7 hours ago
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The savagely deep cuts that Keir Starmer has announced to the international aid budget make a mockery of the pledge his party made to the British people in its manifesto. Then, it promised to restore development spending at the level of 0.7% of gross national income “as soon as fiscal circumstances allow”. On Tuesday the prime minister stood in front of parliament and announced that he will cut it from 0.5% to 0.3% of GDP. In the same manifesto, Labour made a commitment to “rebuild Britain’s reputation on international development with a new approach based on genuine respect and partnership with the global south”. This week, the government turned its back on it.
Of course, I understand the argument that defence spending has to be increased, but cutting our aid budget still further when governments around the world are cutting theirs too will only increase division in our already deeply divided world. More than that, cutting aid amounts to a collective betrayal of the most vulnerable and dispossessed by western leaders.
Too often, foreign aid is thought about through a colonial mindset – western saviours giving generously to the needy. The reality is that a great many people are now reaching out for help because of wars that the west has instigated, or a climate catastrophe rendered inevitable by our industries.
Foreign aid – as wise Conservative and Labour leaders have understood in the past – has never been simply about global solidarity, but also cold national self-interest. As Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary in the last Conservative government, has said: “Far from giving money away, it is an investment … International development connects the dots between prosperity, security and migration across the world. It is a recognition that what happens over there, for good or ill, will repercuss over here.”
Starmer’s decision to cut back international aid closely follows – and is presumably inspired by – Donald Trump’s similar cuts to USAid, the US agency for international development. That agency was established in 1961 by Trump’s illustrious predecessor John F Kennedy, a realist who understood that a stable world – in which the rich did not spurn the most desperate, the planet was protected and nations pulled together on issues such as food standards and communicable diseases – was in the best interests of America and the west generally.
Kennedy was a war hero – he won the Purple Heart – and a member of a generation that yearned for a more peaceful future. At the height of the cold war, he could see that if America didn’t advance its soft power through aid and socioeconomic development, then it would be the Soviet Union that would fill the vacuum. If the west abdicates its responsibilities now, it will leave a vacuum that may well be filled by what America perceives as its current greatest threat: China. If China makes itself necessary to communities struggling to get back on their feet, it will make itself still more powerful, economically, as well as politically and ideologically.
The immediate casualties of Trump’s decision will of course be those who had depended the most on USAid, one of the largest and most indispensable official aid agencies in the world. Those hardest and most immediately hit will be in places such as Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria and Gaza. It doesn’t take a vast amount of imagination to understand – given what life is now like in all these locations – that UK cuts to the tune of billions of pounds will result in still more lives lost.
Populism makes our politicians focus on symptoms, rather than causes. The easy, visible targets, such as migrants making the Channel crossing, are easy to rail against, but they will only be stopped when the causes are addressed. Foreign aid addresses the causes directly by helping people to survive and even prosper in their own communities, by making inhabitable once again parts of the world that are now uninhabitable.
Bending to populist pressure may seem the pragmatic thing to do, but real political leadership means standing firm in our commitment to global justice and demonstrating how Britain can be a global force for good in our world. The pressure on Starmer not to increase taxes still further is intense, but spending less on medicines and more on missiles is a short-termist solution and a false economy.
Organisations such as Oxfam will do everything within our power to fill the gap in the UK and other nations’ international aid budgets, but we cannot do it alone. How right Kennedy was when he said that “in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal”. Governments around the world need to adjust quickly to new realities, but cutting foreign aid is not the answer.
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Dr Halima Begum is the chief executive of Oxfam GB
