... what has guided former prime ministers is a moral compass. What moral compass guides the prime minister and ministers today, as we cut lifelines of support?”
Those words could have been spoken by any of the aid organisations TFN has spoken to and quoted in the past few weeks, and in this month’s magazine (see pages ?? to ??) as we have chronicled the NGO sector’s response to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to slash international assistance to the world’s poorest to fund a rush to arms.
But they were not spoken in the past weeks. Instead, Hansard shows they were said in the House of Commons by one Rachel Reeves, then shadow chancellor, in a debate over Boris Johnson’s Tory government cutting international aid from the previously legally-binding 0.7 per cent of national income to 0.5 per cent on 13 July 2021.
How about this, from the same debate: “It matters that we keep our promises to the world’s poorest, particularly at a time of global uncertainty… every other living prime minister thinks this is wrong: there is only one prime minister who is prepared to do this and he is sitting there… Britain has a moral obligation to help the world’s poorest.”
That’s the problem with words – if you just mouth them and don’t mean them, they can scream right back at you down the years.
Those words were spoken in the same debate by – yes – Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition.
Never mind a broken moral compass, we are now completely off the map as Starmer’s Labour government, despite an election pledge, has managed to slink lower than even Johnson’s venal regime in cutting international aid even further.
And for what? To increase profits for the arms industry? It’s certainly not to bolster national security as cutting aid is a guaranteed way of increasing international insecurity, the consequences of which will blow back – often tragically, always at great human never mind financial cost – upon our shores.
We are about to see this in real time as a result of these cuts and also in the devastating destruction of USAid by the unhinged Trump regime in America.
If we are probing Starmer’s motives, best look to his kowtowing to Trump and to his right wing proxies in the UK – Farage and Reform.
This decision was made just before his obsequious visit to the White House and as a result of the challenge Labour is facing from the far right.
Rather than facing down reactionaries, Starmer is treading the crumbling and dangerous terrain of ceding ground to them.
International aid is seen as low-hanging fruit, electorally unpopular and thus expendable, because a strong enough political case has never been made for it.
At best it is often framed as a ‘soft power’ project, reducing it to a transactional form of ‘acceptable’ imperialism.
There are indeed problems with the international aid model – but these are rooted in colonialism, the vast economic chasm between the global north and south, and its projection as a form of state power.
A case must be made for it – and its expansion – on its own merits. Because it’s the correct thing to do. Because this is how we should live and act as world citizens.
My feeling is that international aid is more popular than the hyenas in the right wing press and think tanks would have us believe – look at the response DEC appeals get.
Global NGOs are reeling after the events of the past few months, but surely now is the time for a concerted campaign on aid – on its intrinsic value.
If there is a moral compass, then we hold it, not politicians of the Starmer stripe. Let’s point the way.
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
