In one of a series of Labour Hub ‘long reads’ to be digested over the seasonal break, Jon Barnes drills down into Labour’s policy on international development and explores the gap between what the Party proposes and  what is necessary.

 Keir Starmer, fond of the mantra that Labour is ‘a government in waiting’, has a habit of not specifying what the Party would do in power. But pressure to close this clarity gap may rise following the disarray of the Johnson and Truss governments and the outbreak of election fever symptoms. Labour, now on election footing, is likely to face more forensic scrutiny of whether it has the policy ideas and political will to tackle the crises gathering alarming pace at home and abroad.

With the period ahead make-or-break time for Labour, an important event meriting cross-examination was Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs David Lammy’s late November lecture at Christian Aid on modernising the UK’s support for international development. He gave a sweeping overview of Labour’s emerging thinking and plans, if elected, vowing to get the UK’s commitment to development “back on track” after the damaging turmoil of Tory government and to restore the UK’s lost global leadership within the international aid donor community.

This in-depth read for Labour Hub takes a critical look at the tough-love nature of what Labour appears to have in mind on sustainable development as it prepares for power. It asks: does Labour intend to forge an ambitious new path or, with previous policy commitments now in question following recent announcements on development aid and delivery, will it build mainly on the Tories’ legacy?

As an earlier piece analysed, in 2020 Boris Johnson abolished the UK’s hitherto well-respected Department for International Development created by Labour in 1997, and DfID’s chaotic merger into the new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) paved the way for a series of brutal cuts to the UK’s aid budget then opposed by Labour. The FCDO had been created as part of Johnson’s supposedly ‘integrated’ review of defence, diplomacy and development and the haphazard launch in 2021 of the Global Britain in a Competitive Age strategy, with aid subordinated to the UK’s purported trade and security interests post-Brexit.

The cuts inflicted huge damage to the lives of people in the Global South as examined by Parliament’s International Development Committee chaired by Labour’s Sarah Champion MP. Today, moreover, as noted by Lammy and recently revealed by the media, more of the remaining ‘aid’ money is now being spent in the UK than overseas. Funds have been syphoned off for an otherwise refugee- and migrant-hostile Home Office to cover the costs of its badly run or failing Ukraine and Afghanistan refugee programmes.

Surface positives: from tackling inequality and discrimination to climate justice

There were a lot of positives invoked in Lammy’s speech, at least on the surface. He argued that the UK’s concern with eliminating international poverty, as backed by New Labour from the late 1990s, should now be matched by a commitment to tackling inequality as one the major global challenges of today. He said such a challenge would mean redistributing power to people and enabling them to claim power, in particular women and girls. Labour’s approach would be feminist.

He pointed out that, in a world showing itself to be ever more interdependent, it was time for action against poverty both at home and abroad, with a shift from us-and-them charity to an approach based on solidarity and social justice. This would enhance the proud internationalist tradition of past campaigns such as those against apartheid and Third World debt and to Make Poverty History.

Lammy also emphasised, as he had done at September’s Party Conference with its “Fairer, Greener Britain” slogan, the need for a development strategy of the 2020s to tackle the climate emergency as a core aim. Labour would boost the UK’s global convening power and international partnerships to this end. This would entail a campaign for climate action to become a fourth pillar of the UN alongside peace, human rights and development and support for a new international law of ecocide.

At home, Labour, as per the announcement of Shadow Cabinet Minister for Development Preet Gill MP at September’s Party Conference, would introduce legislation to ensure accountability for UK progress in helping to tackle the climate emergency. This would follow the model of the UK’s 2014 International Development Gender Equality Act.

Lammy, just back from COP27 in Egypt, welcomed in his speech the climate summit’s landmark agreement to set up a global ‘loss and damage’ fund – long opposed by economically rich countries – to compensate climate-hit countries in the Global South for the irreparable harms they have historically not caused.

The apparent international social justice tenor of Lammy’s speech no doubt resonated within the so-called development community spanning international NGOs, policy think tanks and academia. The purported approach he espoused reflected the policy and practice outlook that forward-looking members of this community have been advocating for many years.

Yet major questions surround Labour’s intent in practice.

Reversing the Tories’ aid cuts: worrying signs of retreat

A marker of Labour’s commitment to sustainable development is whether it will reverse Boris Johnson’s cuts and resume UK spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income (GNI) on aid, as mandated by UK law. Yet David Lammy said during his speech that Labour would only restore 0.7 “as soon as possible as the fiscal situation allows”.

