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In September last year, Tom Woodroffe, the UK Ambassador to the ECOSOC, declared the UK’s commitment to delivering the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. 

Why are we bringing this up now, more than five months after the event?  To remind readers that our government is not working towards goals that would benefit UK citizens, it is working towards the goals that will benefit the United Nations (“UN”). 

As we will hopefully demonstrate, the goal of the UN, or at least one of them, has always been depopulation.

We have not given our approval that this is how our public funds should be used or that civil servants’ time should be occupied fulfilling the United Nations’ desires.  The UK government has committed us, without our consent or authority, to achieve destructive goals set by unelected, unaccountable and largely hidden from public view bureaucrats and oligarchs.  Goals which threaten our inalienable rights and freedoms, as well as our livelihoods, quality of life and even our lives.

Our government appears to have forgotten that the primary source of public funds comes from various taxes we pay such as income tax, national insurance contributions and value-added tax.  Only about £100 billion of the £1 trillion raised by the government is not from taxes, i.e., non-tax receipts.  We pay these taxes in good faith assuming the government will use the money to the benefit of the UK and its citizens.

Tom Woodroffe’s Speech

Tom Woodroffe was appointed as the UK’s Ambassador to the Economic and Social Council (“ECOSOC”) in July 2019. It was his second appointment to the UN in New York, having previously covered human rights and gender issues.

Previously Woodroffe served as the Head of the UK’s Syria Overseas Network in Istanbul, as Deputy Head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Conflict Department, as head of the Office of the Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict and various roles in the FCO’s UN and human rights departments.

ECOSOC is one of the six UN principal organs.  It is responsible for the direction and coordination of the economic, social, humanitarian, and cultural activities carried out by the UN and is the UN’s largest and most complex subsidiary body.

Related: Organisations that make up the UN World Government System

It was established by the 1945 UN Charter which allows ECOSOC to grant consultative status to nongovernmental organisations (“NGOs”).

At the UN General Assembly meeting on the SDG Summit Political Declaration held in September 2023, Woodroffe gave a speech.

The Summit aimed to review the state of the Sustainable Development Goals (“SDGs”) and provide high-level political guidance on transformative and accelerated actions leading up to the 2030 deadline for achieving the SDGs. The declaration highlighted the collective commitment to “build a sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous world by 2030,” with a strong focus on the means of implementation, particularly on financing for development.

“The UK remains fully committed to delivering the universal vision for economic, environmental, and social development set out in Agenda 2030 and the SDGs. With seven years to go, our collective promises are in jeopardy. We need robust political will and commitment to greater action to get them back on track,”  Woodroffe told the Summit.

“The declaration includes a number of ambitious and welcome commitments which should provide the impetus to do so,” he said.

UK citizens, did you give Woodroffe the authority to commit you to delivering the UN’s universal vision?  Woodroffe called for “robust political will and commitment.” Woodroffe is not an elected representative of the British people.  Does he understand that the “political will and commitment” cannot be given by a government unless the people have permitted them?

Now onto the business end of Agenda 2030.  “The UK recognises how important finance is to achieving the 2030 agenda,” Woodroffe said.

He boasted that “we are” driving reforms of the multilateral development banks (“MBDs”), including “making the MDBs … better able to mobilise private investment.”  Private investors will always seek to maximise their profit regardless of the cost to society so his statement raises the questions of what “mobilise” means, exactly, and who are the private investors he’s referring to. 

“We are also encouraging the MDBs, NDBs [national development banks], and all other creditors to offer climate-resilient debt clauses to pause debt payments when disaster strikes. And that is also why, at the G20, our Prime Minister announced a further $2 billion for the Green Climate Fund,” Woodroffe said.

Pausing debt payments is not an act of charity.  Interest is charged on the outstanding balance, so a pause in repayments increases the debt while increasing the investor’s earnings.  Woodroffe did not call for a pause in the accruing of interest, he simply called for a pause in scheduled repayments.  The larger the debt and the longer it is outstanding, the higher the interest charged and the more the indebted country has to pay back.  Framing the ability of the investor to make more money as “climate-resistant debt” is psychobabble and, quite frankly, dishonest.

