This July will mark the 20th anniversary of the Make Poverty History campaign which saw international development high on the UK’s political agenda. But with the Starmer government’s drastic aid cuts, the issue is in danger of being downgraded in UK public life. This long read by Jon Barnes looks at the cuts and the questions they raise for the direction of UK politics under Labour.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s flagship pitch for Labour foreign policy has been “progressive realism”, and last autumn the NGO network BOND held a Party conference event to discuss what his US-published tract meant for reinvigorating UK support for sustainable development under Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s newly elected government.
The development community, already confronted by the dark clarity of the UK’s ongoing complicity with Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, has now received another alarming sign of Labour’s intentions. Starmer, following suit with Donald Trump’s assault on the USAID development agency as part of his reactionary overhaul of the US state, issued his own ruthless Executive Order in making his late February visit to Washington: a 40 per cent new cut in the UK’s international aid budget.
Building on the doldrums of the Johnson-Truss-Sunak era, Starmer’s no-vote announcement will sink the UK’s global development spending to its lowest since the Thatcher years. The ‘savings’ from “life-saving aid”, to use the stock slogan rightly wielded by NGOs to press its moral case, will become a magic-money tree to help fund the government’s plan to increase ‘defence’ expenditure immediately to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027.
Regressive nihilism
Lammy, in keeping with his view that the UK must engage with a messy and multipolar world as it is, without delusions about what is progressively achievable, claimed the sharp aid-to-defence tilt to be a visionary generational masterclass in Labour navigating the fog of uncertain geopolitical times. He presented this new raid on aid as a pragmatically unfortunate casualty of having to deal with international security dangers as an existential priority. Yet only weeks before, Lammy had cautioned that slashing USAID would be a “strategic mistake”.
As the world grapples with rising inequalities, economic instability, and environmental and climate crises exacerbating conflict, the regressive nihilism of Starmer’s surgical strike is hard to overstate. A prime concern is the devastation the cuts will wreak on people across the world. Some 600,000 lives are at stake, according to an assessment by ONE.
But Starmer’s out-of-sight-out-of-mind decision on aid also raises disturbing questions about the degraded state of elite politics in the UK and its dwindling ability to tackle such intertwined problems affecting people, not just in the Global South but also the UK.
Tellingly, Starmer’s edict has coincided with Labour’s controversial raft of UK welfare cuts. The combined assault requires a joint response, given the interconnected damage of fiscal discipline at home and abroad. As left-wing MPs and NGO aid cut critics have both argued, taxing the very rich would have obviated any need for the measures.
Lasting damage
Viewed in isolation, the decision on aid stands to inflict not just lasting damage on the UK’s own official support for development but also to bolster an alarming international trend. Alongside the US and the UK, major European donor governments are cutting aid and repurposing its use to suit their own narrowly defined ‘national’ interests, rather than the wellbeing and empowerment of people in the so-called Global South.
Seen in historical terms, this domino effect, given the traditional importance of aid hitherto, could irreversibly undermine global development co-operation as a recognised, if contested, feature of the post-war ‘liberal’ international order. Not enough attention has been paid to this danger amid the UK media’s frenzied focus on Trump’s disruptive challenge to US-European ‘security’ arrangements viewed as a common-sense pillar of the settlement.
Equally, it is important to look at the wider impact at home of the UK government’s role in such a downward spiral. Media reporting, hard-wired on the here-and-now of Westminster politics and elite-framed foreign policy debates, has not fully drawn out the political significance of Labour’s move, specifically for the standing of development in UK statecraft.
Whatever the pros and cons of aid, campaigns to boost its amount and ensure its focus and impact on tackling global poverty and injustice have been an emblematic feature of development’s hard-won rise since the 1960s as an increasingly influential, albeit subordinate, public policy matter in UK politics. The aid cuts can thus be seen as the sharp end of a wider attempt to drastically overhaul the terms of the UK’s role on sustainable development, if not permanently downgrade the issue’s status in public life.
