The Review and International Development

The Integrated Review (IR) is an ambitious blueprint for the UK’s role in the world post-Brexit. A key component of translating that ambition into reality is maintaining the UK’s position as a ‘soft power superpower’.

Its recent decisions regarding international development have, for the first time in two decades, weakened a central pillar of the UK’s soft power. The cut to the official development assistance (ODA) budget has been brought into sharp focus by the fact that, in the year of its G7 presidency, the UK is the only G7 country reducing aid spending. Compounding matters, Johnson’s decision to merge the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), creating what he termed a ‘mega-department’ – the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) – prior to the IR’s publication, has undermined the ‘integrated’ nature of the Review and further damaged the UK’s international development reputation.

Creating the FCDO: Ill-Timed and Counter-Productive

The new FCDO was formed in September, with officials reportedly having been told to start preparing for the merger shortly after Johnson’s emphatic election victory in December 2019. Johnson’s arguments in favour of the merger lacked substance. He claimed it was necessary because:

Johnson’s superficial argument failed to reflect the reality of interdepartmental coordination between DFID and the FCO. It was also quintessentially Johnsonian, including its rhetorically pungent, xenophobic undertone. As discussed below,

The timing of the move, taking place a couple of months into a major global pandemic, was also questionable. It is unclear what prompted Johnson to announce the merger of DFID and the FCO in June 2020, but re-organising two major departments of state, forcing them to turn inwards to resolve the administrative and managerial challenges of merging two workforces totalling several thousand staff, deployed across the globe, just months into a global pandemic crisis with major implications for foreign policy and development assistance, lacked strategic foresight. The merger proved highly controversial on both sides of the political divide, with several politicians questioning its wisdom. Among many dissenting voices were three former Conservative prime ministers and two former international development secretaries.

The merger was soon followed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, announcing that the government would temporarily abandon the enacted spending commitment of 0.7 per cent of gross national income (GNI) on ODA – although some suspect that the government plans to make the cut permanent. Sunak reduced the total to 0.5 per cent of GNI, saving an estimated £4 billion. Like the decision to create the FCDO, cutting the aid budget also resulted in widespread criticism; all five living former prime ministers have expressed dismay at the decision.

Given the magnitude of the budget deficit caused by the pandemic response, it is reasonable that Sunak has considered options to reduce public spending. However, the decision to reduce ODA spending should not be viewed exclusively as a short-term measure to ease challenging economic circumstances, but as a political act that has ended cross-party consensus on international development that has held for approximately fifteen years.

The politicised nature of the cut is apparent when its economic impact is considered. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, savings from the spending cut are ‘small… relative to the £250 billion of additional support provided by the government in response to the pandemic in 2020–21 (plus a further £94 billion in 2021–22).’ Arguably, Cameron’s sustained increase of development spending from 2010, during a period of painful domestic austerity, intensified anti-DFID pressure in his party and its aligned media, which Johnson was subsequently able to channel. And, it should be said, even at 0.5 per cent, the UK development budget is still large by international standards.

To understand the failure of the IR to better integrate decisions about development spending and DFID’s status, it is necessary to look beyond the pandemic. The longer view is that Johnson’s decision to abolish DFID and subordinate development to wider foreign policy is the latest turn in a decades-long political debate about the appropriate institutional home in Whitehall for development policy. In this context, it is the previous fifteen years of relative cross-party consensus on DFID’s independence that is the outlier.

Political Strategy and Development Policy

The political context in which Boris Johnson announced the FCDO merger was very different to that in 2005, when new Conservative leader David Cameron emphasised the importance of development policy as a component of his wider modernisation strategy. In 2005, the Conservatives had just suffered their third successive bruising election defeat to Labour. In June 2020, Johnson was in a commanding position, having won a substantial parliamentary majority the previous December.

The different positions that Johnson and Cameron occupy on development policy reflect differences in their respective political outlooks. Under Cameron’s leadership, the party embraced international development as part of a tilt towards the political centre-ground. Pragmatism also aligned with principle: both Cameron and his shadow International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, were committed ethically to development, as well as recognising the importance of aid in enhancing UK influence overseas. Cameron’s coalition government was the first to meet the 0.7 per cent target for ODA spending, and thanks to a Liberal Democrat private member’s bill, ultimately enacted that target as legislation in 2015.

The new departure in Conservative policy on development under Cameron and Mitchell was often associated with the party’s social action project in Rwanda, in which activists and several future MPs would get first-hand experience of development. But this effort did not transform the entire party’s attitude towards aid, or DFID specifically. As mentioned previously, the juxtaposition of DFID’s rising budget and the wider domestic austerity strategy was contentious within the wider Conservative Party.

the IR increased the defence budget, against the backdrop of a – perhaps indefinite – cut in the ODA budget (which equals the increase in defence spending).