This phrase worryingly matches the Johnson government’s circumlocution in 2021 to avoid the charge it had incurred a legal breach in slashing aid to 0.5 per cent of GNI. Earlier, David Cameron’s government, building on New Labour’s lead in increasing DfID’s budget over the 2000s, had taken UK aid to 0.7 per cent, in compliance with the UN’s longstanding international target, and Parliament had enshrined this commitment in law in 2015, making the UK the first G7 country to do so.

Lammy’s statement seems to have rung alarm bells in the UK’s development NGO community. “It would be deeply disappointing if Labour retreats from the 0.7 spending commitment after all the party’s hard work in pushing for a cross-party consensus on aid that Lammy refers to in his speech,“ said Oxfam GB’s head of policy and advocacy, Katy Chakrabortty, in response to request for comment. “Upholding 0.7 ought to be a down-payment on Labour’s leadership on development being taken seriously and trusted at home and internationally. It should be a foundational core value not an optional one.”

Labour frontbench hesitancy had already been apparent in its frequent references of late to “restoring the 0.7 target”. This gave the triangulated impression of a cast-iron spending pledge, but Lammy’s rider has now signalled it is far from guaranteed.

In an attempt at damage limitation or adjustment of Labour’s hazy position, Shadow Minister Preet Gill has since said Labour would immediately review aid spending on taking power and set out plans for increases, denying a return to 0.7 would not occur over the next Parliament with a Labour majority. But this ‘reassurance’, while countering Lammy’s timeline, amounts itself to an unnecessary step backwards, as Johnson and then Chancellor Sunak themselves had presented the 0.5 per cent aid restriction as a temporary measure until public finances allowed otherwise.

Fiscal caution: towards a narrower new cross-party consensus on aid?

Labour’s equivocation seems to be a clear extension of Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ fiscal caution and leader Keir Starmer’s warning that the supposed need for “tough choices” will prevent the Party from changing things “as quickly as we would want to”. With two-party competition over the ‘responsible’ management of supposed no-magic-money tree public finances, there is strong danger Labour could accept de facto the aid level it will inherit, even if it claims not to accept the 0.5 per cent restriction always likely intended by Johnson and Sunak at the time to be an indefinite cap.

Indeed, as part of his attempted political lock-in of austerity, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement ruled out any return to 0.7 per cent during and beyond the current Parliament, in theory freeing up savings for inadequate increases in UK health and education. This divide-and-rule ‘black hole’ measure, undertaken in one of the richest countries in the world, was criticised by Romilly Greenhill of the campaign group ONE as “balancing the books on the backs of the world’s poor”.

Another event of note, welcomed within the development sector, is Rishi Sunak’s inclusion of Andrew Mitchell MP, David Cameron’s well respected former International Development Secretary, in his fractious cabinet of all the talents. Sunak’s bet no doubt is to co-opt this leading Tory aid cut rebel of 2020-21 rather than have him remobilise the Tory backbench against the continued decline of the UK’s official development programme.

Mitchell has announced a third round of cuts under Hunt’s financial plans, and it remains to be seen how effective, as Minister of State for Development and Africa, he will be in his apparent determination to clean up Tory aid spending raided for non-development purposes and criticised for its lack of transparency. If he makes progress in the tidy-up, it is possible that Labour, with its 0.7 per cent equivocation, could confine itself to continuing with his legacy, erecting a new cross-party consensus on aid narrower than that which followed the 2010 New Labour-Cameron transition. During his speech Lammy pledged similarly that Labour would “restore transparency, value for money and focus” to the UK’s international development programme.

No return of Labour’s Department for International Development: a sensitive symbolic shift

Labour’s manifest ambiguity over 0.7 per cent will also compound the uncertainty already surrounding Lammy’s renewed allusion at Christian Aid to the Party’s still unspecified plans to set up a “new model for international development to meet the challenges of the 21^st century”. Indeed, Lammy, if the tenor of reports is correct, caused a stir at September’s Party conference by asserting “in very strong terms” that a future Labour government would not bring DfID back.

This change of direction has poignant significance: as Lammy noted in his historical overview of Labour’s heritage on international development, DfID’s creation as an independent ministry to champion the cause was a celebrated achievement of the Blair and Brown governments. Into the 2000s, the department became a recognised leader among economically rich country aid donors.

The prospect of DfID being consigned to history may likewise prompt a sense of defeatist retreat for many within the UK’s embattled yet vibrant development community. Its influencing at public and political levels had helped to foster the political conditions that encouraged Labour to set up the ministry in the first place.

