The most damning report on this Conservative government’s aid strategy comes not from any development charity but from the Tory minister responsible for international development. Andrew Mitchell has this week released a Foreign Office analysis that describes the “severe” consequences of the government’s reduced aid spending. In Yemen, half a million women and children will not receive healthcare and “fewer preventable deaths will be avoided”. In Somalia, a programme to counter female genital mutilation may be deferred or dropped altogether. Across Africa, there will be far more unsafe abortions and women dying in childbirth.
This widespread devastation is civil servants’ assessment of the impact from just one year of cuts to aid spending, yet the UK is into its fourth straight year of reduced development, during a period that has encompassed a global pandemic, a dire shortage of Covid vaccines, a worldwide inflation shock and a violent invasion of Ukraine that has disrupted international supplies of grain and oil.
Mr Mitchell hails from a different time in Tory politics, when, under David Cameron, the party embraced increased aid spending and environmentalism as part of a bid to detoxify its image. How deep those commitments ever ran is a good question, given how resoundingly they have been dumped. Yet their short-lived history in modern Conservatism is a good indicator of where the party now sees its priorities and electoral appeal.
As chancellor, it was Rishi Sunak who dropped the government’s commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on foreign development. While claiming this was a stopgap measure to help the Covid-hit public finances, as prime minister Mr Sunak shows no urgency about restoring that pledge. Just two years ago, the then foreign secretary, Liz Truss, announced that she would increase spending on aid for women and children. That promise, too, now hangs in tatters.
These diminished budgets to help the very poorest in the world are not just because the government wants to plead penury. Mr Sunak’s government is actively diverting the cash to help refugees from Ukraine and towards the handling of asylum seekers. Since the Illegal Migration Act of last month bans anyone arriving without permission from applying for asylum, that may break international rules on aid. It is certainly unethical to pass off prison-like barges parked off Portland as being in any way about international development. Yet in 2022, the UK spent almost a third of its foreign aid budget at home.
As the recently appointed development minister, Mr Mitchell may have put out this latest document in a bid for transparency. But the former chief whip doubtless understands that such a release, well briefed to the press, could be helpful in future bunfights over cash. Yet he is fighting a rearguard action.
Labour cannot avoid its share of the blame for this mess. Creating the Department for International Development was a proud moment for New Labour, yet Sir Keir Starmer will promise neither to reinstate it nor to adopt the 0.7% target. The Tory government is able to get away with such callous policies because so much of Westminster politics appears to be a race to the bottom, in which lifting up destitute families in Africa or in the UK is a luxury rather than part of our common humanity. Yet the human costs are all too real, as the Foreign Office’s report proves yet again.
