British Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office Nick Thomas-Symonds, British Defence Secretary John Healey, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and Army National Military Cemeteries and Office of Army Cemeteries Executive Director Karen Durham-Aguilera walk through the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, July 11, 2024. Starmer, Healey, and Thomas-Symonds were at ANC to participate in a Public Wreath-Laying Ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. ( Elizabeth Fraser / Arlington National Cemetery/Army)
LONDON - Britain, long past its days of empire, has continued to congratulate itself as a superpower in one global area: foreign aid.
In poor countries around the world, the United Kingdom deployed experts and money to fight disease, hunger and poverty, projecting a kind of soft-power update of its colonial legacy. Conservative and Labour governments alike championed the effort, making Britain, briefly, one the few nations to reach the aspirational United Nations benchmark of spending 0.7 percent of gross national income on international development.
Now, like the United States, it is pulling back. Prime Minister Keir Starmer unexpectedly announced plans last week to cut the government’s foreign aid budget by 40 percent, diverting more than $7.5 billion a year to defense spending.
Starmer said the shift in priorities was necessary in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, but also that “the last few weeks have accelerated my thinking” - referring to a period in which President Donald Trump threatened to upend traditional U.S.-European security norms and pivoted toward Russia in the Ukraine war.
But critics, including many who support beefing up the military, fear that Britain, having already withdrawn from the Europe Union, will now be even less engaged with the outside world.
Richard Dannatt, a former U.K. military chief of staff, is an outspoken advocate for increased defense spending. But writing in the Guardian, Dannatt warned that “cutting aid to fund it is a fundamental strategic error that risks making us weaker, not stronger.
Funding one out of the money allocated to the other risks undermining the very security we are trying to ensure.”
Starmer’s announcement of the cuts, which came two days before he met with Trump at the White House, took many in his own cabinet by surprise. Anneliese Dodds, his international development minister, resigned three days later, writing that the cuts would “remove food and healthcare from desperate people - deeply harming the UK’s reputation.”
Foreign Minister David Lammy had been quoted earlier in February warning that Trump’s sweeping cuts to American aid could be a “big strategic mistake,” creating an opening for China and others to assert greater influence. In an op-ed published in tandem with Starmer’s announcement, however, Lammy wrote, “We are a government of pragmatists not ideologues - and we have had to balance the compassion of our internationalism with the necessity of our national security.”
Oxfam, Save the Children UK and more than 130 other aid groups implored the government to soften the blow. But few in Britain expect the decision to be revised anytime soon.
Starmer’s Labour government - which swept the Conservative Party out in July - was already struggling to revive a stagnant economy and improve public services while abiding by campaign promises not to raise income taxes on working people.
Now, with Europe spooked by an expansionist Russia and Trump’s fading commitment to NATO, Starmer is moving his country to more of a war footing and needs money to pay for it. He has offered British soldiers as part of a potential international peacekeeping force in Ukraine, and pledged to increase overall defense spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product within two years, nodding to Trump’s demand for NATO members to pony up more for their own military budgets.
The military buildup has general support across Britain’s political spectrum. Foreign aid spending, meanwhile, as in most donor countries, has only a meager public constituency ready to fight for it.
“I don’t think this is anything voters are going to punish Labour for at the polls,” said Emma Mawdsley, a global development expert at the University of Cambridge. “It is an easy target.”
Critics fear the cuts are likely to spell the end of Britain’s foreign aid heyday. The U.K. has never been the biggest individual aid donor, typically ranking behind the United States, Germany and Japan. But Brits have taken pride in spending more per capita than most Western governments.
The international aid program became known in professional circles, Mawdsley said, for creating innovative ways of delivering and monitoring projects in remote - sometimes dangerous, sometimes corrupt - places. It was backed by an act of Parliament, the International Development Act of 2002, that stated that the purpose of the spending was to “contribute to a reduction in poverty,” not to boost British influence or trade.
“That was quite powerful stuff,” said Stefan Dercon, an economics professor at Oxford University and a former chief economist for what was then Britain’s main aid agency, the Department for International Development, or DFID. “There was a period when the country chose to reflect its national character in its foreign aid; it became the way the U.K. projected itself into the world.”
Foreign aid began its growth spell in the 1990s, when a good economy and the end of the Cold War allowed Western countries to focus more on humanitarian causes such as health, education and poverty. The program swelled under Labour rule, but Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, known as a “liberal Tory,” embraced it when he took office in 2010.
It was under Cameron, in 2013, that the country’s spending on development assistance reached the U.N. target of 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI).
DFID not only survived, but gained a bit of swagger, with some of the best and brightest civil servants from all parties competing for jobs at the agency.
“There was a bit of zeitgeist to it,” said Mark Malloch Brown, a British diplomat who served as U.N. deputy secretary general and as a Labour government minister. “It was Britain back in the world, it was cool Britain, being a leader in this soft-power, values-driven agenda.”
By the time of the covid epidemic, Britain’s aid program had slipped from its high-water mark. Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson pared the budget back from 0.7 percent of GNI to 0.5, the level where it roughly sat before Starmer’s cut last week.
(Although because Britain includes domestic spending on asylum seekers as part of its aid budget, some calculations peg the percentage spent on international development aid as much lower.)
Johnson also dissolved DFID and folded aid programs into the Foreign Ministry, a milder version of what Trump has done by largely dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and shifting its functions to the State Department.
Andrew Mitchell, who remains a Conservative member of Parliament, served as Cameron’s cabinet secretary of state for international development. He said the cuts under prime ministers from both parties had “destroyed the respect in which Britain was held and massively diminished our authority and, indeed, our national security.”
“One of the examples of true British international leadership was on development, where our ideas and our influence gave us world stature,” he said. Karla Adam contributed to this report.
