0.7% Official Development Assistance Target

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I refer the House my declaration of interests.

The UK is at a crossroads. Our citizens and the international community wait to see which way the Government will take. However, it is not that Ministers cannot pick a route; it is that they have chosen, in the words of the brilliant speech by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), to go backwards—and, I would add, have too frequently chosen to go back on their own word. This Government were elected on a manifesto commitment to retain aid spending. Ministers now seek to break that promise, despite their massive majority and despite the global pandemic, just when we are needed more than ever and when global Britain could mean something to the countries and people we are in a position to help.

As we have heard, no other G7 country is taking this approach—Germany and the US are increasing their help—and the outcome is also known. Ministers back- tracking and breaking their promise will mean avoidable loss of life and the preventable spread of disease, and in one case—the failure to provide clean water in a Yemeni refugee camp—could even mean more refugees trying to reach the UK.

The broken promise also contradicts the great British tradition of not ignoring problems and not walking on by. We are the good Samaritan—we pitch in; we help. We do so because it is the right thing to do, but it is not just altruism. We also do it because covid has proved more than ever that no one is safe until everyone is safe. Our aid prevents other diseases, such as HIV, spreading to our shores, can help to prevent conflict involving UK armed forces and the creation of refugees seeking further help from the UK, and can help to facilitate trade benefiting British business. Ministers seem ready to stand by and abandon all that.

“Global Britain” means nothing to most people, but it will mean even less without the agencies needed to deliver it—all those international aid organisations, which currently have so little faith in Ministers after the deceitful claim that they were consulted on the abolition of the Department for International Development and the devastating £4 billion cut in the help they deliver on the front line.

We all recognise that covid affects things, but the Government need to be more ambitious for our international reach and for our country. Let us compare how this country has recovered from previous crises. The post-war Labour Government achieved house building on a scale never seen before, created a social security system that the whole country has benefited from ever since and delivered an NHS still proving its worth in the face of covid today—a post-crisis Labour legacy that the whole country remains proud of. By contrast, this Government seem to seek no positive post-covid legacy. Ministers are abandoning even their own manifesto promises to the British people, despite the massive majority—promises on aid and cuts to the armed forces, as well as the pledges to overhaul social care and even on free TV licences for some pensioners. It is a truly pathetic agenda.

That said, I respect the noble aims of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield and other Government Back Benchers, including the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). I genuinely hope they are successful in overturning the Government’s betrayal of their own manifesto and their wider betrayal of the British people who voted for them.