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Jim Murphy MP, Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, in a speech to Labour’s Annual Conference 2014 in Manchester, said:

After one hundred open air political meetings across Scotland you’ll be pleased to hear I’m making a short speech this morning. Delighted to address you not just as people who share a party but also share a country.

After the past two years of campaigning there’s a lot of healing to be done. This has to be a victory without a vanquished. We have to focus on what we have in common - a passion for a fairer Scotland and a better world. Now we have to bring everyone together - the majority that voted No and the many that voted Yes. We all have to work to guarantee that we don’t have a divided Scotland but a United Kingdom.

I’m not into the politics of cultural conceit - it’s one of the reasons why I’m not a nationalist. But there’s nothing boastful about reflecting upon Labour’s past achievements because when it comes to international development we lead the world because of the generosity of the British public and the political determination of the Labour Party. I’ve seen that first hand the impacts of Syria’s deadly civil war in Lebanon and Jordan and families picking up the pieces from Typhon Haiyan in the Philippines.

By the time we left office we had lifted three million people a year out poverty and helped 40 million children into education. So many whose names we will never know, in places we may never see, have had their lives transformed in ways we can not possibly imagine. And while others said it couldn’t be done and others that we shouldn’t even try we should be proud that we helped lead the world and saved so many lives.

But it’s still an unfair world and that means Britain will honour the commitment to be the only nation in the G8 to spend 0.7 per cent of our gross national income on international development.

And despite progress many of the same old problems remain. Poverty, too many locked out of education, modern day slavery, conflict and corruption. All pernicious for sure. But they are more of a consequence than a cause. They are symptoms of the real driving force of inequity – a fundamental imbalance of power. Power is a bit like food - there is no shortage of it in the world but too much of it is focussed in the wrong places.

That’s why Labour will put human rights at the heart of DFID. That means equality of opportunity whoever or wherever you are. Women’s rights and LGBT rights, religious freedoms and workers’ protections.

One of the first acts of a Tory government was to slash all UK support for the UN’s International Labour Organisation – abandoning working people around the world who rely on that help.

Were going to take the opposite approach. Labour will reverse their mistake – we won’t turn our backs on working people. Next year’s Labour government will support international labour and reverse that cut in ILO funding.

I met some of those we want to help when I travelled to Qatar – home of the 2022 World Cup to see how the kafala system works.

We went unannounced to one of the workers camps in the dead of night. Proud men trapped in sub-human conditions. One Kenyan father I met had been unable to see his son for five years because his employer had seized his passport and left the country leaving him stranded - unable to work or go home and trapped stateless. Others told of abuse and degradation, with as many as eight men shared a filthy room no bigger than a child’s bedroom.

Because I’m an optimist and despite Scotland’s recent World Cup record I love football. So as well as demanding FIFA and the Qatari government take action, we’ll extend the work in freedom programme to help migrant workers at risk of exploitation on the construction sites of Qatar. This was the ugly secret of the beautiful game and we should be clear the World Cup should not be built on the back of workers’ misery and blood.

Our victory in 1997 came at a crucial moment. That Labour Government helped secure and fund the Millennium Development Goals – one of the most successful international agreements in history helping to halve poverty.

2015’s election will come at a pivotal time too - just four months before the international community publishes a new set of goals for the next 15 years. That means a Labour victory can put our party once again at the heart of securing an agreement for the world’s poor part of which is health. Here at home we are rightly proud of the NHS but globally more than three million people die every year for want of vaccination against easily preventable diseases. In some places just one in five births are attended by a skilled heath worker - no wonder a million children a year die on their very first day. That is a scandal and it has to change.

The Tory Party are against prioritising universal health coverage abroad. The nation that gave the world the civilising force of the NHS should champion health care around the world. We are inspired by the NHS. So I can announce today that my very first act as Secretary of State on the morning after the election will be to instruct the UK’s negotiating team at the United Nations to put universal health coverage at the heart of the world’s ambition for the next 15 years.

So if you care about development the choice is clear - the uncertainty of a Tory Party losing its mind over Europe, dragged to the right by a Tea Party tendency colliding with a UKIP instinct.

Or under Labour a pioneering department guaranteeing human rights, protecting workers’ rights and arguing for universal healthcare, rejuvenated and ready to lead the world in the fight against climate change, disease and poverty, innovating and backing business and helping developing countries build their own tax base to stand on their own two feet.

There are many reasons why we need a Labour government here at home, but there are many millions more beyond our shores.

So let’s have the courage of our movement’s convictions and the confidence to win and in so doing changed the world for the better all over again.

Ends