A wind-back of the clock is worthwhile to highlight the scale of today’s reversal. Such retrospective benchmarks ought to be more newsworthy in coverage of Labour’s latest cuts.
From ascendancy to reversal
This July will mark the 20th anniversary of the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign targeting the Blair government-chaired Gleneagles summit of the G8 group of economic powers (then, ironically, including Russia). MPH built on the impetus of 1990s calls for Third World debt cancellation and New Labour’s jewel-in-the-crown 1997 establishment of the Department for International Development (DfID) as a champion ministry independent of the Foreign Office. The campaign was a high-water mark for the mobilisation of much of the UK’s development movement and its engagement with the Labour government, despite mixed and critical views of the summit’s global outcomes on aid and debt and particularly trade.
Remarkably, by the time of the campaign on the next UK-chaired G8 summit in 2013, David Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government was making good Labour’s pledge to increase development spending to 0.7 per cent of gross national income, honouring the UN’s target for economically rich country contributions. In 2015, Parliament even enshrined the 0.7 of GNI commitment in law, making the UK the first G7 country to do so.
That year, Cameron’s fresh Tory government, engaged by NGOs, also backed the launch of the UN’s Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs, for all their gaps and ambiguities, were more sweeping in policy coverage and ambition than the ‘basic needs’ social spending approach of the UN’s earlier millennium framework on extreme poverty. The new goals, invoking the need for firmer action on interrelated economic growth, inequality, climate, democratic governance and development financing challenges, had a rights-based and progressive social democratic feel.
As became clear, the appearance of sustained political momentum across the UK political spectrum proved brittle. A media-amplified Tory right-wing backlash culminated, amid these forces’ nativist Brexit politics, in Boris Johnson’s 2020 abolition of DfID and his launch of aid cuts then continued by his prime ministerial successors. At the time, Labour, now led by Starmer, had joined Tory rebels in supporting major parliamentary opposition backed by NGOs. Labour MPs had echoed their charges of “vandalism”.
Today, however, Starmer, instead of repairing the damage, has given the wrecking ball an even harder swing.
Labour’s extension of the cuts, from the 0.5 per cent of GNI left by the Tories to an even uncertain 0.3, may be more drastic still if the government cannot or will not tackle the Tories’ scandalous use of overseas development money to pay UK-based asylum and refugee costs. Such a failure, not unthinkable in view of the Home Office’s predatory appropriation of funds and its tied-in arrangements with private contractors, would mean overseas development spending could end up as low as 0.2 or a paltry 0.15 per cent.
In resigning from her already downgraded portfolio as development minister, Anneliese Dodds was straining credulity with her consolation belief that Starmer was “not ideologically opposed to aid”. Chancellor Rachel Reeves gave the lie to this charitable view with her spring statement, which insisted on full immediate aid cuts rather than the gradual introduction proposed by NGOs to give partners time to adjust to their punishing impact.
Come what may, the Labour leadership has expected its MPs to swallow the aid decision as it has done over the welfare cuts. Many Labour MPs are disgruntled, some with a background in development, but outright opposition is tempered by awareness that left Labour rebels have been disciplined for their stand on welfare.
Broken promises, deliberate choices: the end of a fragile consensus
NGOs have been left reeling by Starmer’s likely coup de grâce against 0.7 spending. Their indignation at claims of current unaffordability on the part of the UK as one of the richest countries in the world has been matched by sharp protests of betrayal.
Only last September, Starmer had vowed at the UN to “return the UK to responsible global leadership”, voicing the “Britain is Back” rhetoric of Labour’s election manifesto which had pledged to restore “Britain’s global leadership on development as a key part of our plan to reconnect with our allies and partners”. Meanwhile, Lammy’s dangled invocation of the 0.7 target since 2022 had lulled NGOs into hoping that Labour would take at least some steps to resume such a spend over the current parliamentary term.
