As Trump torches overseas aid, will Britain step up? (original) (raw)
Britain used to lead the world on international development. But in the era of right-wing populists, its Labour government is now treading carefully.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy with aid at a refugee camp in Adre, Chad last month. Lammy has said that although “poverty reduction is an end in itself, our development work cannot be siloed off from geopolitics,” | Stefan Rousseau/AFP via Getty Images
February 11, 2025 4:00 am CET
LONDON — Donald Trump is gunning for America’s overseas aid. So will Britain’s center-left Labour government rise to meet the need?
One of the U.S. president’s first acts in office was to freeze billions of dollars in overseas aid, and his administration is now looking to dramatically shrink the U.S. government’s dedicated department, USAID.
The move has shocked humanitarian charities working in poorer countries and conflict zones across the world, and signals America’s further departure from the international community.
Though the U.S. has been one of the leading providers of aid globally, Britain too has a long legacy of poverty alleviation in developing countries.
Yet aid groups are warning that the U.K.’s own position as a leader is now under threat, as Britain’s Labour government — for which they had high hopes — tries to redefine what counts as overseas assistance and refuses to undo a host of Conservative cuts.
Britain loses its standing
In 2005, the U.K. was at the forefront of alleviating poverty around the globe with its Make Poverty History campaign. With the eyes of the world on London, former South African President Nelson Mandela addressed over 20,000 people in London’s Trafalgar Square — while then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown put himself at the center of a celebrity-filled global effort to alleviate African poverty.
But in the 20 years since, the rise of populist-right movements across developed nations, coupled with cost-of-living crises and record migration, mean helping the world’s poorest has slipped down the list of priorities.
Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), set up in 1997 under the premiership of Tony Blair, was “by common acknowledgement the most effective engine around the world for poverty alleviation” by a government agency, argued Andrew Mitchell, the Tory shadow development secretary at the time.
The department even thrived under reform-minded Conservative leader David Cameron, who put Mitchell in charge with plenty of firepower and passed a legal requirement that 0.7 percent of gross national income be spent on aid — no mean feat at a time of public spending austerity.
But political support for that level of spending dropped as centrist liberal parties lost ground to the right following Brexit and Boris Johnson rose to No. 10. In 2020 Johnson merged DFID with the Foreign Office, a move that Mitchell said “vaporized” the department — and that is now echoed by Trump’s intention to fold USAID into the U.S. State Department.
Johnson then slashed the aid budget to 0.5 percent of GNI a year later, seeing off a rebellion from his own party in the Commons.
The impact of spending billions less on aid through a less effective department has been understandably catastrophic in the eyes of charities and NGOs. Those hardest hit by the cuts were programs helping women and girls, according to leaked Foreign Office documents.
In 2005, Nelson Mandela addressed over 20,000 people in London’s Trafalgar Square as part of the Make Poverty History campaign. | Scott Barbour/Getty Images
Concern Worldwide’s Anushree Rao said the organization had to “abruptly” end two flagship programs that reached nearly four million people, adding that the U.K.’s own cuts had “adversely impacted our social and ethical contract with the communities and partners we worked with on the ground, and the trust that we had built over years.”
Skint and unpopular
Despite Labour’s previous strides on international development when in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the new administration — elected on a landslide last July — has hardly been shouting about international development.
Before becoming prime minister, Labour leader Keir Starmer promised in 2022 that he would reverse the “misguided” merger of the Foreign Office and DFID — but his party has now dropped that commitment. And, despite Labour’s saying it would set a “pathway back” to 0.7 percent, the party now merely commits to doing so when the “fiscal situation allows.”
Starmer is clearly “not as interested in development as some of his predecessors,” Mitchell argued.
Complicating the funding picture is that some costs for asylum seekers continue to be taken out of the U.K.’s development budget. While aid spending did rise above 0.5 percent before the Conservatives left office, a large portion of that money was spent providing accommodation and support for asylum seekers in Britain itself.
As a result, the U.K. now risks spending more development money on British postal districts than it does in parts of Africa, with officials recently telling MPs that they do not have a forecast for when these asylum costs drawn from the aid budget will drop, and by how much.
“The election of a Labour government brought cautious optimism within the sector,” said Gideon Rabinowitz, director of policy and advocacy at the Bond network of international development organizations, citing the party’s pledges to rebuild global partnerships and increase aid. “But the government has already scaled back its ambitions.”
Unfortunately for the development sector, so has the United States — leaving a huge international hole to fill.
