0.7% Official Development Assistance Target

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

The decision by this Government to take essential, life-saving money from the world’s poorest people is absolutely shameful and it has confirmed, once and for all, that the idea of “global Britain” has already lost its moral compass. For this idea to have been confirmed at April’s integrated security review simply beggars belief; the idea that by making the world’s poorest people even poorer we somehow make ourselves safer is absolute nonsense and it takes gaslighting to new extremes.

Do the Government really expect us to believe that the best way to make the people of the UK more safe and secure is to slash vital humanitarian aid to parts of the world that are already ravaged by conflict, war and famine, and thereby to force tens of millions of people to uproot their families and go in search of a better, more secure future? It was breathtaking insensitivity, adding insult to injury, that that same Integrated Review announced that money that could and should have gone to help underprivileged and poor people across the world will instead be spent on increasing the UK’s stockpile of nuclear weapons—it is utterly abhorrent. This country has a historical moral obligation to those countries that are now in the developing world. We have to help them because we are responsible for where they are now. For more than a century the UK grew rich and powerful on the backs of the poor. The countries we invaded, conquered, divided and plundered need our help now and we cannot cut it off like this—it is abhorrent.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call Bob Seely, who has 90 seconds.