Cutting foreign aid will play into Putin’s hands, former minister warns Starmer

PM accused of abandoning ‘soft power’, four years after he spoke in its defence, by former deputy foreign secretary. Russia and China will be the beneficiaries of Keir Starmer’s plans to slash the foreign aid budget, a former deputy foreign secretary has warned in a stark message to the prime minister.

Sir Keir defended his controversial cuts saying he would use the cash to hit back at “tyrants” like Putin, as he bowed to pressure from Donald Trump to boost defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP just hours before jetting to meet the US President at the White House.

But Andrew Mitchell warned the move would actually aid Russia, three years after its illegal invasion of Ukraine. And he suggested Labour had turned its back on its own principles, pointing out that Sir Keir argued against reductions to the overseas aid budget under the Conservatives.

As he arrived in Washington for a crunch meeting with Donald Trump, the PM warned Russia could launch a fresh attack on Ukraine unless US provides security guarantees after any peace deal. But in an article for The Independent, Mr Mitchell writes: “Who will benefit from these aid cuts? The answer is Russia and China.”.

He adds: “The foreign secretary (David Lammy) himself warned that spaces we vacate would be filled by our adversaries. History will judge this to be a strategic disaster of our own making.”. The cuts will result in “many lives” being lost, he said. He warned that the government “must never balance the books on the backs of the world’s poorest. It was the reason I opposed the foreign aid cuts my own government made in 2021 as well as the vaporisation of the Department for International Development.”.

And he points out that his protests against that decision received support from MPs “including from the then leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, who made a brilliant speech extolling the indispensability of UK soft power”. He writes that he had “high hopes that the Labour government would continue on the road to restoring the UK’s reputation in the world. Alas, that hope and the opportunity to help the poorest and most wretched in the world lies in the gutter. Britain is all the weaker for.”.

Mr Mitchell said that that while he fully supported the PM’s increase in defence spending, he warned that doing so at the expense of the foreign aid budget was not just “wrong” but also “deeply cynical”. “Deploying the pretext of having to make ‘painful’ and ‘necessary’ decisions in a world full of peril, Keir Starmer reverted to that most predictable of laments: he had no choice. That is disingenuous. I can identify several measures that would have raised revenue to the levels needed. For example, the former Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt pointed out that a return to the same number of working-age recipients of welfare as before covid – surely not an outrageous proposition – would save £40 billion of taxpayers’ money.”.

Instead, he said, the government choose to “take an axe to the lowest hanging political fruit: foreign aid is an easy target, least likely to arouse mass-resistance and most likely to appeal to populist sensibilities across the political spectrum”.

He described the choice as “egregious” and one that “fundamentally misreads the mechanics of international security”, describing hard and soft power as two sides of the same coin. “The role of development is to help build prosperous and conflict-free societies over there so we are safe and prosperous over here”.

This begins with keeping young children healthy through vaccinations, moves on to education and the nurturing of aspiration, and ultimately creating opportunities for jobs and economic growth, helping to create prosperous societies which are “likely to experience mass-migration, export extremist ideologies, and allow infectious diseases to spread far and wide”.

He notes “As General Mattis famously said: the more we cut aid, the more we must spend on ammunition.”. Former Tory minister Rory Stewart has also hit out at the decision to slash foreign aid spending, comparing Sit Keir to Donald Trump. The former foreign office minister warned that parallel decisions to reduce aid on both sides of the Atlantic would leave the UK and the US jointly responsible for “unimaginable damage” to international security and the climate.