Johnson’s abolition of DfID and the aid cuts were a body blow for the sector, and Keir Starmer’s criticism at the time meant it entertained hopes that Labour would automatically reinstate DfID. Even this summer, Starmer, to internal and external acclaim, had come down in favour of restoring DfID, despite the rising worries of the UK development NGOs over Labour’s intentions.

DfID, of course, had undergone a protracted death well before its FCDO integration and Johnson’s intensified development vandalism. Over the previous decade, more and more supposed development spending had been allocated to the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence and steadily realigned with the UK’s perceived geopolitical and commercial interests. DfID’s haemorrhaging of resources, expertise, morale and policy influence quickened in the wake of Brexit and David Cameron’s 2016 resignation, with a surge of aid money channelled to the private sector via the Commonwealth Development Corporation.

In the aftermath of DfID’s decline and the status of development faring poorly since the FCDO merger, “a sensible case can be made for the development sector to have a new look at the future of the UK’s role on sustainable development,” says Mark Miller, a development finance expert from the ODI global affairs think tank. Indeed, the political shifts in the world mean that foreign policy – and the relationship between development and the global challenges involved – have arguably not figured in a generation as significantly as now.

Still, Labour’s apparent conclusion that DfID reinstatement is a too tough and backward-looking political task has caused a quiet shock. This is born not so much out of keenness for the nostalgic revival of an institution but because of its symbolism for what Labour might be abandoning in terms of DfID’s original promise of a UK progressive approach to international development.

Whatever the possible top-level internal political tussles, Labour’s to-ing and fro-ing over DfID during the last year seem to have caused sensitivities within and outside the Party. Since David Lammy’s Conference assertion ruling out DfID, both he and Shadow Cabinet Minister for Development Preet Gill have referred to the “independence” of any replacement model or department. The debate over DfID appears to be still in flux, with the leadership-sympathetic Labour Foreign Policy Group referring to a “new independent DfID” different from the old one in planning a forthcoming consultation on the matter.

Labour’s new model for “development delivery”: how independent will it be?

Ensuring the independence of any new official UK development body is figuring as a fundamental expectation of Labour among NGO advocates. Indeed, the halcyon days of DfID in the 2000s saw hopes that an independent ministry, grounded in 2002 legislation making poverty elimination its sole mandate, would engineer a more pluralistic and progressive reworking of the so-called ‘national interest’ in the conduct of foreign affairs and overseas trade. All state bodies, in principle, would be expected to align their operations with the UK’s international development aims.

“DfID’s equal status with other ministries and its independence gave it the potential to put fighting poverty at the heart of state affairs. That was one of its original strengths and made it a significant counterweight to other less progressive departments,” says Nick Dearden of the UK’s Global Justice Now solidarity campaign group, while urging an updated more radical approach.

“Times have changed and a simple recreation of DfID as it looked in 1997 wouldn’t be right today. We need a much greater focus on equality and structural change in the way the global economy works. But an independent department is still critical to achieving that, and Labour should not back away from that,” he adds.

The location, status and purpose of a UK state development body has long been a tug of war within and between the UK’s two leading parties and subject to the frequent competing interests of powerful elite lobbies and civil society advocacy for pro-development change. Lammy himself referred in his lecture to the 1980s UK-Malaysia tied-aid Pergau Dam-arms scandal which engulfed the pre-DfID Overseas Development Administration. The Tories had housed the ODA in the Foreign Office, overturning Labour’s earlier establishment of a ministry of overseas development.

Will Labour again establish a separate new ministry with secretary of state cabinet status to champion sustainable development, unravelling Johnson’s defence-diplomacy-development FCDO merger? Or will it set up an entity within or alongside another state institution? Right now, the Party seems to be working things out and keen to keep its options open. Its approach to the “independence” of any new model remains unclear.

One possibility is the party might vouch for something “new” within a reformed FCDO. David Lammy’s words that Labour would learn the lessons and “fix the problems of the government’s badly managed merger with a new model to deliver development” suggest it has not discounted this option.

In question is how much political and financial clout such an entity within the FCDO would have. Apart from the ideological legacy of the Tories and the parlous state in which they have rapaciously left the UK’s official development commitment, such arrangements have a mixed record in other countries. Nevertheless, Starmer’s Labour, keen for ‘back to normal’ stabilisation of Westminster politics and more inclined to competent state management rather than structural change, might view continuity-plus revival of development within the FCDO as a handy technocratic means of avoiding further upheaval amid the state-wide chaos to be left by the Tories.

