Ten years ago the idea of a British prime minister announcing a cut in foreign aid to 0.3 per cent of GDP would have been unthinkable.
David Cameron’s Tories had exempted the Department for International Development from austerity, repeatedly declaring that it would be wrong to balance the books on the backs of the world’s poorest people. Naturally, Cameron’s coalition partners the Lib Dems supported this stance, while Labour revelled in having been the party that raised aid spending to this level and legislated to create a legal duty for subsequent governments to maintain it.
The case for radically cutting the aid budget only saw the light of day in the 2015 Ukip manifesto, to which I contributed. We suggested a reduction from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.2 per cent and were of course pilloried as vile for doing so. Given the proportion of the aid budget currently being spent at home on tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, this Ukip policy is in effect what has just been announced by 10 Downing Street. By a Labour prime minister.
Even given the security context, requiring big extra spending on defence, this is the most right-wing thing a Labour premier has done for decades. David Miliband, the Blairite prince over the water with a vested interest in the aid industry, has gone on the record to state his opposition to the move, saying: ‘Now is the time to step up and tackle poverty, conflict and insecurity, not further reduce the aid budget.’
Yet Keir Starmer is completely unabashed by it. He has even underlined the thinking behind his decision via an exclusive article for the once hated Daily Mail.
So we may safely conclude that something political is going on beyond the simple need to be seen to better fund our armed forces in the future. The veteran Labour-watcher Andrew Marr hinted at this in a column for the New Statesman a couple of weeks back in which he drew attention to a series of moves to the right by Starmer, starting with the publication of a government video showing illegal immigrants being deported. This in itself told us something about Starmer given his hostility towards immigration control measures throughout his career as a radical lawyer and even during his early years in Parliament.
What these two moves – cutting aid and upping tough-talk on defending the borders – point to is the extraordinary ruthlessness of this Prime Minister, even by the standards of those who reach the very top of the greasy pole of politics. Marr pointed towards fear of Nigel Farage’s Reform, now topping the polls, as a major motivating factor, along with an appreciation that the election of Donald Trump had changed the political terms of trade all over the world. In which case, just as on the road to Brexit, Farage’s ability to force incumbent premiers who detest his politics to bend to his will must be appreciated as a thing of wonder.
Given Labour’s collapsing poll ratings, perhaps Starmer has asked again the question he posed of others with better political antennae after Labour’s catastrophic by-election defeat in Hartlepool in the spring of 2021: ‘Why does everybody hate us?’ The answer now would be the same as back then: Labour is too metropolitan, too left-wing, and too absorbed in anti-British identity politics and cultural ‘progressivism’.
The most interesting question now is where this shift to the right will show up next, because show up it most certainly will. Perhaps it will be in a sweeping cabinet reshuffle that removes or marginalises the likes of Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and Attorney-General Richard Hermer, two of the Government’s most dogmatic leftist culture warriors. Perhaps it will be in further and equally significant changes of policy.
Soon it may not only be David Miliband finding Starmer’s new politics unconscionable, but Ed Miliband too. Because energy and climate change policy is clearly at the heart of Britain’s industrial malaise and living standards crunch. Surely a Labour prime minister could never slow down the dash to net zero? Think again. This Labour prime minister will do almost anything to try and save his own skin.
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