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.
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.
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”.
Former Tory minister Rory Stewart has also hit out at the decision to slash foreign aid spending, comparing Sit Keir to Donald Trump.
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”.
