Official Development Assistance and the British Council

Navendu Mishra Excerpts

Wednesday 30th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)]

I express my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) for campaigning on this important issue. I also pay tribute to all the organisations and individuals who have provided support to countries across the globe, including Save the Children, the Red Cross, Oxfam, Global Justice Now and others.

I draw the House’s attention to the British Council, which works hard to encourage cultural, scientific, technological and educational co-operation with Britain. This week its CEO wrote to its Public and Commercial Services Union representative, warning that it intends to make 15% to 20% job cuts over the next two years. This is a disgrace. The programmes that the British Council undertakes internationally ensure global friendship with the United Kingdom. The Government must urgently intervene to save jobs and make funding available to plug the shortfall in the organisation.

The world has faced a catastrophic pandemic and, unless we take an internationalist view, we will never overcome this tragedy. Pulling up the drawbridge and hiding away from the rest of the world is never the answer, but that is exactly what the Government did when they made the political choice to abolish the Department for International Development and merge it with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the height of this pandemic. DFID was an international leader on development issues, and one of the best examples of global Britain.

During these pandemic times it is often said that no one is safe until everyone is safe, but the Government’s actions speak louder than words. They have cut vital coronavirus research, including a project tackling the variant in India, by 70%, and recent media reports have informed us that the Treasury delayed plans to send surplus PPE to India over a dispute regarding its allocation towards overall aid spending.

[Alexander Stafford]

The hon. Gentleman mentions so-called cuts, but will he acknowledge the vital role this Government have played in delivering vaccines and oxygen to countries like India? Actually, this country has given a lot to many other countries during the pandemic.

[Navendu Mishra]

This Government were one of the few to oppose the proposal from the South African and Indian Governments for a TRIPS waiver that would have resulted in vaccines, medical equipment and medicines related to covid being produced licence free. That would have led to much more vaccine being available, so I urge the hon. Gentleman to lobby his Front-Bench team to make sure the UK reverses its position on this important issue. We know that President Biden of the United States has reversed his position, having initially blocked the waiver proposed by India and South Africa. The unnecessary delays to PPE going to India have deeply negative consequences. Cutting aid will have almost no impact on the UK’s finances, but it will heighten poverty in some parts of the world.

In addition, there has been a £48 million cut to the NHS overseas training scheme, which trains medical staff in some of the poorest countries. The scheme works with 500 health facilities across Africa and Asia, in places that suffer a deficit of medical staff. The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine would have seen NHS staff provide training to 78,000 healthcare workers in Nepal, Uganda, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The UK has 820 Bangladeshis, 118 Ethiopians, 572 Ugandans and 1,988 Nepalis working in our NHS.

The CDC Group, which promotes privatisation and unaffordable private hospitals in the global south, is due to receive £779 million this year. It seems that cuts apply only to projects that support development. Disgracefully, aid spending targeted at meeting strategic priorities will be cut by only 37%, and funding for the much-criticised conflict, stability and security fund, which last year was found to have supported brutal police squads in Nigeria, has fallen by only 19%.

This multibillion pound cut to overseas development assistance has a momentous human cost. There is no question but that these cuts will result in thousands of unnecessary deaths. Cutting programmes including humanitarian aid, global health, girls’ education, water and sanitation, food insecurity and malnutrition, and sexual and reproductive health have real consequences. The UK must return to 0.7% of GNI on ODA, under the internationally agreed definition, and the Government must bring a meaningful vote to the House on this important decision.

Finally, I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham thanking all aid workers across the world and the excellent FCDO staff. They do an important job in extremely challenging circumstances, and they deserve our support and gratitude.

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[Anthony Mangnall]

Quite right. If I had children I would be going back to say exactly the same thing—all to come, I am sure.

The debate is also about the British Council. I have lived in Singapore and I have worked in Nigeria. I have seen the value of these organisations. I have seen the value of soft power for the United Kingdom. I look back on 2012, a moment in which the UK exhibited its global superpower soft power. We were able to show that we were leading across the world. I hate that we are going down this route and reducing the two things that promote us in the best way.

[Navendu Mishra]

Does the hon. Member agree that using an us and them attitude is not helpful? The UK is one of the richest countries in the world and has a proud record of supporting projects across the world, and dividing people into us and them is not helpful at all in this debate.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fantastic point, and it is one that I will end on. If we are uncomfortable with how people view 0.7%, it is down to this House and to us as Members to explain it properly and show them the true value of what Britain does in a globalised world.

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[Sir Edward Leigh]

My right hon. Friend is very kind. I suppose being the last Thatcherite is better than being the last Majorite.

Actually, funnily enough, according to the latest opinion polls, opinion is changing, because people are waking up to the fact that in the middle of a global pandemic it is probably not a very good time to cut aid—all these problems are now coming back to bite us.

[Navendu Mishra]

Does the UK not have a special responsibility when it comes to Yemen, as a permanent member of the Security Council but also as one of the largest suppliers of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which has a big role to play in the Yemen conflict?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The UK does have a role, and I fully accept the point about the Commonwealth. We have heard that we should prioritise the Commonwealth, but as we have also heard, where are these cuts falling? On the Commonwealth. But we cannot just direct our aid to the Commonwealth; we have to direct it where it is most needed.