‘Global Britain’ and the business of development: soft power and security

The option of a ‘new improved’ model within the FCDO, moreover, might have its attractions for Labour in policy terms, given that Lammy’s show of progressive intent on development during his lecture was overlaid by a conspicuous emphasis on geopolitics and security. Active renewal of the UK’s official development role, with Labour as a trusted “force for good,” he said, would combine “a moral and a strategic direction” to extend the country’s “soft power” in a world that was “more divided” while “more interdependent than ever”.

Such language, notwithstanding Lammy’s assertions that “the time for post-imperial [Little England] delusions is over” and that overstated Western influence “undermines the agency of developing countries themselves,” is redolent of the rhetoric used in the Global Britain strategy issued in 2021 by the FCDO under Boris Johnson with its self-referential pretensions of Britain as a “force for good” and as “soft power superpower”. As analysed earlier for Labour Hub, Labour, anxious not to be considered ‘weak’ on defence and foreign policy, and again resistant to learn from the debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq, appeared to accept the overriding security focus of the Global Britain agenda as the terrain on which it must work.

Lammy sought to finesse the patent tensions involved in harnessing the UK’s development role to state foreign policy by stating, in an ambiguous slice of cake-and-eat-it code, that the two spheres “are related but distinct” and that “our new model [for delivering development] will have the independence needed to reflect those important differences and empower both”.

Johnson’s envisaged ‘tilt’ to the Indo-Pacific region to compete with China under the Global Britain strategy came at the cost of radically reduced support for low-income countries, and Labour is likely to promote a much-needed rebalancing. Still, the greater emphasis a Labour government might give to the global challenges invoked but downplayed in the Global Britain strategy – biodiversity loss, health resilience, conflict, and climate change in particular – will take shape against a UK foreign policy backdrop primarily concerned with geopolitical and geo-economic rivalry, heightened further by the international reverberations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Indeed, an important tranche of Lammy’s speech was devoted to his concerns with the rise of China, also a key topic in then Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s long-delayed international development strategy released in May 2022 to update the Global Britain agenda.

With a pick-and-choose slant on tackling “malign” international actors, Truss’s top-down strategy doubled down aggressively on globally countering China, including its investment in low- and middle-income countries. It claimed that the UK would deliver “honest and reliable investment” and advocated so-called free trade and free markets as automatically good for societies, urging the creation of a G7 rich country “network of liberty”. The strategy ignored longstanding evidence questioning the development and human rights benefits of trade and investment agreements in the absence of policy intervention geared to the wider public interest.

Labour will surely not follow Truss in so seriously neglecting poverty reduction and the need for policy action to tackle the climate, food and Covid crises afflicting the Global South. The Party’s 2021 paper on trade previously analysed for Labour Hub, if adopted in practice, also suggests greater attention might be paid to a pro-development and rights-based approach, despite signs of a Britain First populist slant towards protection against imports. The latter could hamper the export earnings of poorer countries in the Global South.

But Labour’s policy approach on aid and trade, especially if it keeps development within a restructured FCDO, could be outweighed by the UK’s pre-eminent foreign policy and overseas commercial interests, not least with the unfolding of a new Cold War and the UK export challenges increasingly posed by Brexit.

Lammy sidestepped the likely tensions, despite his historical criticisms of tied aid. He presented partnership with low-income countries as both ethically right and in the interests of the UK’s own growth and prosperity – a supposed win-win recipe originally put forward by the Cameron government to try and head off his right-wingers’ attacks on aid.

Bringing development and climate together: friends or foes?

With Labour declaring that climate action will be a priority of its development strategy, however, it is possible that the Party has other institutional delivery options in mind beyond the FCDO. In a recent paper, Preet Gill, referred enthusiastically to the new Social Democratic Party coalition government in Germany bringing climate and development together in a single ministry. Whether this is the type of “independent” model that Labour intends to “evolve” outside the FCDO, for example combining development with the climate brief currently held by Ed Miliband, remains to be seen.

At first glance, Labour’s intent to integrate development and climate action closely is both logical and welcome. The climate crisis is a core challenge for humanity and clear synergies exist with tackling problems such as food insecurity, unsustainable agribusiness practices affecting water and land rights, or the inequitable development of ‘transition mineral’ and renewable energy infrastructure projects often causing human rights abuses.

But support for climate mitigation and adaptation has its own extensive specific requirements, as does the wide span of existing development challenges such as ensuring access to essential services, promoting accountable governance, or curbing the tax dodging depriving countries of vital development finance. If handled restrictively, Labour’s prioritisation of climate action could deprive partners of the support they need, both in policy terms and financially, thus risking a further narrowing of official UK commitment on development.

Campaigners and think tanks have long argued, including when Labour was in power, that governments’ provision of climate finance for countries in the Global South should be additional to, and not supplant, the boosting of development aid. The Tories, within a reduced and raided aid budget, have spared climate finance the same level of pain other sectors have suffered.

