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Author: Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History, Newcastle University
Original article: https://theconversation.com/what-are-labour-governments-for-why-aid-budget-cuts-are-an-existential-matter-251765
What is the point of a Labour government? This is a question traditionally asked after Labour governments lose office. But it’s also a question asked while Labour governments are in office. And, sometimes, even when they still only recently arrived in office.
For a Labour prime minister to announce cuts in aid and development spending to increase spending on the military is one of those “Nixon in China” moments. Only a Labour prime minister could get away with so illiberal a move.
Yet for some it questions the very purpose of the Labour party, which, Harold Wilson told it in 1962, is “a moral crusade or it is nothing”. Two years later Prime Minister Wilson created a Department of Overseas Development.
Starmer’s decision to pull funding from international development to increase defence spending may ultimately prove to be an inflection point for the government.
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The prime minister had made his (unfashionable) enthusiasm for Wilson known. Yet Starmer has presided over the evisceration of an already diminished aid budget. Cuts have taken spending down from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3%. Starmer had once attacked Boris Johnson’s original cut from 0.7%.
The cuts mean Labour’s broad progressive constituency may see itself as being asked to stomach the attempted bromance with a reviled foreign leader. Rearmament is a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s re-election, and the aid cuts a direct consequence of Starmer’s February 27 White House visit. For most party members, and more than a few voters, a Labour manifesto commitment has been abandoned for the least palatable of reasons.
That this is a policy that will be popular (or at least not unpopular) with the public is a given. Foreign aid attracts neither votes nor sympathy. Development’s tiny budget, the lowest of low-hanging political fruit, has been raided and arms spending promised (as it has been phrased) on the backs of the world’s poorest people. That 28% of the development budget was being spent on housing asylum seekers in the UK domestically only adds to the tension within Labour.
And yet, criticism of the government’s shortest of short termism has been muted. Political opponents on the right approve. Cutting aid spending is a Reform UK manifesto commitment.
Labour backbenchers have been pointed. One described it as “Trumpian bullshit”, adding: “I’ve given my entire adult life to the party, is this what it was all for? Is this Labour values?”
Anneliese Dodds, the foreign office minister responsible for aid – and most moderate of souls – resigned after being humiliated by a prime minister who gave her an hour’s notice of the halving of her budget. She delayed her announcement so as not to detract from the White House visit.
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In and out of favour
The historical pattern had been clear: Labour governments elevate, and Conservative governments relegate, international development as a government priority.
In 1964 Wilson made development a separate department. His Tory Edward Heath then moved it into the Foreign Office when he was in power. Wilson took it out again, but then Margaret Thatcher moved it back.
Tony Blair gave it a new title and a new status, and then, providing the exception to the rule, David Cameron not only retained its independence, but ring-fenced its budget. The pandemic gave cause for Cameron’s successor-but-one, Johnson, to revert to type and merge the department into the Foreign Office, one feels now, for the last time.
With these latest cuts, UK aid spending will fall to the lowest level as a percentage of national income since before 1964.
Development was also – and perhaps for the wrong reasons – historically the only department with reliably female leadership: Barbara Castle, Judith Hart, Lynda Chalker, Clare Short, Valerie Amos, Justine Greening, Priti Patel, Penny Mordaunt, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Vicky Ford, Dodds and, now, Baroness Chapman.
One consequence was the foregrounding of women’s and girls issues in policy. Hart in particular proselytised for UK development spending. Her 1973 book Aid and Liberation was a clarion for socialist – rather than what she saw as neo-imperialist – aid to what was then called the third world. It was, for her, a political as well as a moral cause.
There may come a time when Starmer’s choices here will be spoken of by Labour members and, then voters, as craven. Portentously, Wilson was accused of the same over Vietnam, and Blair over Iraq.
The last time a Labour government diverted welfare funds to rearmament they were out of office shortly after, and for over a decade. At least Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin – the pair invoked by Starmer and his ministers as they announced the cuts – exchanged electoral advantage for historical greatness.
Trump’s second administration has created a crisis, both for the government and for Britain’s place in the world. It exacerbates another crisis, also known as the British economy, where pressure on public spending is about to create its own inflection point. Are Labour governments for cutting help for those in need at home as well as those overseas?
Leading where others follow, Trump has cut US foreign aid. By 83%. It is hard, in the new age of transactional, personalistic, international relations, to discern much a future for development spending. The end of the age of aid – one of the reasons for Labour governments – is upon us. Judith Hart would be broken.