Johnson’s approach to DFID wasn’t a surprise. He had long expressed dissatisfaction that international development had been separated from the FCO. Having resigned from Theresa May’s Cabinet, he argued in 2019 that: ‘We can’t keep spending huge sums of taxpayers’ money as though we were some independent Scandinavian NGO…The present system is leading to inevitable waste as money is shoved out of the door in order to meet the 0.7 per cent target [for spending]’. Prominent figures in Johnson’s Cabinet, such as Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Home Secretary Priti Patel are also on record as historic critics of DFID and wider development policy. Under Raab’s leadership of the FCDO, development policy is now subordinated to this long-established view – although it isn’t immediately obvious why a Cabinet and National Security Council led by Johnson and containing Raab and Patel couldn’t have achieved these objectives without the need for a merger.

Whatever the merits of their arguments about the benefits of a merged FCDO, the decision was pursued in the context of a very different Conservative Party strategy. Johnson’s path to victory in December 2019 did not focus on presenting an image of a modernised Conservative Party appealing to the centre-ground. Instead it focused on a more populist offering to ‘get Brexit done,’ and trying to deliver perceptible domestic benefits as part of the UK’s exit from the EU. Pledging to spend taxpayers’ money overseas, whether on the EU budget or aid, was not an attractive policy offer to many traditional Conservative supporters or to its new ‘red wall’ voters.

For the moment,

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has to date retained a separate, front-bench shadow cabinet portfolio for international development. Between Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s creation of DFID’s precursor department, the Overseas Development Ministry, in 1964, the institutional status of development policy became a political football, with incoming Conservative administrations subordinating it to the FCO and incoming Labour governments re-establishing its independence. It’s likely that the next Labour manifesto will pledge to de-merge the FCDO, re-establishing the independence of DFID.

But the merger and associated aid cut have also divided, albeit to a smaller extent, the Conservative Party. For example, Cameron’s former adviser, Baroness Sugg, resigned from her ministerial role in the FCDO in protest at Sunak’s aid cut. And former International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has been prominent in efforts to compel the government to return to the 0.7 per cent spending target next year. The government recently won a vote in the House of Commons – with a reduced majority of 35 – by pledging to follow a formula to restore the aid budget when fiscal circumstances allow. Interestingly, the campaign against the cut unites figures from across the party – former Brexit Secretary David Davis’s support indicates that this is not simply a left-right issue within the parliamentary party. Rather, it highlights a salient argument made by the rebels that the UK’s commitment to international development is more consistent with the Review’s ‘Global Britain’ agenda than Johnson’s chosen path of subordinating DFID and cutting the aid budget.

Conclusion

Not all within the Conservative Party supported the rebellion to overturn the aid cut. Amid a pandemic that has required significant government spending, and after a decade of domestic austerity, it isn’t surprising that supporters of the aid cut argued that ‘charity begins at home’ and that the UK should pursue a policy of ‘trade not aid’ to enable poorer countries to trade their way out of poverty. The government can also point to polling that indicates broad public support for the aid cut. But Johnson’s path diverges strikingly from Cameron’s emphatic refusal in 2010 to pursue aid cuts as a way to: ‘balance the books on the backs of the poorest people in the world.’ Outside of the EU, the UK would arguably have benefited diplomatically from the ‘soft power’ impact of retaining the 0.7 per cent commitment in difficult circumstances.

Arguably, there is also a selfish national argument for retaining higher development spending, as the world tries to recover from a pandemic that, although it has affected different countries in different ways, has underlined the transnational nature of threats and the interconnectedness between what happens overseas and domestically. Retaining an independent DFID and the 0.7 per cent commitment would also have elevated the authority of the UK presidencies of the G7 and COP26. Instead, the ‘Global Britain’ ambitions of the IR were undermined by the resurgence of a strain of opinion in the Conservative Party that had been effectively buried under David Cameron’s leadership. Moreover, by failing to provide a credible roadmap by which the UK will return to the 0.7 per cent commitment, the government has confirmed that the elite worldview of the Conservative Cabinet of the 2020s looks a lot like that of its predecessors in the 1980s and 1990s.

Dr Joe Devanny is Lecturer in National Security Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and Deputy Director of the Centre for Defence Studies. He is a member of the King’s Cyber Security Research Group and an affiliate of the King’s Brazil Institute.

Dr Philip A. Berry is a Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and Assistant Director of the Centre for Defence Studies. He is the author of The War on Drugs and Anglo-American Relations: Lessons from Afghanistan, 2001-2011 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

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