In a bid to re-mobilise concern over this new round of cuts, NGO reactions, along with aid-supportive media observers, MPs and public figures, have argued that slashing good-for-the-world, good-for-Britain aid is self-defeating. It will undermine the government’s own interests in boosting supposed external sources of growth, tackling international instability, and furthering the UK’s much vaunted ‘soft power’ diplomatic influence abroad.
High-level political support for aid still exists in Westminster along these lines. This is the residual legacy of past NGO campaigns during Tory rule mobilising MPs across parties. NGO engagement of the Tory-created Coalition for Global Prosperity, for example, saw the involvement of New Labour figures, advisers and lobby groups in its ranks and events. But at this stage, it is hard to envisage concerted joint political pressure of this kind, aimed at restoring aid’s still legally mandated 0.7 volume, achieving success.
After all, back in 2022, Tory rebels surrendered vital ground by accepting their government’s disingenuous compromise, to avoid charges of a legal breach, that its cuts to 0.5 could be reversed if fiscal circumstances allowed. This was an attempt to place an indefinite cap on aid spending, a position that Lammy rapidly adopted with a progressive realist sleight of hand, spinning the retreat as a positive “as soon-as-possible” commitment to the 0.7 target.
This informal closing of political ranks provided further confirmation of how elusive the search for a cross-party consensus on aid and development – pursued by much of the development community in anticipation of Tory rule following the 2008 financial crisis – had become. As much as money cut, the issue was political capital being drained away.
Today, with Starmer pushing Labour’s programme relentlessly rightwards on an expanding range of fronts, it should be recognised that the government is not committing misplaced errors or regrettably having to break promises on aid due to circumstances beyond its control; it is making a deliberate attempt to bring a particular era of official UK support for development to an end.
Looming crisis and the revenge of politics
For Mark Miller of the ODI global affairs think tank, a key lesson from the last decade is that advocacy of aid as a mainstay of official UK support for development has been too reliant on moral argument. This defensive tendency, he argues cogently, has come at the cost of greater recognition that development, as part of overall foreign policy rather than a discrete policy sphere meriting supportive protection and advancement, is open to contestation amid shifts in domestic politics.
As much as recognition, however, at issue is the way parts of the mainstream development community have sought to influence politicians on aid precisely in relation to these wider policy fronts. As noted above, this has often privileged advocating positive shifts that might resonate with the policy discourse and concerns of politicians rather than challenging far more assertively this wider terrain. This had become increasingly unsupportive and hostile, particularly after Boris Johnson’s back-to-the future merger of DfID, once seen as a leader among Western development agencies, into the Foreign Office.
For all Lammy’s criticism of Boris Johnson’s hostile takeover of DfID, there were strong signs that Starmer’s Labour would adopt the heavy defence and national security bias of his Global Britain foreign policy review. Notwithstanding NGO and think tank critiques of the strategy and its subsequent iterations, the mainstream development community struggled overall to challenge outright the pivot’s establishment nature. This was despite its corollary of development being treated as an inferior concern – one that needed to be refocused anyway on cherry-picked climate and health security risks as well as geopolitical and post-Brexit trade imperatives.
Johnson’s buccaneering “Britain as a Force for Good” slogan, taken up by the Coalition for Global Prosperity, captured this hierarchical fusing of defence, diplomacy and development. Reactions to the aid cuts have again shown that this relationship has been a thorny one to critically unpick.
The defence and development conflict
In the main, NGOs have argued cogently that cutting aid to boost defence is an unnecessary false choice. But even now, with aid facing even further possible ambush – Labour, if re-elected, intends to take military spending eventually to 3 per cent of GDP, as proposed by Liz Truss – some NGO reactions along with pro-development commentators and MPs, have argued that, amid policymakers’ security concerns, development and defence can go hand in hand. In this view, aid could be conducive to countering the geopolitical and geoeconomic threat of rival foreign actors, for example.