On the Thatcherite point—and this is not the humanitarian point, because many people have made the humanitarian point, which I associate myself with—I remember, in my first Parliament, listening to Enoch Powell. He sat over there on the Opposition Back Bench. In fact, my first rebellion was to force the Government into requiring workplace trade unions to hold postal ballots, while the Minister defended workplace ballots; but I leave that to one side.

Now, what would Enoch Powell have said on this subject? He would not have liked the 0.7%, but he would have said it was ridiculous to have an arbitrary limit of 0.7%, to reduce it to another arbitrary limit of 0.5% and then to promise to increase it back to 0.7%. As he would have said—I cannot do the Birmingham accent, unlike my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield—“It is a logical absurdity. It is a nonsense built on stilts. It makes no sense” that all these civil servants, in the middle of a global pandemic, are running around cutting all these programmes, and next year, if we believe the Government—and of course the Government would never tell an untruth to the House, would they, so this is only a temporary cut—all these programmes, after this pandemic, are going to be restored. [Interruption.] The Minister is shaking his head. So are they not going to be restored?

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[Mr Ellwood]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I congratulate him on the work that he is doing. There is a great example of where British leadership can be seen on the international stage. Yemen requires leadership. We have been there for some time and have not utilised our relationship with the Saudis to prevent them from doing what they have been doing. We could have better harnessed our friendships and capabilities in order to bring a conclusion to that particular challenge.

I worked as a Minister in both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as it then was—I was Minister for the Middle East and North Africa—and the Ministry of Defence, and I can confirm how siloed our Whitehall Departments still are. I concede that things are definitely getting better, but if global Britain is to have meaning, exhibiting increased resolve to play a role on the international stage, it will require greater cohesion between our internationalist-facing Departments, which even today remain too siloed.

I would go further than the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and introduce the role of a Deputy Prime Minister, with the arc of responsibility to co-ordinate the MOD, DFID, FCO and trade initiatives, so that we can develop grand strategies to tackle some of the global hotspots that we are engaged in. We do need to expand our Whitehall bandwidth.

[Navendu Mishra]

Does the right hon. Gentleman share my view that abolishing DFID at the height of a global pandemic was a backward step, and that the role of development is far too serious to be left to the now much larger FCDO, and without a dedicated Minister at the top table?

[Mr Ellwood]

My biggest criticism about that is what is done in practice to the Department and the important voice at the Cabinet table and at the National Security Council. Now we have only the Foreign Secretary there, not another voice, and that is what we have lost.

We absolutely need to expand our Whitehall bandwidth to be able to recognise the current challenges to which we could provide solutions and also the looming ones that are coming over the horizon. This is the point I hope the Minister will listen to. The real backdrop to this debate that we must all recognise is where our complex and dangerous world is heading. If there was one welcome outcome of the G7 summit, it is the realisation that unless the west becomes less risk-averse, regroups and reunites, the next decade will get very bumpy indeed.

I have been consistent in my clear message to this House: over the next five years, the world is getting more dangerous, not less, and more complex, not less. Authoritarianism is on the rise, new power bases are emerging, and states are starting to rearm at an alarming rate. To compound matters, we now have the growing challenge of climate change, which is already having an impact on security and governance in some of the world’s most vulnerable regions. Storms, floods and droughts will affect agricultural productivity, damage economies and lead to mass migration, most notably from Africa to Europe. This goes back to the point about where the challenge is: it is not in Dover; it is actually in Africa. Simply put, global security in our ever complex and confusing world is on a worrying glide path, and right now there is no grand plan to alter the current trajectory. The threat picture is greater and more complex than during the cold war, and it requires addressing.

The political scientist Joe Nye introduced the term “soft power” a decade ago. It is the ability to influence the behaviour of others to get the outcomes we want by attracting and co-opting their support. However, in the spirit of Sun Tzu, who said:

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”,

I argue here today that a new global soft power war or soft war is already at play, but we in the west have yet to wake up to its reality.

China is weaponising its immense soft power to significantly advance its influence and reach, and to promote its own interpretation of the international rules-based order. We are seeing this gathering apace across Africa and Asia through its one belt, one road infrastructure programmes and its gifting of 5G networks and military support to ensnare dozens and dozens of countries into its sphere of influence. It is also securing senior leadership positions in international organisations such as the United Nations to neutralise any criticism of its errant behaviour, and is now contributing ever more significant Chinese military forces to UN peacekeeping missions. As we have heard today, it is using its Confucius centres—now over 600 across the globe—to advance its message.

This will be China’s century, as it eventually overshadows and overtakes America as the dominant military, economic and technological superpower, yet here we are in Britain still failing to put two and two together. For a nation that usually prides itself on its place and influence in the world and its grasp of global situational awareness, I am genuinely baffled to understand why it is not reading and responding to this bigger picture. China is offering a competing authoritarian ideology and is leveraging its colossal economic growth to undercut western competition. On this current glide path, the world will splinter into two spheres of competing influence. Now is not the time to cut our defence budgets or our aid budgets as these threats increase, yet here we are doing both.

There is a phenomenal opportunity for British leadership here, made all the easier with the new US Administration, to craft a post-Brexit international role at the very moment the west is required to regroup. I urge this Government to listen to the voices here today in this Parliament and see the bigger picture, recognise the scale of the threat we face, invest in the statecraft and the hard and soft power tools we need, and expand Whitehall’s international bandwidth, for the actions we the west choose to take over the next few years could have implications for how the next few decades play out.