Global cooperation will be central to our approach to international development

Spend any amount of time on social media, reading our tabloids or listening to our public discourse, and you could well be excused for thinking compassion was dead. Yet whether we are opening our wallets and front doors for Ukrainians, driving food and medicines to Calais or helping neighbours survive Covid, the truth is that our everyday lives in Britain are made up of many more small acts of kindness and solidarity than the news would have you believe.

Social democrats and progressives believe fundamentally in people’s compassion. The left may not have a monopoly on the principle; plenty of well-meaning Conservative politicians, after all, have placed great importance on compassion too. Yet their compassion too often means merely giving people crumbs from the table, rather than an equal seat at it. Ours is a compassion based not on charity, but on solidarity. We act together to make society fairer and more equal.

I was fortunate to grow up shaped and inspired by these values from an early age. When you grow up with six younger siblings, you quickly learn the importance of solidarity and working together. My father worked hard as a foreman and bus driver. But he somehow made time too to help our community, serving for 18 years as president of the Sikh Gurdwara on Smethwick High Street in Birmingham. He stood as a Labour councillor and was instrumental in the 1980s in setting up Sandwell’s race and interfaith networks. He ran food banks to address the impact of recession in Sandwell. It was these values that led me to become a social worker and, eventually, to stand up for and represent my community as a councillor.

For social democrats across Europe, our values matter. They must be at the heart not just of local change, but also of our response to the global crises of climate change, inequality and conflict that can at times seem daunting. Yet ultimately, personal principles count for little unless they result in material improvements to people’s situations, reshaping the world in their favour.

I am fortunate, as the UK Labour Party’s shadow minister for international development, to see day in day out the remarkable difference that international development policies, budgets and programmes can make. Make no mistake, we have the means to change people’s lives in the most practical of ways.

In this essay, I argue that it is time for European social democrats to recommit to international sustainable development. In doing so, we must grapple with two key propositions. First, that in a fast-changing world, we must reform, not retreat from, global institutions and international rules and second, that our approach to development must tackle head-on the challenges of the next quarter of a century, rather than fall back on doctrines of the past 25 years.

The international ‘compassion’ of Conservatives

Back when I was first elected as a councillor in 2012, it appeared that David Cameron’s new Conservative government might maintain the cross-party consensus on international development. That consensus would come to include both an independent department and the UK’s landmark pledge to spend 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance (ODA).

Early optimism proved to be unfounded. In 2015, the government declared in a strategy that aid would now be “squarely in the UK’s national interest”. It heralded the start of a gradual tilt away from spending taxpayer money on reducing poverty and towards protecting the UK’s short-term security, trade and business interests. In the political turbulence that followed, long-term strategy and smart decision-making suffered. Between 2016 and 2020, six different international development secretaries – Justine Greening, Priti Patel, Penny Mordaunt, Rory Stewart, Alok Sharma and Anne-Marie Trevelyan – all left office.

Then, in 2020, things fell apart. Boris Johnson’s government shut down the world-leading Department for International Development (DFID), merging it into a new Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). With one ill thought-through flourish of the pen, Britain’s development expertise – for which we were once renowned around the world – was gone. In the new FCDO, civil servants’ morale reportedly plummeted.

Then, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak moved to slash the UK’s aid budget by some £4.6bn. The decision defied opposition from across the political spectrum, including Conservative ex-Prime Ministers and former Conservative Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell, who warned that “hundreds of thousands” would die.

The cruel cuts saw the Conservatives abandon their own 2019 manifesto pledge to retain the 0.7% funding pledge. But, for the millions of people around the world living through crisis and relying on UK aid, it also spelled immediate disaster. Some 7.1 million children – equivalent to more than half the UK’s child population – lost their education. In the middle of a global pandemic, funding for research, health programmes and hygiene was pulled at short notice. 72 million people missed out on expected treatment for neglected tropical diseases. Hundreds of millions of pounds were cut from life-saving assistance in some of the world’s most acute crises, such as in Yemen and Afghanistan. Just months before Russia was to invade Ukraine, the UK cut £350m from its conflict stability and security fund programming to prevent conflict.

Rushed through and driven more by political ideology than by need, the cuts also caused more damage to people’s lives and Britain’s reputation than they needed to. Without a careful exit strategy, the government tore up agreements and abandoned international partners, aid agencies and the communities they worked with – often with little warning or opportunity to seek alternative funding. In March 2022, the National Audit Office, the UK’s public finance watchdog, found that the Conservatives had failed to sufficiently consider the impact of the funding cuts (which had lacked transparency and consultation) on development programmes – creating what they euphemistically called a ‘value-for-money risk’ to the British taxpayer. In fact, it was DFID – as the most effective department at spending ODA – that had given the British taxpayer best value for money.

In 2022, with the damage done, the Conservatives finally made explicit in their new international development strategy what they had already started to do in practice. Britain’s remaining aid budget would now be spent directly on taking on so-called “malign actors” like China and promoting the UK’s short-term trade and foreign policy objectives. In a document some 32 pages long, the Conservatives referenced the UN’s sustainable development goals – negotiated and championed by David Cameron just a few years earlier – only twice. Also cited just twice was “poverty reduction”, despite still being required by UK law to be the central focus of any aid spending. After 12 painful years of gradually unpicking Britain’s internationalist consensus, for the Conservatives, ‘development’ was finally dead in all but name.