NGOs with expertise on this problematic interface, however, have cautioned against the deployment of development-and-defence narratives to nudge political opinion against the aid cuts. They note the tension between official approaches to security prioritising military force at the expense of supporting action to tackle the causes of conflict, invest in peacebuilding and build wider ‘human security’.
Some have similarly sought to oppose the cuts by defending aid as an important part of the ‘rules-based international order’. But Labour’s conduct on the world stage, in step with its immediate Tory predecessors, has shown Starmer and Lammy’s mantra-like invocation of the concept does not amount to a firm commitment to international humanitarian and human rights law.
The UK’s double standards, and the tensions between defence and development, have been sharply illustrated in the cases of Ukraine and Gaza. Starmer’s plan for ‘boots on the ground’ to defend Ukraine from Putin’s Russia contrasts with his ‘helmets in the air’, arms sales and diplomatic support for ally Israel despite its ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine.
War crimes in Gaza: aid and the abuse of humanitarianism
Labour Defence Secretary John Healey, in dismissing calls for the UK to stop providing components for F-35 combat aircraft inflicting atrocities in Gaza and thus uphold its duty to prevent war crimes, determined that the UK’s wider international relations and security considerations were paramount. Amid reports of earlier US threats if the UK acted otherwise, the moral vacuum of Healey’s rationalisation was highlighted by the US official in charge of the F-35 supply chain observing that Gaza had been a handy test site for the jets.
Starmer’s 2023 endorsement of the view Israel had “the right to defend itself” in Gaza by cutting off water, food and energy had led the way for this stance. After pushback, Labour, to deflect opposition and adverse public opinion, went on to voice support for ‘humanitarian’ intervention to “alleviate suffering” while aiding Israel with the wherewithal to inflict the pain. Underlying Starmer’s calls for “humanitarian pauses”, rather than a permanent ceasefire to allow access to aid was an implied licence for Israel to continue its deadly mass assault.
Labour’s double discourse illustrated global concerns that the cause of humanitarianism has been abused as a denialist cover for the malign politics of the ‘Gaza crisis’. Its backing of the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Middle East appeal last autumn has not escaped such questioning.
The appeal, reportedly given reluctant BBC approval, materialised at the cost of broadcasters, as Nick Dearden of Global Justice Now has argued, largely presenting the regional crisis as a natural disaster rather than one recklessly fuelled by the geopolitics of the UK-US special relationship and its collusion with Israel. Whatever the pragmatic best-under-the-circumstances motivation of the appeal and the generous intentions of the public in donating to it, Labour’s own matching funds contribution seemed a downpayment on trying to hide its sins.
Despite Labour’s attempts to confuse and co-opt, however, several aid-active NGOs, including some involved in the appeal, have continued, to their credit, to press for a complete halt of arms to Israel, complementing the legal action and campaigning of others in the UK and abroad.
Security has been at the heart of Starmer’s Labour discourse. But politicians’ talking up of external threats has long served to divert people’s attention from their failure to resolve domestic problems. For many people, the threat to their lives arises from policies at home. Meanwhile, Labour’s aid cuts, along with its stance on Gaza, has caused serious damage to the UK’s reputation in the Global South.
The domestic political drivers of cutting aid
The aid cuts, amid the crises buffeting UK politics and the country’s position in the world, have strong domestic as well as international ramifications.
It was noteworthy, for example, that Starmer’s leadership team timed the aid-for-defence cuts to furnish the prime minister with a murky ‘I-can-be-tough-on-foreigners-too’ bonus to bond with Trump over UK-US trade and global security. With relatedly intentional resonance, it has seen the cuts as an investment in shoring up its own flagging efforts back home to Make Labour Great Again.
