Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

Blair McDougall Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Blair McDougall (East Renfrewshire) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is appropriate that we have such a distinguished internationalist in the Chair for this debate. [Interruption.] That did not get me any extra time for my speech.

I recognise the impossible decisions that the Government have to take, but I hope that we do not set up a false dichotomy in which we believe that our moral preferences have to be at odds with our strategic interests. I recognise, though, that the Government are making budgetary decisions in response to very painful real-world events that are taking place every day. I represent many of the FCDO workers from East Kilbride, and I myself worked for 10 years delivering aid. I do not want to repeat what others said in pleading for the international development budget, but I want to ask the Government about one thing, and perhaps challenge them on it.

If, as the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) said, we are not still the development superpower, what is our offer to the global south? We know what Russia’s offer is: blood for gold. It will kill your enemies for you, through mercenaries, and take precious minerals out of your country. We know what China’s offer is: infrastructure in return for debt that keeps you in its power. We cannot offer violence, and we cannot demand subservience. It seems to me that our offer is values, but values need to be projected through vehicles. In the time I have, I want to mention two of those vehicles.

I add my voice to those of right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken in defence of the BBC. Others have spoken about how development helps to save money on defence. That also works the other way around: when defence fails, development picks up the pieces. If we need one example of that, we can look to Afghanistan. When we left Afghanistan, we left behind the BBC World Service. It is now the only broadcast journalism in the country—the only thing that is still there, saying to those people, “We have not abandoned you.” The cuts that we are discussing imply very deep cuts to the World Service, which I hope we will not see.

The second thing I wanted to plead for is the democratic infrastructure that supports dissidents and democrats around the world—the people I worked with. As we stand here, that infrastructure is being dismantled because of Elon Musk’s vandalism. The most extraordinarily brave people I have ever met are being utterly abandoned.

[Stephen Gethins (Arbroath and Broughty Ferry) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on his contribution. He and I disagree on a lot, but not on this. Will he pay tribute to those who work with the conflict, stability and security fund, which is particularly important in all the areas that he rightly touched on?

[Blair McDougall]

I am very happy to do so. The hon. Gentleman and I have worked closely together on Georgia—a country in the backyard of Vladimir Putin that is on day 96, I think, of huge street protests, all for lack of the cost of a single storm shadow missile in recent years. We cannot fill all the gaps, but I hope that we can triage, and can look at places such as Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Belarus, where a small amount of money makes an enormous amount of strategic difference.

If investing in arms allows us to fight, we must remember to invest in the reasons why we want to fight in the first place. The fundamental weakness of the authoritarians with whom we are in this unspoken war is the same. Every act of brutality is a confession of their weakness. They know that if their people were free to choose, they would not choose the form of Government that is there. All that those authoritarians offer is corruption, violence and brutality against their own people, who will choose to be on our side in the global fight, but we need to put in the resources to make that case every single day around the world with confidence.