Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

Debate between Julian Lewis and Emily Thornberry

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

Since the election of the Labour Government last July, I am proud to say that Britain is back on the world stage. When we are at our best, we are a respected and influential global player. We have many things to our advantage: we are the bridge between the US and Europe; we have a place on the Security Council; and our security services and defence are very respected. Under recent Governments, it must be said that we lost our way, fighting among ourselves about Brexit and everything else and threatening to break international law, but under this Government we are taking a lead again.

The question is: are we going to step up to the challenge? We are more than capable of that, but we cannot do it on two Chewits, a button and a postage stamp. Alongside a pivot to hard power, the Prime Minister has set out his priorities for the reduced aid budget: Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. To achieve peace, we need that investment in hard power, but if we abandon Britain’s soft power strength we cannot secure it.

In Ukraine, for example, political and financial investment and military might are key to ending the war, but when we reach the ceasefire, there will be shockwaves across eastern Europe that must be absorbed. There are many ways in which Russia will continue on the offensive, and that is not just about tanks; it is about misinformation, telling lies and trying to influence people by not telling the truth. The best way to counter that is to tell the truth.

How are we going to tell the truth? Well, we could rely on the BBC World Service, which is internationally respected and recognised. There is nothing like the BBC World Service, yet we spend only £137 million on it, which is given from the Foreign Office, and roughly 80% of that comes from ODA. Russia and China combined spend more than £8 billion each year on their state media. When we vacate the airwaves, which we have done, Russia moves in and takes over the same frequencies.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I entirely endorse what the right hon. Lady says about the BBC World Service. There used to be a ringfenced grant for BBC Monitoring as well, but now that falls on BBC general income and expenditure. Does she agree that that monitoring service performs an equally crucial role to the World Service in terms of open source information?

[Emily Thornberry]

I do, although I think that the role has changed given the rise of the internet.

If we lose the World Service, will this be remembered as the moment not just when Britain abandoned Africa to the Chinese, but when we abandoned our historic role of telling the truth and speaking the truth of a united west around the world?

The second priority for the aid budget is Gaza. I visited Jordan last week with the Foreign Affairs Committee. Jordan, which relies on US and UK aid, has absorbed over 2 million Palestinian refugees. Its continued stability is fundamental to a lasting peace in the region. Can that be guaranteed if we no longer have a humanitarian budget to spend on it?

The third priority from the Prime Minister was Sudan, where we are the penholder and we face a situation where Russia has secured a Red sea base that it has long coveted. The situation reminds me of warnings given by Lord Dannatt, the former Chief of the General Staff, that every pound cut from spending on development today risks costing us more in future military operations.

Soft power is not just a nice-to-have; it is core to peace and security. I have looked into the numbers following the latest cuts, and after taking into account the ODA money spent on asylum costs as well as our commitments to the UN and the like, we have only about £1 billion left for the Foreign Office to spend on overseas aid. Is that really going to be enough, even just for those three priorities and the money that needs to be spent on that?

I am concerned that the ODA cuts will not be the last of the challenges. There are also rumours that the Foreign Office is expecting cuts, on top of those, of between 2% and 11%. In that scenario, it will sell its buildings. Will embassies shrink? I am concerned that we will lose the British Council, which only receives 20% of its funding from the FCDO and generates the rest of its income itself. I trust that an enormous amount of work is being done on the details of the cuts, but at the moment, we have heard nothing more than an aspiration about where the other funding will come from. I fear that we may look back at this time and say to ourselves, “This is when Britain left the world,” and yet, it really should be the time when we are able to say, “Britain is back, and we are back as a force for good.”

Budget Resolutions

Debate between Julian Lewis and Emily Thornberry

Monday 27th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. Studies have been made, have they not, of the amount that each tax inspector can bring in to HMRC? Cutting back on the number of people is simply counterproductive.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

rose—

[Emily Thornberry]

I will give way to the Chair of the Defence Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Lewis]

In the past, it has been possible to make common cause between the Government and Labour Benches on the need to secure the future of the nuclear deterrent. Can we now make common cause on a recognition that the bare minimum of 2% of GDP is simply not enough, bearing in mind the fact that for several years after the cold war, in 1995-96, after we had taken the peace dividend, we were still spending 3%, not 2%, of GDP on defence?

[Emily Thornberry]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that question and I will come on to answer it if he will give me a moment.

Beside the specific proposals, there is a wider point of principle on defence spending, which takes us back to the question of falling growth. We on the Labour Benches have long argued that the way the Government meet the target to spend 2% of GDP on defence is wholly inadequate. Defence spending should mean spending on defence, not on Ministry of Defence pensions, as the right hon. Gentleman and the Select Committee have pointed out, or on any other items that the Government simply lump in to meet the target. We need to ensure, at a time when growth is being downgraded—we are dangerously close to a period of falling GDP—that the Government do not use that as an excuse to cut the armed forces budget, in effect treating the 2% figure not as a target but as a cap. If anyone thinks that is a fictional risk, let us take a look at the budget for international development.

I am told this is different but I believe it is not. The Budget speech in March this year was one of the first I can recall since coming to this House, under Chancellors from different parties, that made no mention of international development and our obligations to the poorest in the world. I believed at the time that it was a temporary aberration, but sadly it happened again last week. This time, the omission was far more serious. Say what you like about George Osborne—and I am sure the Foreign Secretary frequently does—at least when he used to cut the international development budget and keep it capped at 0.7% of GDP, he would stand in front of this House and announce that decision publicly. It is a disgrace, by contrast, that the Chancellor last week chose to cut £900 million from the overseas aid budget over the next two years but did not think it worth mentioning in his speech, let alone detailing exactly which projects and programmes will be cut in the world’s poorest countries as a result of the Government’s failure on growth.