Brilliant article from the Spectator showing how poverty is falling all around the world including the UK - well worth a read

The World Health Organisation, the United Nations, the OECD, the World Bank – all of them now keep annually updated records of human progress, and the story told by these metrics is the greatest story of our age. A few weeks ago, Fraser Nelson wrote this piece on malaria for the Telegraph – once (but no longer) mankind’s biggest killer. Each year you check the statistics, they’re even more jaw-dropping. For example: remember polio? The disease that crippled Roosevelt and afflicted 350,000 children as recently as the 1980s? Last year, fewer than 100 cases were diagnosed. It’s on the verge of going the same way as smallpox: to extinction.
As we become more prosperous, as we deal with poverty, we become less tolerant of it. No one is seriously arguing that there is more hunger today than in the 1950s. But we have food banks now, and didn’t then, because we’re less tolerant of the (far lower) level of hunger in our society.
As Nelson argued in my Daily Telegraph column, the need for food banks is deplorable but their emergence is a welcome sign of progress. And on a global basis, wealth of the rich world is being shared by the poor as never before, as shown by overseas aid figures (below) both private and public. It’s a paradox: a generation ago, there was far more global poverty yet far less anger about it. As the West grows richer, it starts to care – quite rightly – about problems that we can now solve. Chiefly through the promotion of free trade.
The full piece is here:
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/why-2016-will-have-less-poverty-hunger-and-disease-than-any-year-in-human-history/

Humanitarian Aid to Syria

It is important we remember that Syria is about human tragedy on an immense scale
The number of refugees has now exceeded 2 million, half of them children.

While in St Petersburg at the G20 the Prime Minister announced that the UK will provide £52 million in new humanitarian funding. This brings the UK’s total funding to £400 million, double the £200 million of the UK’s largest previous response to a humanitarian crisis. The Prime Minister has called for a strong and united push from G20 leaders for safe, unimpeded access for humanitarian workers inside Syria, including safe routes for aid convoys and the lifting of bureaucratic hurdles imposed by the regime. This would ensure aid agencies can deliver life-saving help when and where it is needed. For full details see here.
This week, Justine Greening has written about the situation in detail in various papers, including the Guardian
The key facts on the humanitarian situation make clear quite how bad the situation is:

For my part I am proud that the UK is at the forefront of the humanitarian response. We are the 2nd largest humanitarian donor to Syria crisis relief after the US. A year ago there were 230k refugees from Syria. Now it is over 2 million and rising.
The UK is providing food for over 285,000 people every month, clean water for almost 1m people, and over 300,000 relief items like blankets. Lebanon, a country of 4 million, will soon host 1million Syrian refugees. The Syrian regime is still obstructing humanitarian operations, which must stop. The UK continues to call on all parties to allow humanitarian access.
Like everyone I would welcome a resolution to the chemical weapon problem, albeit I would struggle to trust the Russians as monitors of any process of detention of weapons. But the proof will be in the pudding - this idea of giving up chemical weapons has been sought for some time with no response by Assad. However, I do regard these last few days as progress.