As with the government’s boasts in its stepping up of deportations, Starmer’s team calculates that slashing aid, as well as appealing to Tory audiences, will supposedly help retain the support, partially recouped in 2024, of key target Labour voters in deprived areas viewed as conservative-minded or now prone to the rising far right appeal of Reform. Boris Johnson had peeled away such working-class voters from Labour in 2019 with demagogic “levelling up” promises of change matched by pro-Brexit anti-foreigner rhetoric.
In vindication of Labour’s strategy, a Labour List piece drawing on opinion surveys claimed it was sad but true that the aid cuts were popular in these areas, albeit revealingly more so when pitted against greater spending on public services rather than the military. Its “charity begins at home” argument seemed to re-peddle Johnson’s divide-and-rule fiction that ‘foreign’ aid deprives communities of investment. It skirted discussion of how such discourse might lose its socially corrosive power in delegitimising aid if Labour showed financial ambition to undo the damage of Tory austerity compounding decades of neglect.
Frustration with Labour’s self-imposed financial straitjacket has been rising in the Guardian along with its qualms over the Party occupying right-wing territory. Yet while its initial editorial on the aid cuts worried they might be another instance of Labour bad behaviour wounding its traditional liberal soul and supporters, it added that such moves were “fine, if just tactical positioning” to negate the right’s competitive relevance at the ballot box.
This benefit-of- the-doubt view reflected the lingering ability of Starmer’s Labour to trade on the disastrous legacy of the Tories as justification for the government’s refusal to significantly change policy tack, with past trauma still allowing ‘he can change’ hopes to be entertained. As with the welfare cuts, Starmer exaggeratedly claimed that the move against aid had been vital to avoid the supposed Truss-like destabilisation of the financial markets.
Leaving everyone behind
Even at its peak, aid, less than a penny in a pound, is a tiny item of public expenditure, and as 138 NGOs rightly stated in their appeal to the government, drawing on tax justice campaigning, taxing extreme wealth could more than easily fund both international aid and public spending to improve people’s standard of life everywhere.
This argument is consistent with the universal thrust of the Sustainable Development Goals expecting all countries – not just economically poorer nations – to support their respective communities and “leave no one behind”, each contributing to national and international SDG achievement according to their differential levels of development. SDG progress in the Global North as well as the Global South would generate social cohesion and solidarity within and across borders.
Whatever the technical value of the NGOs’ tax-and-aid proposals, however, Labour, through its insistence on the cuts, remains not only wedded to dropping this part of the SDG development financing bargain. By refusing to embark on more ambitious action to tackle inequality at home, it is undermining the material basis for the UK public to sustain its commitment to supporting aid as part of the UK’s role in promoting sustainable development.
Aid is eminently affordable, but the ongoing policy approach of the UK’s political class leaving swathes of British people behind has made it increasingly hard to defend as a protected part of public spending.
Beyond aid: trick or treat?
The struggle for sustainable development transcends the role of official aid involving paternalistic transfers of money, of course. For all its important benefits, aid has carried association with ‘charitable’ Northern donors and ‘grateful’ Southern recipients, given the old West’s role in its emergence as part of the post-war international architecture.
Many in the development sector, moreover, have long pushed for reform of ‘aid’ driven too often by Northern donor governments’ own interests. Their policy work has stressed that the value of aid, even when accountably and effectively delivered, cannot be a magic wand by itself while powerholders’ wider policies and practices damage people’s welfare and rights. These structural barriers to development need to be addressed.
There has also been much soul-searching and critical reflection within the international development NGO community over the problems and limitations of aid still being channelled largely through Northern intermediaries rather than directly to people-centred organisations and social movements in the Global South.
Such critiques of official aid are valid. Amid the political barriers to resumed spending ambition both in the UK and globally, the UK’s sustainable development and global affairs community may concentrate increasingly in the future on partnerships to influence the broader policy climate.