Bond’s CEO, Romilly Greenhill, said the attempt to “erase USAID by the new U.S. administration is shocking,” and urged the U.K. to confirm it will assess the impact of the U.S. move on Britain’s own aid programs.
Labour’s task of rebuilding the country’s development prowess comes as it grapples with the poor state of public finances, along with the rise of populist parties like Nigel Farage’s Reform that would like to see the aid budget cut further and international cooperation deprioritized.
“Now, alas, we live in an era of narrow nationalism — Putin, Xi, Modi, Erdogan, Trump, Johnson, Le Pen, the AfD in Germany, and Reform and Nigel Farage — and to make a case for the international system and development is much, much more difficult,” Mitchell said.
Going ‘beyond aid‘
Britain’s new government argues that it is making that case in part by changing what it means by development. The Foreign Office under Labour is framing international aid as project that can curb migration and spur economic growth — while using it more explicitly as a soft power tool.
One U.K. government official said Foreign Secretary David Lammy wanted to move away from development in “1997 terms.” | Sergei SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
Foreign Secretary David Lammy has said in recent speeches that although “poverty reduction is an end in itself, our development work cannot be siloed off from geopolitics,” and that the Foreign Office must do more to “deliver on two domestic priorities of the British people — tackling irregular migration and boosting economic growth.”
An example of this came two weeks after taking office, at the European Political Community summit, when the British government committed £84 million to projects in Africa to stop people fleeing their homes and traveling north.
Last week the government quietly slipped out its 2024-25 aid spending statistics, which included an increase in British Investment Partnerships and funding for Africa compared to previous Tory spending projections.
But they cut the amount of overseas development assistance the U.K. was set to spend fighting climate change by a third — some £200 million.
One government official said Lammy wanted to move away from development in “1997 terms,” adding: “We don’t want to be patronizing or paternalistic.”
Guided by the results of a recently completed review of its development policy, the Foreign Office is promising to focus more on direct partnerships with countries’ governments as well.
It’s a shift from previous development approaches in which money sometimes circumvented capitals, and Lammy has dubbed it a “fusion of development and diplomacy.”
The government does not, however, plan to publish this review, which will likely show the continued impact of development cuts, including on women and girls. Making its findings public could prove a headache for Anneliese Dodds, the development minister who also holds the government’s women and equalities brief.
As part of its new approach, the U.K. also will look more to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, to which it boosted British funding in November by about 40 percent. Labour has taken its development aim of creating “a world free of poverty on a livable planet” directly from the bank.
Britain’s investments in other organizations, such as the Gavi vaccine alliance and the Global Fund epidemic group, will be replenished when they come up for renewal — though whether they will be as generous this time around is an open question. The FCDO is under pressure, like all departments, to cut spending as part of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ spending review.
“Interesting in all of this is, what do leaders in developing countries want?” said Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director general of the international affairs think tank RUSI. “Often their priorities are more about economic growth and development and infrastructure and energy than they are [about] poverty reduction and social protection, which the U.K. has done quite a bit on.”
“In quite a lot of British politics, the U.K. and Africa [are] seen primarily in aid terms,” Chalmers said. “There’s an element of what Lammy is about which is about moving beyond aid, which the Foreign Office traditionally does — and because of the merger, that Foreign Office narrative is a more dominant one.
“When DFID was a separate department, then it was always defined by having an objective that was not linked to wider geopolitical objectives, it was about poverty reduction.”
National interests
A major strand of the FCDO’s development work involves addressing the root causes that force people to flee their homes, which include climate change and conflict. A greater focus on and funding for this marks a change from recent years, when U.K. spending on conflict prevention and resolution fell from 4 percent of the aid budget to 1 percent.
Yet while conflict and security has been a major theme of the Foreign Office’s direction under Lammy, next month sees a cliff edge for dozens of international security programs, including on counterterrorism, funded by the British government.
POLITICO has identified more than a dozen projects funded through the U.K. Conflict, Stability and Security Fund that are due to end in March. These projects, funded by a mix of departmental spending and the aid budget, include an international version of the government’s Prevent program against counterterrorism, as well as work in countries including Afghanistan.
A government official was unable to confirm whether these projects will be renewed ahead of this year’s spending review, due by late spring, but confirmed that any programs extended beyond the end of next month would not see a break or pause in their funding.
A separate official working in international development said several NGOs had been told to prepare for their projects to be scrapped.
All eyes are now on Chancellor Reeves’ spending review to see whether Labour moves to rekindle its heritage of helping the world’s poorest — and whether it can step into the space Trump has vacated across the Atlantic.