If like me you don't know your Nikkei from your Footsie, international economics probably isn't your strong point. But the 24 hour a day coverage of the global financial crisis, including a rain forest of info in the newspapers, is beginning to get through - even to me.
Munching on my cornflakes this morning while browsing through the Daily Mirror, I read that the £50B promised to our bankers a few days ago, had mushroomed to a mammoth £500B - about the equivalent of a year's public spending. The small print assured me that the cash is not all about saving the necks of those responsible for causing the crisis but about protecting the most vulnerable in our society – let’s hope so! But you can’t help thinking that eventually, public services will suffer, and that Joe Public will be picking up the bill.

But what if there was no instant bailout, and what if we didn’t live in the 4th richest economy in the world - but a poor country - what happens then?

Many countries in the developing world have been facing that problem for decades, crippling debt, caused by the same reckless lending decisions that has fuelled our crisis, and just like in the UK, is hurting the most vulnerable people.

While our credit crunch will undoubtedly cause real hardship, it does not compare to the catastrophic consequences people face in poor countries, caught in the debt pit - with little hope of climbing out. Under the current international schemes it is impossible to cancel hundreds of billions of unpayable debt and a new way of dealing with the problem is urgently needed. At the end of November a major UN conference in Doha will discuss how the system of global finance could work in the interest of development. It has the potential to set the agenda for international development discussions for years to come, and the Department for International Development is deciding right now what the UK government will say at that meeting.
Developing countries are still stuck in the debt trap because the odds remain stacked against them and the route to debt cancellation is governed by the same wealthy, powerful countries that made the loans and seek their repayment. So despite the fact that their often-reckless lending behaviour was responsible for much of the spiralling debts of poor countries, lenders are not accountable to anyone, and there is no penalty imposed on them for lending carelessly. Today the interconnections of the global financial system - and the consequences of unregulated and reckless lending - are more evident than ever before. It’s time for some of the political will given to bailing out private banks to be put towards lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

The uncomfortable truth is that we are all part of the same system that causes the problem, as Alan Alexander explains on our previous page, and if developing countries are to recover from their own financial crisis and meet their people's basic needs we have to be part of the solution .

A fairer system for dealing with global debt needs to be supported at the UN conference in November, and the Labour Government, who in recent years have cancelled debt for some of the world’s poorest countries, must continue to lead the way in the global fight against the debt trap for developing countries and the poverty and destruction that it causes. There has never been a more important time for Labour to be true to its principles