IN a debate in the Commons last Friday, Gordon Brown referred to a photograph in the genocide museum in Kigali, Rwanda.

The photograph in question is of a boy called David, and underneath is a very brief summary: he was ten; his favourite sport was football; he liked to make people laugh; his ambition was to be a doctor; he suffered death by mutilation; and that his last known words were “the United Nations are coming to help us”.

As Mr Brown pointed out, David believed the international community was coming to his rescue. He believed when we made promises, we would keep them. It is to our shame that he died, believing that help would come when it never did.

The debate was on the second reading of a bill which would place a statutory duty on the government to spend 0.7 per cent on our national income on overseas aid. This target was first set by the British Council of Churches back in the 1950s, in 1970 it was adopted by the general assembly of the United Nations, and we are now one of the very fewcountries that have achieved it. Mr Brown pointed out it is too late to keep our promises to David, but that the bill was about how we keep the promises we have made.

What we were talking about was whether the parties that signed pledges are prepared to keep them. I believe profoundly that we should. I spent last week in Jordan and Lebanon visiting projects that are being paid for with British taxpayers’ money out of the UK international development budget.

Ordinarily we reserve aid for the poorest countries in the world. The reason for the exception is that these two countries have borne much of the brunt of the Syrian refugee crisis as millions have fled the fighting. They are already hosts to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and this new flood has put huge pressure on their infrastructure and municipal services. I went to see schools that are running two shifts per day in order to accommodate tens of thousands of Syrian children in addition to their own.

I saw the desperate conditions in the camps as winter approaches. Worst of all, I visited the United Nations registration centre in Beirut where the newly-arrived refugees come to register and seek assistance. It was harrowing listening to the dreadful accounts of the refugees whose homes had been destroyed, their possessions stolen at checkpoints, sons taken to be fighters, or taken because they were suspected of being fighters, and daughters taken to satisfy the needs of rebels.

So far only just more than one-third of the UN’s budget to meet the needs of the refugees is funded. Next week we will be going the UN General Assembly to raise more money and pledge more of our own, to pay for the education of Syrian refugee children so that there should not be a “lost generation’.

The international community and the UN must not let these children down, in the way that David was let down.