0.7% Official Development Assistance Target

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

I very much welcome this debate today and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). It will help widen our understanding of how British overseas aid commitments work and also our soft power, which allows us to speak with such authority on the international stage and goes in part to justify our seat on the UN Security Council. It is also plays a pivotal role in supporting our economy and strengthening our national and international security, which is what I wish to focus on today. I will just say that for too long our aid programmes worked in isolation of wider Government strategies, often without a British flag to even acknowledge their origins. We have come some way, but I would be the first to say that taxpayers’ money must be wisely spent. As a former soldier, I was saddened and horrified to see the failure to utilise our aid programmes in both Afghanistan and Iraq; we won the war but we lost the peace. Hard power and soft power are two sides of the same coin, and we will need a lot more of both over the next decade—this is something the G7 summit will doubtless attempt to address. Our world is on a worrying trajectory, with rising authoritarianism, growing extremism and the new challenges of climate change and defeating a brutal pandemic that continues to damage economies and take lives, but the west has become risk averse, with an absence of leadership and resolve to address these issues alongside weakened international institutions that are no longer able to defend our rules-based order.

This G7 summit offers an opportunity for Britain to step forward as we have done in the past when other nations hesitated, but when we step back, we not only cause hardship, as we have heard today; we also leave a worrying vacuum that gets filled either by extremists in such places as Yemen and Somalia or more specifically by Russia and China, who pursue very different bilateral relationships that will most likely ensnare yet more nations into economic programmes they can ill afford. China has weaponised its soft power to extend its influence economically, militarily and technologically across Asia and now Africa. Nations are increasingly obliged to look west or east for assistance, and we are progressively seeing our word splinter into two competing geopolitical spheres of influence. That is the face of the new cold war that looms ahead, and this is not the time to reduce our soft power footprint.

We understand the huge bill of £400 billion that the Treasury faces, but if this is all about the money, why not learn from what we did after the war and ring-fence this debt, rather than using austerity measures to balance the books before the next general election? Our last war debt was finally paid off in Gordon Brown’s era as Prime Minister. We should do this in the same way. We should find a fiscal instrument that allows us to manage the books more sensibly here today. As our history shows, we are that Churchillian nation that steps forward when others hesitate. I say this to the House from a security perspective: the next decade is going to get extremely bumpy indeed. The US is once again keen to play its part on the global stage, so in the spirit of global Britain, let us be that reliable ally, let us stay firm and let us honour our manifesto commitment.