The Green Climate Fund was established in 2010 as part of the financial mechanism of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”) and serves in the same function for the Paris Agreement. Its purpose is to further the UN goal of socialist redistribution in the name of sustainable development.

“The Green Climate Fund consists of 100 billion US dollars a year to be transferred from the developed world to compensate for the damage that’s been done to the climate of the developing world, basically,” the late Prof. Bates explained in 2021.  Adding that it is because of these economic implications, the enormous sums of money involved, that any scientist who dares to challenge the UN’s climate change narrative has to be prepared for vilification and, perhaps, threats.

Woodroffe told the UN General Assembly that “we must [ ] ensure that [the finance] is invested in areas which will accelerate progress across all the goals, such as gender equality, science and data, education, health, food security, and renewable energy. We must rapidly cut emissions, decarbonise, and transition to renewable energy to keep 1.5 degrees in reach.”

In 2022, DownToEarth noted that climate finance, the Green Climate Fund being one of the largest vehicles, has been plagued with problems of non-transparency, dubious categorisations of diverse funding under the “climate” banner and a greater proportion of loans versus grants that can catch a developing nation in a “climate debt trap.”  

Woodroffe’s encouragement that lenders offer “climate-resistant debt” exacerbates the “climate debt trap” that has already been identified as one of the problems with climate finance.

Woodroffe reiterated his commitment to the UN’s dystopian plans as if he were speaking on behalf of all 68 million UK residents.

“The UK remains committed to our 2013 nationally determined contribution, reaching net zero by 2050 and supporting developing countries to achieve their climate and biodiversity ambitions. We would have liked to see the declaration reflect the need for continued high policy ambition to tackle climate change and limit global temperature risk as we look towards a critical COP 28,” he said.

He pushed gender equality ideology. 

“Given the importance of gender equality to accelerating progress across the goals and to their delivery, we are also disappointed that the declaration does not represent the full range of gender commitments we collectively made in Agenda 2030,” he said.

Why have we dared to call gender equality an ideology?  Because no one has paused long enough to ask women if they want the sort of equality envisioned by government bureaucrats, academics and many feminist advocates.

In Western nations it is an equality-by-the-numbers approach that presumes women want absolute parity in all things measurable, and that the average woman wants to work as many hours as the average man, that they want to be CEOs, heads of state, surgeons and Cabinet heads just as much as men do.  What about women who want to work part-time or not at all?  Have their wishes been factored into the equality-by-the-numbers?

In a 2016 article, Nikita Coulombe asked the question: Do women really want equality? “It’s a question I think every one of us needs to ask ourselves because frankly, I don’t think many of us do,” she wrote.  It seems a wise question to ask before bureaucrats push all women into a life they would never choose for themselves, while at the same time discriminating against men to achieve “the numbers.”

Woodroffe concluded by rattling off a list of yet more summits and meetings to keep banging the “universal vision” drum.  None of which will be of benefit to us and, most likely, all paid for out of public funds.

“It will be critical for us to build on our 2050 agreements as we go into the second committee this year, CSW and ICPD30 next year, the proposed social summit, and indeed the Summit of the Future, in order to be sure we really do leave no one behind,” he said.

Stanley Johnson, Rockefeller and the United Nations

ICPD30 refers to the review of 30 years of International Conference on Population and Development (“ICPD”) achievements. In April 2024, the 57th Session of the Commission on Population and Development (“CPD”) will be dedicated to assessing the status of 30 years of ICPD implementation. The global ICPD30 report will be distributed to UN member states and multiple stakeholders and factored into the 79th General Assembly, the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and the Summit of the Future in 2024.

Thirty years ago, in 1994, the UN coordinated the ICPD which was held in Cairo.  It created a wide-ranging Programme of Action which put population policies at the heart of the struggle for social development.  The Programme of Action is the steering document for the United Nations Population Fund (“UNFPA”).

