Keir Starmer has lost another minister. Anneliese Dodds is stepping down as International Development Minister following No. 10’s decision to slash the foreign aid budget by almost half to pay for an increase in defence spending. That policy decision was announced earlier this week ahead of Keir Starmer’s meeting with Donald Trump at the White House. In her resignation letter to the Prime Minister, Dodds warns that ‘these cuts will remove food and healthcare from desperate people’ and ‘deeply’ harm the UK’s reputation.
Dodds’s departure speaks to an unhappiness in parts of the Labour party
Dodds says that she chose to wait until after Starmer’s Washington trip was completed to allow Starmer to have a united cabinet behind him. With the visit over and government aides crowning it a diplomatic success, Dodds is speaking her mind. The Labour MP says Starmer will find it ‘impossible’ to deliver on his commitment to maintain development spending in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, warning that a failure to do this would boost Russia and encourage China to rewrite the rule book on the international rule-based order.
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