Caution is needed, however, over palpable views within parts of the development community that the aid crisis might paradoxically present acceptance-of-defeat opportunities. For it is hard to envisage the dismal political intent behind the aid cuts not affecting Labour’s willingness to take on board the proposals of think tanks and NGOs in crucial ‘beyond aid’ policy areas if they do not align or engage with the government’s views and priorities.
Indeed, Labour – once part of post-Cold War peace dividend moves in the 1990s and 2000s to stem ‘donor fatigue’ – is keen to cash in on ‘beyond aid’ discourse as opportunistic cover for its deliberately escalated aid lethargy. As with the UK’s public services, its solution is ‘reform’ not just money.
From public money to big finance and the risky business of growth
But what kind of reform? Labour is placing its hopes in the questionable effectiveness and accountability of a multilateral push since 2015 for states and big business to mobilise private financial investment for sustainable development. Besides the problem of private capture and fragmentation of the development agenda, the record of big finance in investing in economically poorer countries and sectors of interest for disadvantaged people in the South has been weak.
Labour’s decision to throw its weight definitively behind this shift from the public to the private will help to accentuate falling official commitment to aid globally. Dwindled funds, as well as being redeployed to de-risk business involvement, will become the target of a competitive scramble as well as increasingly tied to the uncoordinated ‘national’ interests of individual donor governments at odds with the aid reform principles of the OECD. The shift also means Labour ignoring transformative alternatives to traditional aid such as a UN system of global public investment whereby all countries would pool contributions to the best of their means and have a democratic say over their use.
Labour’s private turn internationally mirrors the government’s own approach domestically with its outsourced banking on big finance, rather than socially optimal use of its own revenue-raising power and ambitious action on corporate tax dodging, to revive the UK’s public realm. In each setting, Labour shows few signs of being willing to align state coaxing of private finance with wider public interest aims.
Top-down growth relying on policy reforms and incentives skewed in favour of big business investment have long been criticised for their poverty reduction and inequity problems in the global South. Yet the powerful global development institutions are giving trickle-down economics another push, and as the head of the New Economics Foundation has noted, Labour is adopting such defective recipes for the UK itself.
Allusions by the think tank informing Starmer’s programme to Labour’s reform of the UK state drawing disruptive inspiration from economic libertarian Javier Milei’s chainsaw abolition of ministries and regulation in Argentina are a chilling sign of the dangers of its economic adjustment plans to ‘unleash’ investment.
Meanwhile, with the government’s vast parliamentary majority giving it untrammelled, unaccountable power not justified by its share of the popular vote, it will be an uphill battle to change the approach and content of the government’s growth-at-all-costs drive for trade and investment deals in the wake of Brexit and the US re-election of Trump. The Trade Justice Movement has alerted us to the risks to people both in the UK and ‘partner’ countries.
High stakes and vested interests
The stakes have never been higher for the UK’s development movement. The major intertwined national-international challenges it faces on the economic justice front are equally thorny in relation to the determined push since Johnson to re-elevate defence as an untouchable leading feature of the UK’s economy and statecraft. Defence is a problematic issue itself for sustainable development, beyond aid having been sacrificed on its altar.
Experts question Labour’s claims that defence will be a key motor of growth and argue that it will further detract from investing in a more beneficial energy transition aiding UK action on the climate crisis. Meanwhile, alongside waste and corruption, the human rights problems of the UK’s defence industry, which its arms export regime appears cynically primed to ignore, remain a travesty as the long case of Yemen and now Gaza show.
For some, the very rationale of greater military spending is unclear. Yet Labour MPs, pointing to heightened geopolitical tensions the UK is an active part of, have called on financial businesses not to apply environmental, social and governance policies in relation to defence investment.
The long political influence and connections of arms companies within the UK state are the dominant factor in the above. But sectional interests within the labour movement cannot be overlooked. Trade unions lobbying for the defence boost to prioritise British jobs did not refer to aid cuts paying part of the price.
