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Treaty of Lisbon (No. 6)

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention. I understand her point, but I hope that I was making it absolutely clear that the business of humanitarian aid predominantly involves a greater degree of professionalism than can, inevitably, be provided by such a corps. The third area that I want to discuss is poverty eradication. Conservative Members welcome the fact that the treaty will hard-wire the eradication of poverty as an objective of the European Union; that is surely good news. We applaud the EU's support for the UK's drive to scale up aid among member states, as did the Secretary of State when he cited the example of Gleneagles. However, judging by the disappointing record of many EU countries on delivering on their promises, there is still a long way to go. An influential report last year by the think-tank, Data, rightly named and shamed certain member states for not living up to their promises. It found that France, Germany, Italy and a number of other European Union countries are failing to live up to the solemn pledges on increased aid that they made at Gleneagles in 2005. That is, after all, why the then Prime Minister arranged for those pledges to be signed in front of the cameras of the world's media.