We are told the world in 2025 has changed. It certainly feels like it. Tensions are rising between the great powers, old alliances are under strain and conflict is proliferating. In this complex and perilous landscape, national government spend on aid and development is retrenching when it is needed more than ever. More than 120 armed conflicts rage globally while wars are no longer state versus state, but internecine and dizzyingly complex, forcing humanitarian crises of depressing scale. Climate change is driving malnutrition, migration and conflict. International humanitarian law is straining and buckling. Meanwhile, the world’s policeman no longer walks quietly. Instead, it uses its big stick unpredictably.
What is Britain’s role in this new world? The slashing of USAID by the Trump administration was matched in scale, if not rhetoric, by the Labour government. Keir Starmer’s decision to cut international aid to the lowest level this century—0.3 per cent of gross national income when just five years ago it was 0.7 per cent—was not the “tough” decision the prime minister claimed. It was another easy target. It was short term and short sighted, not only a moral dereliction to the world’s poorest but a strategic error that will leave the UK less secure and less powerful.
Development is one of the three instruments of an effective foreign policy, alongside defence and diplomacy. Each strengthens the other. That’s why my party supported—indeed called for—an increase in defence spending to 3 per cent but identified other ways to fund it. Because preventing conflicts is cheaper than fighting them. Poverty, poor governance and endemic violence create unstable states which go to war and become breeding grounds for the extremism and terrorism which threaten us at home. Conflict drives people from their homes to our shores. Last year, almost 2,000 Sudanese nationals crossed the English Channel in small boats.
International aid not only helps secure us against foreign conflicts but is also vital in curbing the spread of global disease. Our support for immunisation through Gavi, the vaccine alliance, alongside other bilateral and multilateral efforts, has not only saved lives but reduced the risk to British health and the NHS.
Meanwhile, the work of the Global Fund—to which Britain pledged £1bn as recently as 2022—is responsible for a 61 per cent reduction in death rates across cases of Aids, tuberculosis, and malaria. Pulling back now squanders decades of investment and success.
Britain has been at the forefront of aid and development. The Labour government of 1997, and the coalition government that followed, understood not only the impact of our assistance but the attendant investment in our soft power. Britain is now sadly in retreat, taking with it jewels of our soft power crown: the underfunded British Council and the BBC World Service. Meanwhile, China and Russia move into the space which we vacate, scooping up relationships in the global south.
UK aid and development is not, as Boris Johnson called it, “some giant cashpoint in the sky”. Nor is it “charity”, as the government’s development minister described it recently. It’s a deposit account protecting British security, our health, our shores and our power.
So what next? All challenges create opportunities. While the United States dismantles its overseas assistance, there is an urgent vacancy for a convening power, a facilitator and thought leader on what aid and development should look like. The UK should fill it. We’ll need bold and brave thinking. We’ll need to think differently, work differently and persuade differently. Instead of short-term decision-making chasing domestic headlines, we must invest in a long-term vision for Britain. This is an invitation to write the first chapter of that new history.
