Boris Johnson will soon be rolling out a red, white and blue carpet for Joe Biden and the other guests coming to these shores for the G7 summit, an event the prime minister hopes to exploit to suggest that Brexit Britain can still be a mover, a shaker and even a leader on the world stage.
There was an arena in which, until recently, the UK was entitled to boast that it was all of those things. Britain had earned the right to be regarded as a global pioneer and a country that not only aspired to “punch above its weight”, but genuinely did. It was at a meeting of the rich democracies’ club in Scotland in 2005 that Tony Blair cajoled the other leaders to commit to big increases in international aid. The signatories included George W Bush, a Republican US president, Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist French one, and Silvio Berlusconi, the bunga-bunga prime minister of Italy. This was not an act of charity, but of self-interested altruism. The pledge recognised that it is in the long-term interests of the affluent democracies for developing countries to be less exposed to poverty, disease, instability, conflict and extremism.
Gordon Brown stuck to the commitment even after the great crash of 2008 triggered the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. David Cameron enshrined in law the undertaking to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of national income on aid. He did so even as his government imposed austerity at home. When rightwing Tories complained, their then leader riposted that it would be morally reprehensible for a wealthy country such as Britain to try to balance its books on the backs of the world’s poor. The commitment continued under Theresa May and made it into the 2019 Tory manifesto signed by Boris Johnson. As we know, “my word is my bond” is not a motto by which he has lived his life. The pledge was cast aside last year, the Covid-induced “domestic fiscal emergency” being deployed by Rishi Sunak as the justification for inflicting devastating reductions in the support for some of the world’s most marginalised people. No other major western government has thought it sensible or ethical to cut international aid in the middle of a pandemic. A prime minister not as impervious to embarrassment as Mr Johnson might squirm at the thought of hosting the G7 when its other members are responding to the crisis by sustaining or boosting their aid budgets.
The cuts have come in two waves. There was a first last year in response to the expected contraction in the economy and a decision to switch aid spending to dealing with the pandemic. The second wave, the consequence of breaking what is supposed to be a legally binding commitment to the UN target, has been happening since the beginning of this year. The overall effect is to take out about a third of the aid budget over just two years. That would be extremely painful even if it were done carefully and with a view to protecting the most fragile countries. The evidence suggests that the cuts are being executed with a slapdash crudity that magnifies the damage and inflicts the worst of them on the most vulnerable. The government’s own commission on aid impact has just released a withering report into the first wave of cuts last summer. Civil servants were given no more than seven working days to decide where the axe should fall, among those cuts a £730m reduction in bilateral aid based on economic forecasts that proved to be too gloomy. Ministers spent just seven hours discussing £2.9bn of cuts, which were then predominantly imposed on the world’s poorest countries, the opposite of what they said would happen.
Ministers insist that Britain’s aid budget will still be among the largest, but that argument conceals as much as it reveals. Contributions for UN peacekeeping missions are treated as aid. So is international support for tackling the climate crisis. The government has also chosen to count vaccine donations to Covax against the aid budget. The result is that the severest cuts are being concentrated in areas that are not ringfenced, which means they are falling on humanitarian support. Programmes to combat malaria, polio and HIV are being slashed to near-nothing. Support in Yemen, site of the world’s most severe humanitarian emergency, is being reduced by 56%. Funding for the provision of life-saving clean water and reliable sanitation has been reduced by more than four-fifths, not a smart idea when the world is in the grip of a pandemic. Mr Johnson has declared the education of girls to be one of his personal priorities. He even put that supposed commitment into the mouth of Her Majesty when she read out his Queen’s speech. Yet that budget is also being sliced. There is also a whopping 85% reduction in support for family planning and sexual health, which play critical roles in sustaining girls’ education in the developing world.
While this has a big impact in some of the world’s most impoverished countries, the saving on the UK’s balance sheet is trivial in the scheme of things. The cash saving from cuts to the aid budget will be about £4bn this year, barely 1% of the government spend on tackling the virus and supporting the economy here. It can hardly be said that the UK’s fiscal credibility stands or falls on delivering these cuts.
This feeds the suspicion that this is not really about the money. A noisy section of the Tory party and its media has never liked the commitment and neither has the Treasury. One former foreign office minister says: “The Treasury has always loathed it because it is hypothecation and they hate being told that a set amount of money must be spent in any one area.”
They saw an opportunity to strike by putting the aid budget on the table in the negotiations between Rishi Sunak and Mr Johnson about how much more money could be directed towards defence. According to some inside accounts, this boiled down to the chancellor telling the prime minister that he could only have more cash for the military if he raided aid.
“There’s also the low politics of this,” observes one former cabinet minister. “There were people at Number 10 who saw a crude appeal in cutting aid for foreign countries in order to spend money on shiny new weapons for our boys. Let’s be blunt. That plays very well with the Tory newspapers and some of our voters.”
Another former cabinet minister agrees: “It is the product of utterly cynical thinking. It’s got nothing to do with economics. It’s because they think aid cuts go down well in the red wall seats.”
If there is anything consoling to take away from this, it is the revelation that there is still an internationalist-minded cohort of Tory MPs who don’t like what these cuts say about the values of their party and who will rebel if they get the opportunity. In a recent Commons debate, the Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell invited the chancellor to think about the “very savage” damage being done to both “the poorest people in the world” and “Britain’s reputation”. Mr Mitchell is a former international development secretary, so he knows his subject. He is also a former chief whip, so he knows how to count heads. It would take 44 Conservative MPs combining with the opposition parties to defeat the government. Remarks one of the Tory dissenters: “We’ve probably got that number and the government knows we’ve probably got that number, which is why they are running shy of a vote.”
Ministers are swerving a reckoning in parliament by arguing that they are not changing the target, but choosing to miss it for an unspecified amount of time, a shameless exercise in semantics. The case that the government is behaving unlawfully could be taken to court, but it would likely take at least a year to secure a verdict. The Tory rebels are hoping to find a piece of legislation to which they can attach an amendment designed to force a government retreat. “We are lying in wait for an amendment,” says one of them.
Rather than risk being ambushed in parliament or rebuked in court, the government could instead choose to do the right thing. Thanks to a fast economic rebound, the outlook for the national finances is looking brighter than it did when these cuts were announced. Restoring the commitment to the aid target wouldn’t undo the damage that the prime minister and chancellor have already perpetrated but it would avoid a lot more harm. And the government’s stated ambition to be “a force for good in the world” wouldn’t ring so hollow as it does today.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