Labour former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has now called for urgent action to ensure the new ‘loss and damage’ initiative is separately properly funded, overcoming the existing failure of rich countries to uphold their 2009 promise to provide an annual US$100 billion to mitigate the ongoing effects of the climate crisis. Yet worries exist that Labour, with its manifest equivocation over available monies, might sustain in practice the elision of climate finance and overseas development assistance. “This would cannibalise one source for another,” says Oxfam’s Katy Chakrabortty.

Moving ‘beyond aid’: trick or treat?

So where would the UK’s commitment to sustainable development now stand with the apparent prospect of a Labour government after the next general election? Labour’s deliberations over options for a new “development delivery model” are not just about choice of institutional architecture. They reflect crucial questions about its overall strategic approach in the darkly degraded place of UK and world politics.

An important feature of Lammy’s ‘modernisation’ pitch was his critique of development strategies based mainly on aid and his stress on the need for a much wider approach. When leveraged transparently and accountably, aid has helped people and countries in the Global South to deal with problems and make important gains. Yet aid is only one tool and Lammy’s words on the limits of what it can achieve by itself will resonate within the development sector.

“A major problem for DfID was that it came to be mainly associated with aid spending,“ says the ODI’s Mark Miller, noting how the UK’s development community, faced with rising questioning of the value of foreign aid and development by the media and politicians, found itself pulled into a necessary yet defensive battle to protect and retain the 0.7 per cent spend, thus squeezing space for its wider policy concerns and recommendations.

“The perception of DfID as just being about aid spending was on the whole probably unfair,” Miller adds, pointing to the ministry’s production of flagship policy White Papers into the 2000s, “but that is what stuck in the public mind.” In line with ODI’s Global Reset dialogue urging an overhaul of global co-operation structures, he highlights the need for a “common wealth” approach whereby like-minded coalitions and partnerships could be formed to promote systemic changes and tackle common global challenges.

Lammy’s references to Labour prioritising new forms of partnership and innovation as well acting as a global convenor signal that the Party is entertaining similar ideas ‘beyond aid’. But caution is in order over its possible motivations for doing so, given its equivocation over the 0.7 per cent spend which Oxfam’s Katy Chakrabortty sees as a crucial bedrock for any new UK development delivery model to leverage financial and political support from governments across the world. Indeed, the ‘beyond aid’ discourse has often been a convenient cover for those seeking to cut aid in the continued era of economic austerity.

The need to defend aid from cuts in its volume has often detracted from NGO pressure on donors to ensure the pro-poor effectiveness of aid and curb its use for self-interested geopolitical and business purposes. This in turn has taken away from the healthy political space needed to consider new ideas for aid reform and transformation.

One such idea is the establishment of a new system of Global Public Investment within the UN rather than the OECD rich country policy mainstreaming think tank. This would require all countries, on a global redistributive basis, to contribute funds according to their means and receive support according to their needs, in line with the universal nature of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals approved in 2015. Under the 2030 sustainable development agenda, all countries, economically rich and poor alike, are expected to achieve and support SDG progress at home and abroad.

The Global Public Investment proposal has been welcomed by sustainable development experts and advocates in both the Global North and South, but it is yet to be championed by governments. “Labour could seize the opportunity to provide a ground-breaking lead,” argues Nick Dearden of Global Justice Now, pointing to the system as a means of helping to boost funding for access to public services across the world.

Labour and the UK’s ‘development movement’: a contribution recognised?

It remains to be seen whether Labour has the appetite to take up proposals of this kind. Indeed, a notable omission of Lammy’s lecture – surprising in view of the NGO setting for its delivery – was any proper recognition of the vital role of the UK’s broad development movement over long decades in advancing the wider policy approach he purportedly advocates today.

Indeed, if a shift took place from aid-supported poverty reduction to a more concerted focus on challenging inequality and the political, economic and social power structures driving discrimination and injustice, this was in no small part due to the international pressure of civil society, including the important contribution of UK solidarity movements and NGOs.

The latter urged Labour governments to move beyond its support for stronger social spending grafted onto the business-as-usual purported ‘benefits’ of neoliberal globalisation to take a more progressive stance on wide range of economic governance issues such as structural adjustment aid conditions, privatisation, pro-poor growth, trade justice and corporate accountability.

In global terms, such UK work played its own part in the transition from the largely ‘basic needs’ approach of the 2000-2015 Millennium Development Goals to the more structurally ambitious promise of the SDGs promoting integrated policy action to benefit people, peace and the planet.

