This Government's Completely Wrong Priorities

Diane Abbott writes:

Cutting the aid budget to pay for a rearmament drive is the clearest expression of the completely wrong priorities of this Labour government. The distance between this policy and what might be called Labour “values” is a chasm. It will not add to our security and is morally indefensible.

The war in Europe began at least three years ago – and (many argue) much longer ago than that. So, why is it only now causing chaos in Berlin, Paris, London and other capitals? One of the strangest aspects of this political crisis is that there is now a possibility of the war coming to an end.

Clearly, for them, this crisis concerns the power and prestige of the European powers: principally Germany, France and Britain. In the US, Trump has recognised reality. Nato forces are not winning and could even be staring at defeat. That, plus other priorities – such as keeping both migrants and Chinese goods out of the US – is why he wants out.

However, European leaders seem to believe that a failure to defeat Russia undermines their standing in the world. For fading world powers, this is such a blow that all types of extraordinary and panicked measures are being considered.

We should lay to rest the idea that Russia poses a military threat to western Europe. We know that is impossible because Keir Starmer told us so. In a televised address, he enumerated the damage that has been inflicted on Russia; its economy has been weakened. It has also lost the best of its land forces, as well as its Black Sea Fleet.

This has been a prolonged and damaging war, with possibly hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides. The idea that Russia is ready or able to sweep through western Europe at any time in the foreseeable future is not a serious proposition. No authoritative military analyst suggests that is the case.

Yet Europe is now in a frenzy of warmongering and agitation for higher military spending.

This is a full rearmament agenda which has little to do with Ukraine itself. Polls show Ukrainians want peace negotiations. Furthermore, without a US commitment to participating in – and funding – the war, Nato forces cannot win.

Starmer’s suggestion – that France and Britain place forces on the ground while the US offers them a security guarantee – has no prospect of success. It is opposed by both the countries which will determine the outcome of any peace negotiations: the United States and Russia.

The Anglo-French plan fails at the most fundamental level because it refuses to recognise reality. It is simply a rejigging of the current position, which is unsustainable. Including a security guarantee that is rather like the Article 5 provisions of the Nato charter simply adds to the air of unreality. It is this Nato expansion into Ukraine that Russia gives as its reason for the war. It is never going to agree to the plan, not unless there is a complete defeat of its forces.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this posturing, especially given how unlikely it is to be enacted, is the toll this will take on government spending. There is already budgetary restraint in Europe’s major countries, cuts to pension entitlements in France and outright austerity here.

The Starmer government is deeply unpopular following the cuts already made. There may be more to come in the spring statement. Cutting aid to some of the world’s poorest in order to increase military spending is an anathema to many in the Labour Party and beyond. Many of us will make the argument that if money can be found for the Ukrainian war, then why not pensioners, schoolchildren, poorer families or the NHS?

We should oppose the increase in military spending. It is an unnecessary distraction from the real crises facing Europe, especially Britain. We simply cannot afford further cuts in real pay – and in public services and public investment.

Economic regeneration must be the priority – and it cannot be achieved by increasing military spending, which has no useful economic impact. This stands in contrast to investment in housing, transport, infrastructure and public services such as the NHS and education.

Investment in these areas produces a far greater number of higher-skilled, higher-paid jobs – and real improvement in people’s living standards will follow. Increasing military spending at the expense of these areas – and at the expense of international aid – is a complete dead end.

And Andrew Mitchell writes:

Annaliese Dodds’s resignation as minister for international development – over the prime minister’s bid to use the foreign aid budget to boost defence spending – comes as little surprise to me.

Labour’s disgraceful and cynical attempt to balance the books on the backs of the poorest people in the world has demeaned the party’s reputation. Shame on them – and kudos to a politician of decency and principle.

Defence of the realm is the number one priority for any government. I fully support the prime minister’s increase in defence spending at this most precarious moment in my 35 years as an MP.

But doing so at the expense of the foreign aid budget is wrong. It is also deeply cynical. Deploying the pretext of having to make “painful” and “necessary” decisions in a world full of peril, Keir Starmer reverted to that most predictable of laments: he had no choice.

That is disingenuous. I can identify several measures that would have raised revenue to the levels needed. For example, the former chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, pointed out that a return to the same number of working-age welfare recipients as before Covid – surely not an outrageous proposition – would save £40bn of taxpayers’ money. Similarly, the former defence secretary Grant Shapps has referred to the previous government’s fully costed plan for efficiency savings across the civil service.

In seeking to avoid those battles, the government instead opted to take an axe to the lowest-hanging political fruit. Foreign aid is an easy target, least likely to arouse mass resistance and most likely to appeal to populist sensibilities across the political spectrum. The prime minister made that choice, and that choice is egregious on so many levels.

First, it fundamentally misreads the mechanics of international security. If military hard power is the foundation of defence, international development – or soft power – is its bedrock. Hard and soft are two sides of the same coin; each plays a distinct yet interlinking part in the international security apparatus, and if either is depleted, the whole edifice comes undone.

The role of development is to help build prosperous and conflict-free societies over there so we are safe and prosperous over here. Starting with keeping young children healthy through vaccinations, then focusing on education – particularly of girls which leads to the nurturing of aspiration – and ultimately creating opportunities for jobs and economic growth supported by private sector investment, international development is predicated on the idea that prosperous societies are secure societies, and secure societies are less likely to experience mass migration, export extremist ideologies, and allow infectious diseases to spread far and wide.

It follows that cutting foreign aid will achieve the opposite: fuelling rather than alleviating poverty, disease, conflict and migration. If Pandora’s box is unleashed, the galloping escalation of misery and suffering will be our problem too.

If we pull the plug on lifesaving vaccination programmes, we expose ourselves to the threat of diseases that could have been stopped at source. If humanitarian funding is cut in areas of famine, vulnerable, starving children are more likely to be recruited by Isis or al-Qaeda. These evil outfits thrive on the desperation of others, and we know that in sub-Saharan Africa it is the poorest countries that are in the firmest grip of violent extremists. To paraphrase President Trump’s earlier defence secretary General Mattis’s famous line: the more we cut aid, the more we must spend on ammunition.

Reaching this point of instability and breakdown will make it nigh on impossible to curb the migration crisis that will result as people seek safer shores. And there is an irony for us in Britain who are rightly so exercised by migration but cannot connect the dots between poverty, conflict and the movement of desperate people.

Second, we must ask: who will benefit from these aid cuts? The answer is Russia and China. The foreign secretary himself warned that spaces we vacate would be filled by our adversaries. History will judge this to be a strategic disaster of our own making.

Finally, aid cuts will result in many lives being lost. I’ve always argued that we must never balance the books on the backs of the world’s poorest. It was the reason I opposed the foreign aid cuts that my own government made in 2021 as well as the vaporisation of the Department for International Development.