Keir Starmer’s disastrous decision

But almost every political party, along with most of the public, agrees the UK genuinely needs to spend more on the military, and engage in at least some degree of rearmament – not least because Trump’s America is no longer a reliable guarantor of European security.

As a result, Starmer’s announcement that the UK would spend 2.5% of its GDP on defence by 2027 was broadly welcomed. If anything, questions centred on whether that would be enough, and whether more funds could be found.

Perhaps inevitably, international development minister Anneliese Dodds handed in her resignation over the proposed cuts, though – perhaps as the result of delicate negotiations with Number 10 – she tactfully delayed it until after Starmer’s departure from Washington DC.

Nonetheless, Dodds was quietly eviscerating in her resignation letter, spelling out the shortsightedness of Starmer’s abrupt decision for the UK’s own interests.

“The cut will also likely lead to a UK pullout from numerous African, Caribbean and western Balkan nations at a time when Russia has been aggressively increasing its global presence,” she wrote.

“All this while China is seeking to rewrite global rules, and when the climate crisis is the biggest security threat of them all.”

Dodds decision was simple: no minister with any sincere effort in international development could sit across the table representing the UK in meetings about aid after Starmer’s abandonment.

The role is now surely fit only for the most soullessly ambitious of Labour’s MPs, or else a masochist utterly (and selflessly) devoted to making the best of a disastrous decision.

There were some needless speedbumps over the government’s decision to fudge the figures: Starmer insisted the extra spending amounted to £13bn a year for defence, whereas the Institute for Fiscal Studies quickly pointed out that in reality it’s nearer to £6bn. Ministers and prime ministers seem addicted to saying the biggest number possible, and then wonder why the public don’t trust them as much as they used to.

The government had everything in place for a good day: a necessary policy which crossed typical political divides, and which addressed an urgent concern for the British public. But then Keir Starmer announced how he intended to pay for it – by cutting overseas aid.

The appeal of cutting overseas aid to fund increased defence spending is obvious on a shallow level: that’s precisely why cut-price populists like Nigel Farage and his latest political vehicle Reform enjoy doing so. Aid spending is unpopular with the public, defence spending is needed, QED.

It is hard to shake the suspicion that Labour’s political strategists saw an opportunity to hurt Reform politically, by effectively stealing their idea. Sources in the party said the scheme “whiffed” of Number 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and his cabinet ally and fixer Pat McFadden.

In reality, such efforts rarely work: research shows that when centre-right parties crack down on the issues their radical right rivals favour, such as cutting aid, or prioritising immigration as an issue, it fails. Voters still turn away from them. When voters are offered populism versus populism-lite, they opt for the former.

Labour, of course, is supposed to be a party of the centre-left. So, when it tries to steal Reform’s lunch in this way, it is competing for a very narrow slice of UK voters not just with Reform but also with the Conservatives – and abandoning its actual voter base in the meantime.

At some point, Labour will have to remember that, though its strategists like to denigrate liberal, middle-class, or left-leaning voters, they are in fact its base. Also, these are voters with obvious alternatives, in the form of the Liberal Democrats and Greens, and Labour is haemorrhaging voters to both parties.

The politics of cutting aid to fund defence look good, but it’s too clever by half even on its own narrowly political terms. When the actual impact of trying to cut aid is factored in, though, the policy becomes calamitous – and morally bankrupt.

At present, the UK officially spends around 0.5% of GDP on aid – but a significant amount of this money doesn’t leave the country, instead being used to fund the asylum system. A little over a third of the aid budget currently goes to the Home Office. Some of this had been assigned to set up the Rwanda system, but much of it goes on the cost of processing asylum claims, housing asylum seekers, and so on.

The government’s plans are to cut overseas aid to 0.3%, and doing this smoothly relies on the assumption that a lot of the cuts can come from the cost of handling the huge asylum backlog that built up under the Conservatives. In theory, if this could be done, cuts to existing overseas aid spending would be relatively small.

However, if those savings don’t materialise – and experts warn they seem optimistic – cuts to overseas aid could easily prove even more drastic than they appear. And the timing could not be more catastrophic, given the US has abruptly withdrawn from major overseas aid commitments around the world.

The political left has done a terrible political job selling overseas aid to the electorate. It evokes an image of something that should be handled by charitable giving, or is framed in terms of duty, or moral virtue. The reality is that overseas aid is an essential tool for our own safety and security – and something any hard-headed realist should be able to support.

Overseas aid helps keep disasters contained and mitigated while they are far away from our shores. It helps prevent conflicts overspilling into regional wars and mass migrations. It staves off disease outbreaks before they become pandemics. It helps buy goodwill and cooperation for anti-terrorism operations, and intelligence on adversaries.

Aid, diplomacy and military spending are all different means to attain the same goal. By boosting defence spending at the cost of aid, Keir Starmer is effectively cutting off our left hand in the hope of making our right arm stronger. This is political cowardice on an epic scale, and one with costs that will be all too real.

Elon Musk has triggered something close to a wholesale collapse of USAID – and Trump’s wider cuts have left bodies like the World Health Organisation facing major financial shortfalls, with no obvious way to plug them.

The UK would have been one of the countries best able to step into the mess left behind to mitigate the damage. One of the legacies of the last Labour government – and Gordon Brown’s deeply felt commitment to aid, which saw the UK spend 0.7% of GDP on the goal – was that the UK is deeply connected in these international networks. Where other countries merely give money through international bodies, UK officials have connections, relationships, and the ability to get things done.

We might have been able to coordinate European countries to address the most desperate situations left by the USA’s disastrous funding cuts – getting HIV medication to those who need it across Africa, or handling outbreaks of infectious disease.

By cutting aid at this moment, Keir Starmer sold out the world’s vital interests for a little political convenience. He will soon find he sold it far too cheaply: all he has done is postpone a necessary conversation with British voters over the need to raise tax.

The public will not wear cuts to public services to pay for defence, and the existing money committed is not nearly enough to actually rearm. Starmer could have seized the moment to level with the electorate, but he ducked it.

All he has done is postpone the inevitable – and by doing so, he has foregone the chance for Britain to play a genuine leadership role on the world stage. Cutting aid was bad politics, bad for Britain, and it will lead to untold additional suffering across the world. It ought to weigh heavily on the prime minister’s conscience – and those of the people around him, too.