Labour’s own SDG-themed 2018 policy document, A World for the Many not the Few, developed with the participation of the UK’s development community and largely welcomed by the latter, focused on the need for a fairer global economy, tackling inequality and discrimination, promoting climate justice and supporting peace-building and conflict prevention. The strategy also promised a cross-cutting feminist approach. While Labour now appears keen for a fresh start with the anticipated departure of the Tories, it is not working with a blank slate.

Given the vast knowledge and expertise accumulated by the UK’s development sector, there are plenty of experiences Lammy could have drawn on, not just to demonstrate how Labour views the policy issues at stake but also to indicate how it would value working with the sector to reinvigorate a UK movement to tackle them. It was often DfID funding that enabled some of such ‘beyond aid’ policy work to make a vital contribution in the past.

One of the most vibrant NGO and policy research contributions since the mid-2000s, for instance, has been on tax justice, yet Lammy made no reference to this in his announcement of a task force to coordinate private sector support for development finance. Similarly, on inequality, he might have looked to Oxfam’s recent Commitment to Reducing Inequality report for examples of positive action by governments to address this problem amid the Covid crisis.

One welcome signal Lammy did provide, in the context of Covid crisis and the need to move beyond aid to tackle wider policy problems, was his urging of intellectual property and vaccine manufacturing capacity to be globally shared. Yet even this reference seemed not to properly acknowledge civil society’s long work on the anti-development problems of intellectual property rights from the HIV and AIDS crisis to advocacy on the Covid pandemic of today.

It is to be hoped that Lammy’s invitation to the development community to contribute to its thinking and plans will enable open space for more detailed exploration.

Whether Lammy’s critique of development based on aid and charity, with all the connotations of paternalism and unequal power relations between ‘generous’ benefactors in the Global North and ‘grateful’ beneficiaries in the Global South, was aimed at the approach of official aid donors – such as DfID or the FCDO under the Tories – or the non-governmental sector is unclear.

His words will nonetheless strike a chord within the latter in view of its reflection in recent years on different approaches to development and the need for international NGOs to strengthen their support for a shift in resources, power and agency towards organisations in the Global South. All the same, the UK has not been devoid of organisations committed to working in solidarity and for social justice in response to the prime agency of their overseas counterparts, with decades-old proponents of such an approach in some cases becoming casualties of the increasingly unsupportive UK political environment of recent times.

Lammy’s words on the problems of aid and charity may be apt in relation to ongoing problematic practices within the sector, for example in fundraising; but they would be an unfair straw-person caricature if directed in blanket fashion at the best of the UK development sector’s work in terms of grassroots support and international advocacy with partners in the Global South.

Development in a changed world: new challenges, old problems

In ruling out the automatic reinstatement of DfID, Lammy rightly said that the world has changed since 1997, and that the UK’s development role must move with the times. Indeed, one can point to developments such as traditional aid paradigms being challenged by the rise of Southern powers such as China, the alarming levels of ecological breakdown, the existential threat of the climate emergency, or the dangerous return of sharp geopolitical rivalry and tensions further straining multilateral systems and hindering the urgent need for global co-operation.

At the same time, one can argue that many of the challenges, rather than being altogether new, involve the resurfacing of unaddressed old problems. These have undergone further mutation with the unravelling of the post-1989 new world order and its unfulfilled promise of inevitable human progress resting on the supposedly symbiotic relationship between free-market economics and liberal democracy.

As in the 1990s and 2000s, low-income countries in the Global South again face further debt crises as they struggle to cope with the social and economic damage of Covid and the costs of the mounting climate emergency. Yet banks and the international financial institutions – in which economically poorer countries remain under-represented – persist with austerity squeezes.

The food price crisis they are experiencing will be painfully familiar in the light of that of 2007-08 which coincided with the damage of the international financial crisis caused by Western banks. Along with the surging diversion of land and crops to biofuels as a questionable renewable energy solution for climate change, food commodity speculation figured as a structural cause of the food price crisis alongside the immediate impact of harvest problems in eastern and central Europe. Likewise, today, as a Guardian editorial pointed out, the power of global traders and commodity market speculation have been a factor in food price rises otherwise largely attributed to Putin’s manipulation of supplies following his reprehensible invasion of Ukraine.

The problems of multilateralism long predate the increasingly assertive global role of countries such as China. The latter’s rise has been propelled economically by the West’s outsourcing of manufacturing capacity, which, in terms of the climate emergency, has made China today the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases ahead of the United States as the historic leader.

