Annaliese Dodds’s resignation as minister for international development – over the prime minister’s bid to use the foreign aid budget to boost defence spending – comes as little surprise to me.
Labour’s disgraceful and cynical attempt to balance the books on the backs of the poorest people in the world has demeaned the party’s reputation. Shame on them – and kudos to a politician of decency and principle.
Defence of the realm is the number one priority for any government. I fully support the prime minister’s increase in defence spending at this most precarious moment in my 35 years as an MP.
But doing so at the expense of the foreign aid budget is wrong. It is also deeply cynical. Deploying the pretext of having to make “painful” and “necessary” decisions in a world full of peril, Keir Starmer reverted to that most predictable of laments: he had no choice.
That is disingenuous. I can identify several measures that would have raised revenue to the levels needed. For example, the former chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, pointed out that a return to the same number of working-age welfare recipients as before Covid – surely not an outrageous proposition – would save £40bn of taxpayers’ money. Similarly, the former defence secretary Grant Shapps has referred to the previous government’s fully costed plan for efficiency savings across the civil service.
In seeking to avoid those battles, the government instead opted to take an axe to the lowest-hanging political fruit. Foreign aid is an easy target, least likely to arouse mass resistance and most likely to appeal to populist sensibilities across the political spectrum. The prime minister made that choice, and that choice is egregious on so many levels.
First, it fundamentally misreads the mechanics of international security. If military hard power is the foundation of defence, international development – or soft power – is its bedrock. Hard and soft are two sides of the same coin; each plays a distinct yet interlinking part in the international security apparatus, and if either is depleted, the whole edifice comes undone.
The role of development is to help build prosperous and conflict-free societies over there so we are safe and prosperous over here. Starting with keeping young children healthy through vaccinations, then focusing on education – particularly of girls which leads to the nurturing of aspiration – and ultimately creating opportunities for jobs and economic growth supported by private sector investment, international development is predicated on the idea that prosperous societies are secure societies, and secure societies are less likely to experience mass migration, export extremist ideologies, and allow infectious diseases to spread far and wide.
It follows that cutting foreign aid will achieve the opposite: fuelling rather than alleviating poverty, disease, conflict and migration. If Pandora’s box is unleashed, the galloping escalation of misery and suffering will be our problem too.
If we pull the plug on lifesaving vaccination programmes, we expose ourselves to the threat of diseases that could have been stopped at source. If humanitarian funding is cut in areas of famine, vulnerable, starving children are more likely to be recruited by Isis or al-Qaeda. These evil outfits thrive on the desperation of others, and we know that in sub-Saharan Africa it is the poorest countries that are in the firmest grip of violent extremists. To paraphrase President Trump’s earlier defence secretary General Mattis’s famous line: the more we cut aid, the more we must spend on ammunition.
Reaching this point of instability and breakdown will make it nigh on impossible to curb the migration crisis that will result as people seek safer shores. And there is an irony for us in Britain who are rightly so exercised by migration but cannot connect the dots between poverty, conflict and the movement of desperate people.
Second, we must ask: who will benefit from these aid cuts? The answer is Russia and China. The foreign secretary himself warned that spaces we vacate would be filled by our adversaries. History will judge this to be a strategic disaster of our own making.
Finally, aid cuts will result in many lives being lost. I’ve always argued that we must never balance the books on the backs of the world’s poorest. It was the reason I opposed the foreign aid cuts that my own government made in 2021 as well as the vaporisation of the Department for International Development.
My protestations received much support across the House, including from the then leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, who made a brilliant speech extolling the indispensability of UK soft power. And here’s the thing. The UK was good at soft power. We were respected around the world for our expertise and leadership. We had suffered some blows but started to make a comeback, and I had high hopes that the Labour government would continue on the road to restoring the UK’s reputation in the world. Alas, that hope and the opportunity to help the poorest and most wretched in the world lies in the gutter. Britain is all the weaker for it.
The Independent receives funding from The Gates Foundation to help support its reporting on international aid, maternal health and the climate crisis in low and middle-income countries. All of the journalism is editorially independent.
