1990, or that the Berlin Wall would have fallen at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, or that polio could be eradicated - or that, perhaps sixty years ago, nobody would have said a man could have gone to the moon. All these things have happened: by tackling the impossible, you make the impossible possible.
Question
We had a speaker who said that very thing, and swallowed a sword right after that. But surely a true global ethic is for someone to say ‘I believe that the life of every human on the planet is worth the same equal consideration, regardless of nationality and religion’. And you have politicians - you’re elected, in a way you can’t say that you, as a human being, you believe that, you can’t say that. You’re elected for Britain’s interest.
Prime Minister
We have a responsibility to protect. Look: 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, and all the treaties before that - the Treaty of Westphalia, and everything else - were about protecting the sovereign right of individual countries to do what they want. Since then, the world has moved forward, partly as a result of what happened with the Holocaust, and people’s concern about the rights of individuals within territories where they need protection, partly because of what we see and saw in Rwanda, partly because of what we saw in Bosnia, the idea of the responsibility to protect all individuals who are in situations where they are at humanitarian risk - it is now being established as a principle which governs the world.
So while I can’t sort of automatically say that Britain will rush to the aid of any citizen of any country in danger, I can say that Britain is in a position where we are working with other countries, so that this idea that you have a responsibility to protect people who are victims of either genocide, or humanitarian attack, is something that is accepted by the whole world. Now in the end, that can only be achieved if your international institutions work well enough to be able to do so, and that comes back to the future role of the United Nations, and what it can do, actually is. But the responsibility to protect is a new idea, that has in a sense taken over from the idea of self determination as a principle governing the international community.
Question
So to protect not just your own citizens.
Prime Minister
Where there is abuse of human rights, where there is a threat either of genocide, or of intimidation, or of violence, you’ve a duty to take into account that in making any decision. Then you’ve got to decide, of course, whether the action you’re taking is proportionate and can actually make the difference that it is intended to do. But the responsibility to protect was accepted as a dominant feature of future international policy by the United Nations a few years ago.
Question
Can you picture, in our lifetime, a politician ever going out on the platform of the full form of global ethic, global citizenship, and basically saying ‘I believe that all people across the planet have equal consideration and, if in power, we will act in that way, and we believe that the people in this country are also now global citizens and will support that ethic’?
Prime Minister
Is that not what we’re doing in the debate about climate change? We’re saying that you cannot solve the problem of climate change in one country; you’ve got to involve all countries. You’re saying that you must, and you have a duty to, help those countries that cannot afford to deal with the problems of climate change for themselves, you’re saying that you want a deal with all the different countries of the world, where we’re all bound together to cutting carbon emissions, in a way that is to the benefit of the whole world.
And so, if we could get - look, we’ve never had this before because Kyoto didn’t work - a deal at Copenhagen, where people agreed a) that there was a long term target for carbon emission cuts, b) that there was short-range targets that had to be met, so this wasn’t just abstract, it was people actually making the decisions now, that would make a difference now - and if you could then find a financing mechanism that meant that the poorest countries, that have been hurt by our inability to deal with climate change over many, many years and decades, are given special help so that they can move to energy efficient technologies, and they are in a position financially to be able to afford the long term investment that is associated with cutting carbon emissions, then you are treating the world equally by giving consideration to every part of the planet and the needs they have.
It doesn’t mean that everybody does exactly the same thing, because we’ve actually got to do more, financially, to help the poorest countries: but it does mean there is equal consideration for the needs of citizens in a single climate.
Question
Yes. And, of course, the fear is still that those talks get rent apart by different countries fighting in their own individual interests.
Prime Minister
Yes, but I think Europe has got a position, which is 27 countries have already come together - the great difficulty in Europe is, if you are at a meeting, and 27 people speak, it takes a very, very long time. But we did get an agreement on climate change. America has made its first disposition on this, with the bill that President Obama should be congratulated for getting through Congress. Japan has made an announcement. China and India have signed up to the scientific evidence, and now we’ve got to move them to accept a long term target, and then short term targets.