Bringing Britain back to the international stage

Appalling though this recent record is, some might reasonably ask, is it not simply the normal way of things that Labour governments strengthen Britain’s role on international development and that Conservative governments weaken it?  After all, it was a Labour government that first established a separate Ministry of Overseas Development in 1964 before the Conservatives incorporated it back into the Foreign Office in 1970. In 1974, Labour again made the department separate with its own minister. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher again transferred it back into the Foreign Office. In 1997, Labour established a Department for International Development, shut down by Boris Johnson in 2020.

Labour is clear that when the British people put us back into government, we will return to the 0.7% spending pledge and restore Britain’s development expertise. Could the pendulum not, therefore, simply swing back again in favour of international development, compassion and solidarity?

There is some truth to this. But the changing times demand we go much further than restoring an independent aid department and budget. We need a government that will truly put its shoulder to the wheel. The global challenges that we now face in 2022 are unprecedented. Conflict rages not just in Ukraine, but around the world. One in 95 people have been forced to flee their homes. Amid a global cost-of-living crisis, inequality surges; while those with extreme wealth get richer, 263 million more people are believed to now live in extreme poverty than before the pandemic.

Global food insecurity means more famines and conflicts that barely even make the news. In East Africa, aid agencies report one person is now dying every 48 seconds. The clock is ticking too towards climate breakdown. From California to the Sahel and the Pacific, the world is already on fire. Governments have no choice but to bring about immediate and transformative climate action and scale up help for those on the frontline of pollution that they did not cause. Risks, moreover, interconnect and multiply like never before. From conflict to climate and from the economy to ecology, the fragility of our system is extreme.

Global crises demand global solutions. Unilateral compassion is not enough. In the financial crisis of 2008, swift international action by leaders prevented a bad situation from getting worse. In 2005, concerted effort by G8 leaders saw progress on debt cancellation. Now, in the face of a global pandemic, if we are to vaccinate the world and halt economic crisis, we need both effective global institutions and governments with leaders who will respect international rules and step up.

In an increasingly multi-polar world, norms and values are contested. The liberal consensus that shaped international norms after the Second World War is fast being eroded. In much of the world, the notion that wealth trickles down and that our lives are getting better seems increasingly absurd to too many.

Our global institutions – and our mechanisms for resolving difference and tackling shared crises – can feel like they are creaking and in need of urgent reform. Yet the choice is stark. Down one path lies isolation. The Trumps and Johnsons of our world peddle the lie that we can turn inwards, abandon global cooperation, put walls up against those with whom we disagree and surrender the international stage. The other path is difficult, but the right one: face outwards, build international partnerships as equals, resolve differences where they exist, reform our global order so it works for people over profit and step up to tackle global crises.

Labour’s sister parties in Europe now hold power in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Luxembourg – all of which in 2020 kept their UN pledge to spend at least 0.7% of GNI on ODA. Together, we could inspire others to step up. France is already legislating to return to 0.7% by 2025 and Spain by 2030. With progressive governments in power in countries as diverse as Australia, Portugal, Chile, Finland, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, the truth is that new opportunities are emerging to address the world’s biggest crises together.  Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, Britain would once again assert itself as a global leader in international development, supporting the multilateral system and bringing Britain back to the international stage as a trusted partner.

International development of the future

The world is fundamentally different today and that means that the focus of international development and the means by which we must achieve it must be different too. An independent department solely focused on poverty needs to look to the future challenges we face as a world.

Notions of poorer, less developed countries in need of charity are outdated and wrong. It is true that humanitarian assistance and conflict prevention remain an important part of what the British government can do; poverty, human need and climate damage are greatest in just 20 to 30 key crisis- and conflict-affected countries. Help people here, and we will also make genuine global progress on many of the key indicators for the UN’s 2030 sustainable development goals.

We must also prepare for the reality that, in the coming quarter of a century, climate breakdown will be directly responsible for a growing amount of human suffering around the world. A central mission of Britain’s international development must be to support people to survive and adapt to the changing climate.

Important though humanitarian assistance will remain, it is justice rather than charity that is needed most around the world. The sustainable development goals negotiated by UN member states were underpinned by the principle of ‘universality’, the simple recognition that we are all the same. What people need, want and have a right to is the same in Uganda as in the UK.

In middle-income countries, where vast numbers of the world’s poorest people still live, inequality has too often surged. Just as in the UK we demand and deserve investment in our NHS and our schools, the future of many of the world’s poorest people depends increasingly not on food parcels handed out by foreigners, but on universal, quality public services and the power of civil society to win change.

That is why Britain’s next international development strategy must unequivocally back citizens, activists, social movements, trade unions and faith groups fighting for change where they are. How we do development must change.

Yet the Conservatives cut funding to civil society in Britain and the Global South. Where the Conservatives promise only aid and charity to women and girls, Labour will get resources, support and protection to the women’s rights activists fighting for gender equality and transforming their own societies.

We must back the British people’s demands for global justice, especially on issues like climate change and vaccine equity. As with the movement for tax, trade and debt justice in the early 2000s, Britain’s positive impact on the world is at its greatest when government works in tune with the British public.

For social democrats across Europe, bringing to life a different way of doing development, fit for the challenges of the coming 25 years, may sound daunting. But we can learn from and work with each other. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party’s new government brought together climate and development into one single, powerful department. Together, centre-left governments will soon face the challenge at the UN of negotiating what succeeds the 2030 sustainable development goals.

As we look ahead, the power of cooperation is unmistakable. We can choose to turn to each other when confronted with global crises, rather than inwards. We can choose to renew and update the world’s approach to international development, learning from each other. We can and must address the world’s biggest challenges. In the UK, under Keir Starmer, Labour is again ready to play its part.

This essay first appeared in the Fabian Society collection Enduring Values: How Progressives Across Europe Can Win.