UNFPA describes ICPD as the “landmark” conference that “transformed global thinking on population and development issues and defined a bold agenda, placing people’s dignity and rights at the heart of sustainable development.”  But dignity and rights were not the objective of the conference – the objective was to ratify a depopulation policy.

Stanley Johnson, the former UK prime minister’s father, wrote a book about the conference recounting what actually happened in Cairo and how it was achieved.  Google Books summarises Johnson’s book as follows:

The early chapters look in some detail at the preparations for Cairo, in the context of over three decades of attempts to integrate population, development and environmental issues.

Focusing on the key controversial questions, including abortion, contraception and adolescent sex, it examines the ways in which attempts were made to reconcile opposing positions.

Setting the discussion in a much wider context, it argues that Cairo witnessed a “quantum leap” in the way the population issue is seen, and the need to give them control over their own lives – central to the discussion about population, resources and development.

The Programme of Action which emerged from the conference, particularly the parts dealing with gender issues … is the most forward-looking ever adopted.

The Politics of Population, Cairo 1994, Google Books

To understand what “population issues” were being referred to, we need to go back a couple of decades.

Johnson was working at the World Bank when in 1968 he was invited to work with John D. Rockefeller III, who was renowned for his work at the Population Council. The Population Council was an expression of Rockefeller’s interest in global population growth, family planning and the health of developing nations.

In 1968, Rockefeller was appointed by the United Nations Association of the United States to chair a National Policy Panel on World Population.

“The Panel was asked to consider the role of the UN in helping the world to come to grips with the population problem,” Johnson said in an interview in 2014.   “You see, at the end of the ’60s, as now, we were faced with burgeoning populations around the world,” he added.

“The main outcome of the Panel,” Johnson said, “was a report which said the UN should establish a Population Agency … [which they called] the UN Fund for Population Activities, or UNFPA.” 

Johnson said he was the main author of the report which later in the interview he referred to as the “Rockefeller Report.”

“To give Richard Nixon credit – he was President at the time, of course – within days of our publishing the report, he sent a message to Congress called the Presidential Message on Population, where he said he was encouraged by the “scope and thrust” of the Rockefeller Report and that the United States would put every effort into funding the UNFPA and supporting its work. And really within days, the UNFPA was established. It was the United Nations Fund for Population Activities in those days; now it is just called the United Nations Population Fund,” Johnson said.

What Johnson is admitting is that he wrote a report for a depopulation policy that was the foundation for the creation of UNFPA.

The United States, the United Nations and Depopulation

UNFPA began as a trust fund in July of 1967. Its administration was entrusted to the United Nations Development Program.  In 1972 the program was placed under the General Assembly’s authority and the UNDP Governing Council was named as its governing body. In 1987, the name was changed to the United Nations Population Fund.

In June 1973 a meeting was held where General William Draper and his colleagues presented their views that the population explosion in developing countries was not only a threat to US interests in the economics and in the development of those countries but also, more fundamentally, presented a danger to the United States’ politico-military interests.

In 1974, The Kissinger Report, undertaken at the direction of President Nixon, was published which became official US policy in 1975.  The report stated: “The memorandum and subsequent policies developed from the report were observed as a way the United States could use human population reduction to limit the political power of undeveloped nations, ensure the easy extraction of foreign natural resources, prevent young anti-establishment individuals from being born, and to protect American businesses abroad from interference from nations seeking to support their growing populations.”

The Kissinger Report also stated it is “desirable in terms of US interests” to work with the UNFPA which already had projects in more than 70 countries.

Pressure to develop a global strategy of population reduction was advanced to the Nixon Administration by Major General William Draper, who had been instrumental in establishing UNFPA. General Draper is also credited with the idea of making the UN World Conference on Population, held in Bucharest in 1974.  The Bucharest conference led eventually to the historic ICPD in Cairo in 1994.

Further reading:

• The Kissinger Report: US government’s policy to depopulate the world
• Did Stanley Johnson’s report for the UN initiate the US depopulation policy and The Kissinger Report?

Featured image: Tom Woodroffe (left). Stanley Johnson (centre).  Henry Kissinger (right).