Nothing shames our country more than Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, paying the bills for Covid off the backs of the poor – at home and abroad.
He has recently been pushed off his plan to cut £20 a week from the already low universal credit paid to 6 million of Britain’s poorest families.
But the world’s poor, thousands of miles away, cannot defend themselves from the chancellor’s assault, and never in our history has the overseas aid budget been cut so peremptorily, so savagely and by so much.
At the end of March, the 30%, £5bn reduction from the 2019 aid budget total will be so severe that it is in breach of UK law, and current legislation will have to be repealed for it to be implemented. And we have to ask: what moral compass guides ministers towards severing lifelines of support in the midst of the most devastating peacetime humanitarian emergency in a century?
For 20 years until now, the UK aid budget has risen, and global poverty has fallen. Now, for the first time in two decades, global poverty is rising but development aid, sadly, is falling. We are depriving the world’s most vulnerable of food, medical treatment and schooling, as surely as pulling away the needle from a child awaiting vaccination, whipping away the school meal from her hungry mouth and shutting the school gates on all those whose human right to education we promised to uphold.
It will take decades to undo the damage that is about to be inflicted. More than 5 million young people will be denied the vaccinations for polio, measles and others they require, with the result that, according to a calculation by the Center for Global Development, 100,000 children’s lives that could have been saved will be lost. Four and a half million fewer children a year will receive an education.
“Global Britain” is being launched by telling 27 of the poorest countries in Asia and Africa that, at a stroke, their bilateral aid is being almost halved, and that Britain’s share of national income devoted to overseas development – once one of the highest at 0.7% – will fall to 0.5 %, below that of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
And when Boris Johnson arrives in Glasgow to chair November’s Cop26 climate change conference, he will have to explain why Britain’s contribution to solving what he says is the greatest existential problem facing the world is also about to be cut back.
The government’s actions are as shortsighted as they are unprincipled. Covid cannot be finally and certainly eliminated anywhere if it is not eliminated everywhere. Given the risk that the virus mutates abroad and returns to ravage even those who have been vaccinated, it would be value for money for rich countries like Britain, that are losing trillions in economic output, to agree to share the burden of financing the vaccination of all the people of all the poorest countries.
The scale of the human tragedies and lives lost not just from Covid but from the consequent hunger and destitution should focus our minds. The great reversal in progress is happening at the very moment when the world’s poorest need our help most. Yesterday, the broadest possible coalition, from the Women’s Institute and Save the Children to the National Union of Students and the Wildlife Trusts, called for a renewed commitment to the 0.7% share of national income aid target and even if MPs vote to do so on urgent humanitarian grounds only – to deal with today’s emergency – the House of Commons should this month defy the government and defeat its plans.
As chair of this year’s G7, Britain should not be cutting aid but rounding up worldwide support for an urgently needed new global growth and development plan. At the heart of it should be a Marshall-style plan for Africa. To halt the rising tide of poverty there, we should push for an issue of what are called special drawing rights – $1.2tn (£0.9tn) of new international money – and allocate it to poverty-stricken countries. We should instruct another trillion in resources to be made available to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and implement a far more generous debt relief and restructuring programme.
And if there is to be substance to the Johnson promise of 12 years’ education for girls, he should ask June’s G7 to fund a back-to-school plan that includes school meal provision for all undernourished children.
For two decades and more, NGOs have worked closely with the UK government and, indeed, managed the implementation of many development programmes.
The understanding was that both the government and NGOs would be ramping up efforts year by year to deliver the UN sustainable development goals.
Standing side by side in campaigns such as Make Poverty History, the NGOs and the UK government would together lead the world, and the combination of our grassroots and intergovernmental pressure would persuade other countries to follow.
A great deal was achieved over 20 years – $200bn of debt relief, a doubling of aid to Africa, new global health funds, which massively reduced infant and maternal mortality, and more recently, to Britain’s credit, the replenishment of the global vaccination facility and a new target to cut carbon emissions.
But now that the UK government is reneging on its financial commitments to deliver on the sustainable development goals, NGOs will have to think again.
It is right to be campaigners alongside governments when they are doing the right things, but it is right also to campaign to change the minds of governments when they are getting it wrong. And as we confront not just a threat to Britain’s standing as a global leader but also an urgent moral issue, this is preeminently the time to hear and heed the warning first issued by President John Kennedy that in the end “if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich”.
Gordon Brown is a former prime minister and chancellor of the UK