If their staff have correctly reported him Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy seems more concerned by the likely shift of soft power to China caused by President Trump’s dramatic closure of the US Overseas Aid Programme (USAid) than the immediate practical consequences on the individuals who are to lose aid supplies and services.
It wold be nice to think that your government’s first thought went to 10 000 or so individuals who still die every day of hunger, the 1 000 daily toll of children under five who die of malaria and the 900 plus who die each day of diarrhoea. Why are our government and their spokespersons so “tin eared?”
Even if their support for the world’s poor is primarily motivated by power politics (and I know from second hand reports that that isn’t true of most of the officials who administer (or administered) Britain’s aid programmes, the politicians at the top could at least pretend.
Mr Lammy goes
on to pint out the when Britain’s own Department for International development (DfID)
was merged with the Foreign Office by Boris Johnson’s government in 2020 Britain’s
“soft power” received a serious blow, which
was even further depleted by the reduction of funding from 0.7% of our GDP to
0.5%. See previous posthttps://keynesianliberal.blogspot.com/2024/09/oda-test-of-labours-moral-compass.html
What he does not say is that, so far, the new Labour government was shown no sign of resorting DfID/s independence, or the level of aid to 0.7%. (In fact it had risen to a little above 0.5% and they’ve knocked it back - See previous post:
Frankly, I’m pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of Liberal Democrat and Green voters expected better of Labour, and so do a lot of Labour party members and voters too. Yes, there have been some glimmers of hope (raising the minimum wage, better working conditions) but on the whole so far it’s been pale imitation Tories.
In a Guardian article on 7th February former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown shows a surer touch. He list the programmes on which USAid had been working and which are now axed:
Landmine-clearing work in Asia
Drug deliveries to fight mpox, and Ebola
Cervical cancer screening
Treating malaria, tuberculosis and polio
Assisting maternal and child health
And, of course , many general programmes in health and education.
Happily, one programme, to try to prevent 136 000 babies from acquiring HIV has been allowed to continue.
The above gives a picture of the human impact of President Trump’s tantrum.
A re-creation of and independent DfID and a meeting 0.7% of GDP target, for which a Conservative government subscribed way back in 1970, would be a response more fitting our best values. If our soft power also improved, that would be a welcome bonus.