Lammy is right to pose the transparency and public accountability problems of China’s aid and investment in African countries and the risks of debt. But this overlooks why Chinese support may have been attractive in the first place, with African governments under pressure to accept the self-interested conditions that Western countries and international financial institutions have tended to apply to their economic adjustment aid. This has squeezed countries’ own ‘policy space’ and played against the intended benefits for citizens of parallel Western support for so-called ‘good governance’ centred on better disciplined use of international aid and domestic public money rather than promoting the wider public interest in economic policy. Governments, if beholden to China at the expense of their own citizens, have likewise had such a relationship with the IMF.

China’s success to date in reducing poverty, accounting for much of global progress, may also have been noted by African governments in welcoming its presence. Wisely, China avoided the economic shock therapy overseen by Western economists in Russia with its catastrophic social damage following the fall of the Soviet Union.

As much as the influence of authoritarian states invoked by Lammy, it is the failure of Western countries to support lower-income countries’ access to Covid vaccines and to honour climate finance pledges, as well as to help tackle their debt, food and energy price difficulties, that have dimmed Global South enthusiasm for backing what are seen as self-interested Western calls for global action against Putin’s regime.

At the COP27 climate summit, moreover, it was their anger over these issues – and Western countries hypocritically expanding fossil fuels while asking the Global South not to – that led to their effective resistance to Western efforts to divide the G77 bloc of developing countries and China in negotiations to approve the ‘loss and damage’ fund now facing the uncertainty of plans and finance for its establishment and operation.

With the devastating floods in Pakistan at the top of their minds, they maintained their unity, despite the alarm of some vulnerable nations over China reportedly siding with authoritarian petrostates such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, the West’s murkily indulged ally, in seeking to water down other commitments at the summit, crucially on action to ensure the urgent reduction of carbon emissions.

It is such multipolar complexities, beyond Labour’s concern with the problems of specific authoritarian states, that Ed Miliband will have to navigate in his welcome plans to forge a clean power alliance of so-called ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations. In global terms, the West’s persistent neglect of the Global South, combined with its sharp adversarial tilt in relation to China’s challenge to hitherto dominant US economic, political and military power, do not provide propitious conditions for UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ call for a new “historic pact” between economically rich and poor countries.

Development in a changed UK: Little England and the Global South

As much as the shifts in the world, it is the changed political environment in the UK, particularly since Brexit and the eventual triumph of the Tory right in 2019 with all its hegemonic pretensions, that is playing its part in shaping Labour’s thinking on sustainable development and foreign policy.

Labour’s equivocation over the 0.7 per cent spend and ambiguity over a new development model stem in large part to its reluctance to be more ambitious in challenging the Tories on public spending and presenting an alternative to its Global Britain agenda.

At the same time, the Party’s hesitation may reflect worries on the parochial political front. The leadership’s focus-group strategists are likely concerned over how audible support for sustainable development might play with the supposedly ingrained and immutable conservative views of parts of the electorate they consider vital to its short-run political success at the ballot box.

Indeed, Boris Johnson’s attacks on aid were part of his nationalist ‘culture war’ pitch to Labour-lost ‘red wall‘ constituencies, pitting wasteful “giant cashpoint in the sky” aid spending not in the national interest against the austerity-absolved lack of investment in neglected communities at home. His populist drive to give international aid a bad name – playing to the UKIP-ed political environment and deployed as another tool to dent Starmer’s hopes of ‘making Labour great again’ in target seats – had a cynical irony in view of the SDGs’ expectation that all governments should “leave no one behind”.

The steady attacks on aid joined the rhetoric wielded by the Tories since 2010 mendaciously presenting the international movement of people, rather than austerity, as a major cause of communities’ woes. As highlighted on this site, Labour’s response to such discourse has been dismal, begging questions over how the Party will approach migration as one of the major global challenges of today. Labour’s “Greener, Fairer” slogan at Conference was deployed against the backdrop of the Union Jack with all its unreconstructed connotations.

UK support for action against poverty, inequality, climate change and conflict in the Global South is vital to ensuring people’s welfare where they live in the Global South, as Lammy states. But the Party seems hard-wired, again with the hostile pressure or unquestioning conformity of the media, to viewing migration largely as a security and social cohesion threat. It ought to be seen as a possible win-win opportunity for people to be welcomed and supported in helping to address the labour and funding shortages affecting the ageing societies of the Global North.

Time for a new development consensus: linking progressive action at home and abroad

If Lammy’s criticism of the Tories taking a Little England stance at the expense of the Global South are to gain meaningful traction as a route towards an ambitious programme of support for the SDGs, Labour will need to work hard for a new consensus on this agenda at political and particularly public levels. There are signs of this happening as shown by Preet Gill’s appeal at a recent event for activist awareness-raising to boost public support.