But more progress has been made, I think, in the last few weeks than has been made for some years. I do believe that there is a strong possibility that, if we work together, we can get that agreement at Copenhagen. I certainly have been putting forward proposals that would allow the poorest parts of the world to feel that we have taken into account their specific needs, and we would help them adapt, and we would help them make the transition to a low-carbon economy - and I think that’s going to be an important element: there’s got to be an element of transferring resources to the poorest countries, to make them able to be part of this deal.
So the work is being done. But, again, come back to public opinion on this: if there is a global ethic, that I believe does exist, where people say ‘you’ve got to do the responsible and fair thing’, then the force of that public opinion can be heard and, as I said before, things need not be tied up between a few elites. The force of public opinion can play a huge part in the solution of this problem.
Question
And finally, Prime Minister, you played a key role in the whole process of trying to save the world from financial meltdown. How confident are you that we are past the worst?
Prime Minister
I think the problem about the world economy at the moment is that we’ve got to make these international institutions work better. So you go to Eastern Europe, or Eastern and Central Europe, and you find that countries are having to be bailed out because they are not in a position to withstand the pressure from banks leaving their country. So there are different parts of the world that are facing this crisis, and it’s happening in a fairly uneven way. What we’ve done is stabilise the banking system. What we’re now working on is a strategy to get growth back into the world economy.
Clearly, if the American consumer spends less (and let’s say the American savings rate rises from 0% to 10%) and therefore, the American consumer, which has been a large part of the growth that has happened in the world economy, the consumption of that group of people falls - then you have got to find alternative means of securing the growth that you need in the world economy.
And we’re in a transition phase, because you can see ten years from now, twenty years from now, but ten years from now, China, India and Asia, who are producers, essentially, becoming bigger consumers. You can see a middle class developing throughout Asia that will probably bring a billion people into middle-class incomes that will allow them to be consumers of some of the branded goods that are produced by America, Britain and other countries.
But we’ve got to make the transition from the industrialised economies as they were - a sort of G8 - to this G20, where all the countries of the world play their part in creating the economic growth that is necessary for the future.
And a revival of growth in the world will depend on what China and Asia can do. It will depend on how we can use the reserves of individual countries a lot better. It will depend on how we can keep trade open, which is really important in my view, because that is one of the engines of growth. It will depend on greater productivity in our countries, so that we can get more benefit from the work that we do, and it will depend, I think, on some of the new inventions and innovations that can make a difference.
Low-carbon technologies is one, biotechnology, life science, is clearly another, the creative industries are another - and I am quite confident about the future of the world economy, as a result of our ability to innovate, but clearly, in this transition phase, we’ve got to make sure that there is enough resources in the world economy so that unemployment doesn’t go higher, and so that we can return to growth as quickly as possible.
I do think a reform of the international institutions is vital to this. When the IMF was created in the 1940s, it was created with resources that were 5% of the world’s GDP. The IMF now has limited resources - 1% - so it can’t really make the difference that ought to be made in a period of crisis. So we’ve got to rebuild the world institutions and that is a big task: persuading all the different countries, with the different voting shares in these institutions, to do so.
There’s a story told about the three world leaders of the day getting a chance to get some advice from God. The story is told that Bill Clinton went to God, and he asked when there would be successful climate change and a low-carbon economy. And God shook his head, and said ‘Not this year, not this decade. Perhaps not even in your lifetime’. And Bill Clinton walked away in tears, because he had failed to get what he wanted.
And then the story is that Barroso, the President of the European Commission, went to God, and he asked ‘when will we get the recovery of global growth?’ And God said ‘Not this year, not in this decade. Perhaps not even in your lifetime’. So Barroso walked away crying, and in tears.
And then the Secretary General of the United Nations came up to speak to God, and said ‘When will our international institutions work?’ And God cried.
It is very important to recognise that this reform of the institutions is the next stage after agreeing upon ourselves that there is a clearer ethic on which we can build.
Question
Prime Minister, I think there are many in the audience who are truly appreciative of the efforts that you made in terms of the financial mess we got ourselves into, and there are certainly many people in the audience who will be cheering you on as you seek to advance this global ethic. Thank you so much for coming to TED.
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