Shadow Foreign Secretary Andrew Mitchell said he’d been given a dire warning in Ethiopia as with ‘hundreds of millions’ likely to head to Europe because of climate change
A Tory frontbencher has warned that “hundreds of millions” of people will be forced to move towards Europe because of climate change.
Andrew Mitchell, Shadow Foreign Secretary, said the UK must not turn its back on parts of Africa and Asia worst affected by the global crisis. He told a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference that he’d been warned by the Prime Minister of Ethiopia that changing weather is causing crop failures that will drive millions from their homes.
He called on Chancellor Rachel Reeves to commit more cash to international development in the upcoming Budget. He told delegates in Birmingham that he’d witnessed people being driven out of Chad, Sudan and Ethiopia because of crop failures. Mr Mitchell, who served as Deputy Foreign Secretary in the last Government, said: “I saw the effects of climate change, the fact that people who had sold all their possessions to get food and they bought enough to get seeds, one more throw of the dice as they planted the seeds and lots of harvest failed. And they then had to start to migrate. This is the reality of what we are seeing.”
He went on: “Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia said to me: ‘I do hope you realise that unless you help us feed people, unless you help us with our economy, you’re going to see hundreds of millions of feet marching north towards Europe. And that is the reality.”
He told a meeting that former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt had increased the international development budget by £2.5billion “to help cope with that”, and added that unless Ms Reeves follows suit this will “go backwards very fast”.
Evie Aspinall, director of the British Foreign Policy Group, said that 31.8 million people had been displaced globally because of extreme weather events. Of these 19 million were related to floods, 10 million because of storms and two million caused by floods.
Tory MP Dr Ben Spencer, addressing whether climate change could impact on small boat crossings, said: “The people who decide to make the incredibly dangerous journey to get on the boats, we have to come see them all rational actors. Yeah. They are not evil people who have decided to be evil and do evil things and sort of demonized as sometimes I think they are. They are rational actors for making decisions and often due to a whole host of complex reasons.”