The aid cuts and hostility to dissent
The aid cuts should be viewed in the light of these challenges. Just as the government’s arguments for aid retrenchment on economic stability grounds were spurious, media coverage of money being released for supposed defence and security reasons has underplayed looking at the move as a hostile political act aimed specifically at the development sector as a site of alternative thought and practice on foreign policy.
In the UK’s increasingly authoritarian political climate and Labour’s hostility to dissent, it is not outlandish to ponder that an intentional by-product of the aid cuts, beyond the operational hit on NGOs benefiting from official aid money within their overall finances, may be to induce fear and inhibit criticism of state policies undermining people-centred development. As well as using aid to support social initiatives in the Global South, policy change has been a vital aim of NGOs’ work with partners.
The Tories already had increasingly placed restrictions on the independent scope for NGOs receiving official aid money to carry out wider UK and international advocacy and campaigning. it is not inconceivable that Labour may continue where they left off in restricting civil society space. As well as applying political conditions on funding, this might involve a divide-and-rule approach in which favoured partners are rewarded, more policy-critical organisations excluded, and those of a more radical nature targeted for marginalisation.
At their social justice best, forces within the UK’s development movement, alongside international solidarity and human rights organisations, have a history of asserting that all aspects of the UK’s global role should be aligned with support for development favouring the less privileged and powerful in the world. Their work on trade, free-market reform, tax dodging, arms sales, corruption and corporate accountability, for example, has reflected this call for ‘policy coherence’.
In the 1990s, the accumulated political impact of such work was plausibly a factor in Labour’s then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook advocating that UK foreign policy should have an “ethical dimension”. But today, much as David Lammy likes to invoke his predecessor’s idea, it is unlikely that his still undisclosed post-Tory follow-up review of Britain’s global role will consider the need for traditional state-centric and elite-driven foreign policy to involve more pluralistic democratic scrutiny and civil society participation. UK politics has seen a concerted state drive to shape public views and, in the case of Gaza, repressively impose official foreign policy, and these moves have continued apace under Labour.
Lammy’s promise of a “new model for development fit for the 21st century” post-DfID has been deliberately held in a hazy landing pattern for almost three years, and the shape of any vessel to hit the ground remains to be seen. Whatever the pros and cons of aid, the top-down imposition of the aid cuts raises alarm over the government’s wider intentions.
The failure of politics and revitalising public support for an alternative agenda
Meanwhile, Labour has not expected to pay a political price with voters in making the cuts. This signals a clear challenge for development organisations: to step up their own mobilisation of public pressure for the UK government to play a positive role in the world, connecting such efforts with the need for political action to tackle problems affecting citizens at home. Oxfam’s canvassing of public views on the joint injustice of the government cutting aid and UK welfare with its protection of the soaring wealth of the super-rich is a timely pointer.
For all the importance of professionalised high-level advocacy targeting politicians holding all the power, the reality of UK politics today is that its mainstream parties, as currently led, are resistant to taking ambitious global and local action on the people, peace, planet and public participation challenges involved in sustainable development. Beyond aid, the public case for a forward-looking development agenda needs to be revitalised.
The development community will need to get to grips with the unpredictably dangerous politics taking shape in the UK. This includes the hollowing out of Labour as a progressive social democratic force that the development sector has traditionally looked to for progress.
As Clare Short, the former International Development Secretary under Tony Blair, recently stated in responding to the aid cuts and the government’s welfare cuts: “I am afraid that, in many respects, this is not a Labour government.”
Jon Barnes is a freelance writer, editor and researcher. He is author of A Record of Change in a Changing World, a history of the pioneering development NGO CIIR-Progressio, which closed in 2017 after 76 years of influential work for international peace and rights-based sustainable development.
Image: Make Poverty History march https://www.flickr.com/photos/tedconference/8477930956 Creator: Bruno Vincent | Credit: Getty Images Copyright: 2005 Getty Images. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC 2.0 Deed
