No Longer A World Leader

There was a time -- not long ago -- when Britain was a world leader in international aid. Simon Rawnsley writes:

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.

Johnson has not honoured his signature:

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.

For those who have followed Mr. Johnson's career, none of this is surprising.

Image: bbc.com