As the so-called cost-of-living crisis – a euphemism for the politically enabled results of deepening inequality – hits hard in the UK, making the case for development faces a difficult environment. Back-in-the-cabinet Tory aid advocate Andrew Mitchell has highlighted the challenge himself, bemoaning the failure of politicians to win the wider argument for development in response to the advent of Johnson’s onslaught. Still, surveys indicate that public support for development, while changeable, has remained remarkably resilient overall.

But justice – not charity – begins at home. Labour, beyond the importance of ambitiously advocating renewed UK support for development in Parliament and through public engagement at constituency level, could win wider and deeper support for its international commitment by challenging the unjust causes of inequality and hardship in the UK. Indeed, the universal character of the SDGs expect economically rich countries, not just lower-income ones, to do so.

Such an approach, linking the need for both domestic and international progress on sustainable development, would provide a stronger material, as well as communicational, basis for its global sustainable development case. A radical commitment to the sustained improvement in UK communities’ living conditions would undercut the discursive ability of the populist Tory right to present overseas solidarity as inimical to the interests of people at home.

Whether Labour is prepared or willing to show such ambition is in question. It would require Labour at last to make some form of break with the spiralling damage of the neoliberal orthodoxies that have dominated UK politics and society for over 40 years. This has hollowed out the promise of social democracy and given rise to nativist populist grievances giddily fuelled by the right and the media.

The signs are that, despite the declining legitimacy and popularity of neo-classical economics, Labour, with its renewed managerialist culture, will seek to adjust the policy climate to give free market-led growth another chance better to work. It is likely to rely on the increasingly dwindling rewards generated to bolt on social spending to cushion the model’s worse impacts, rather than tackle the underlying structural problems and injustices afflicting the UK’s economy and society and dangerously corroding its democratic health. Its policy caution at home casts doubts over the scale of its ambition abroad in addressing the causes of inequality.

Initiatives such as Stop the Squeeze, bringing together organisations active in the UK and international development NGOs advocating policies to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, suggest there is potential for momentum linking progressive action in the domestic and international spheres. The Enough is Enough rallies have invoked the joint interests of workers, climate activists and migrants in demanding change.

Yet, to achieve maximum impact, initiatives of this kind, in sparking cross-sector conversations and energy on the urgent need for change, need to win political recognition and positive political action. Labour, for all its words on the crucial importance of social movements in the struggle for sustainable development, including the role of trade unions, is hardly setting an example at home with its lukewarm attitude, if not hostility, towards those fighting for decent pay and working conditions, mobilising for urgent action on the climate emergency, or acting to defend civil liberties and human rights increasingly under threat.

From art of the possible to challenge of the necessary

These are challenging times for those in the UK committed to the cause of sustainable development. The supposed cross-party consensus on international aid and development became increasingly frayed in the political circumstances that gave rise to Boris Johnson. Now, along with the dilapidated state in which the Tories will leave the UK’s official development programme, the uncertainties surrounding Labour’s approach throw into question the extent to which UK politics will match the ambition of the SDGs with their essentially progressive social democratic orientation.

Labour generally is doing all it can to dampen public expectations of clearly needed change, and in the case of sustainable development, it may be banking on the UK’s development sector being lulled into the view, given the Tories’ ruinous record, that ‘something is better than nothing’. As the UK approaches the next general election, the UK’s non-governmental development community, in urging pledges of immediate action to support the SDGs, will hopefully combine pursuit of the ‘art of the possible’ on the UK’s difficult political terrain with strong independent insistence on the ‘challenge of the necessary’.

The stakes are high and the task urgent. With the world in crisis amid the Covid pandemic and the food and energy crisis, the World Bank has said extreme poverty will not be eliminated by the 2030 deadline, and experts have warned that progress in reducing inequalities has been thrown off course. Meanwhile, with the world on course for a global temperature rise of 2.5C above pre-industrial levels instead of the 1.5C commitment agreed at the 2015 Paris climate summit and renewed in Glasgow last year, the mid-point for achieving the SDGs by 2030 has become an existential tipping point.

Jon Barnes is a freelance writer, editor and researcher who has worked with several international development and human rights NGOs. He is author of A Record of Change in a Changing World, a history of the pioneering development NGO CIIR-Progressio, which closed in 2017 after 76 years of influential work for international peace and rights-based sustainable development. Follow him on Twitter @JonBarnes3

Image: David Lammy. Author: Policy Exchange, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.