To mark UN Day on 24 October the London School of Economics (LSE) youth branch, one of the largest in the country, organised a full day of activities. This included collecting signatures for UNA-UK's petition to show support for the UN.
In the evening UNA-UK’s Executive Director, Phil Mulligan, spoke to a group of 60 students on ‘The UN you do not normally hear about’. With former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, having delivered an address to LSE earlier in the month focused on peacekeeping and Syria, Mulligan was able to talk more about the unsung work of the UN which feeds over 96 million people a year, shelters over 42 million refugees, and provides global agreements and institutional architecture vital for many aspects of modern life.
Phil Mulligan highlighted the under-reported successes of the UN, including the consolidation of four UN agencies into the newly created UN Women and the relatively successful transition into independent statehood of South Sudan. He also made the point that, while some may see it as large and bureaucratic, the UN actually delivers a huge amount of work with relatively few resources. The entire cost of all UN peacekeeping operations is less than the budget of the London Metropolitan Police, for example, and the UN’s complete operational budget is less than half the costs of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Whilst acknowledging the need for improvements to certain UN systems, Phil Mulligan used the opportunity to stress that, given the increasingly complex and interconnected nature of geopolitics, a world without the UN would now be unimaginable.
