Writing for The Mirror, Dr Halima Begum, chief executive of Oxfam UK, said that compassion has gone out the window – while international aid helps the UK’s self-interest
In the cuts he has made to the international aid budget. Keir Starmer is putting missiles before medicine.
This makes a mockery of both the Government’s stated promise to stand in partnership with the developing countries and the pledge it made to the British people in its manifesto.
More than that, it paves the way to a world where might is always right and we give up on any sense of responsibility to our fellow human beings. Foreign aid – as far-sighted Conservative and Labour leaders have understood in the past – has never been simply about munificence, but also cold national self-interest
Foreign aid not just wins hearts and minds overseas, but buys us a stake in emerging economies, it is the best way to ensure peace in our world and addresses the root causes of so many of our current preoccupations, such as the Channel crossings, by making inhabitable again communities that have been rendered uninhabitable by war and climate change.
As previous prime ministers such as Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown have recognised, foreign aid is a way of wielding soft power overseas that, if we choose not to wield it, others gladly will. The current perceived threat to western interests is China who will see America’s decision to wind down USAID – the United States Agency for International Development – as part of a wholesale western withdrawal from the developing world.
Here, we have gone back to foreign aid that has not been this tight since the days before Tony Blair took office. Neil Kinnock as Labour leader once talked about how we helped others not because we had to, but because we could.
Now we seem to be going back to a time when compassion has gone out of the window and only might is right. The immediate casualties will be in places like Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria and Gaza.
I don’t know about Starmer, but I wouldn’t want to have to explain to these people in person why these cuts are necessary.