International Aid: Treasury Update

Alyn Smith Excerpts

Programme motion
Tuesday 13th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

The Scottish National party opposes these cuts, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee West (Chris Law) eloquently outlined. We are committed to our 0.7% manifesto commitment. Some 98.2% of the votes cast in the Sterling election in 2019 went to parties committed to the 0.7%, so I am representing my party and my constituency in the stance we have taken.

I pay tribute to and warmly praise a number of Members on the Government Benches; we have heard some refreshing blasts of integrity throughout this discussion. This is too important for Punch and Judy politics.

There are just three points I would make, because this is a well-trodden path at this point in the debate. First, the 0.7% figure is a Government manifesto commitment made barely 18 months ago. Secondly, yes, covid has changed everything of course, but it has changed everything for everybody else as well, and to use covid as a pretext for this cut when the developing world is also dealing with covid and the effects of the economic impact is reprehensible.

Thirdly, the cut is out of step with the rest of the world. The UK is the outlier in this; other countries are increasing, not decreasing, their aid spending. The UK remains, as we have heard, a significant donor of international aid—I applaud that, I welcome that, I acknowledge that—but this is a broken promise to the poorest people in the world at the worst possible time, and it flies in the face of the global consensus. Canada is increasing its spend by 28% while the UK is decreasing its by 25%, and France is increasing its spend by 36%, Italy by 13%, the US by 39.4% and Germany by 6%. It is the UK that is out of step.

Global Britain is clearly not the SNP’s project, but we are engaged in this because we do not want to see the poorest in the world let down. We want to try to rectify a mistake and to see Scottish taxes—or, more realistically, Scottish debt—go to effective purposes rather than where this Government might take them. We are entirely unconvinced by the Government’s compromise proposal; we think that to present this as an arithmetic formula is to misrepresent this issue entirely. Estimates and numbers are arguable of course, but, as has been acknowledged throughout this debate, only once in the last 20 years have the criteria foreseen within the Government’s mechanism been met. We fear this is a formula to entrench the cuts, not to bring the spending back.

Now, of course the books need to be balanced, and I feel for the Government in that task, but the difference between 0.5% and 0.7% is barely 1% of the global sum. For a Government who have spent money on increasing defence spending and nuclear capacity, blown £1.3 billion on a needless stamp duty freeze and yet—worse—are talking about a royal yacht, I think the priorities are wrong. I do hope that a significant number of Conservative Members will join the coalition to put this right.