I once experienced the quite terrifying sight of a man outside my gate with a machete in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. He wasn’t a guard – and the single guard who worked the gate fled. I still vividly remember watching the armed man as he paced back and forth; I knew if he got into the house I would probably die. Yet I was strangely calm, because at that moment there was actually nothing I could do.
That sense of almost psychedelic paralysis is how the world feels right now to me. I don’t have the words nor the head-space to go into the multiple crises we are staring down; industrial-level forced civilian labour in Myanmar; catastrophic slaughter and rape across Sudan; mass displacements by Israeli troops of Palestinians across the West Bank; the bloody grinding war in Ukraine. These levels of deliberate ruin and misery don’t only feel overwhelming, they are.
Meanwhile, in our upside-down world, the newly-elected German government has a cabinet with no women, Greenpeace is being sued by a Texan oil pipeline company, and the new US President gleefully talks of ‘clearing’ 2 million traumatised civilians from Gaza, of buying Greenland whether or not it is for sale – and now blames President Zelensky for Russia invading his country. You can’t make this stuff up.
I have worked ‘on’ violent conflicts for some years (analysing them and managing peace-building programmes, which believe it or not is an actual job). I understand, as most of us do, why heads of state fly to Washington DC to supplicate themselves to Trump and his Vance side-kick, however cringe this looks. I also understand why our PM offered a second formal state visit to a convicted felon and sexual predator – and why Starmer insists that Britain now needs to increase defence spending. But I tell you ladies and gentlemen, ripping up our aid budget to fund defence and security is incoherent.
Let me explain.
for my work I lived in war zones for years, in central and West Africa, and in the Middle East. Defence budgets – i.e. spending billions on weapons, military and military intelligence, does not stop wars, or frankly terrorism; you need accountability and long-term political settlements to win peace, to keep it – and to create the space to address what drives terrorism. Just look at the disaster that is Afghanistan, or the Sahel – where abuses by security forces (including those trained under EU and UK defence budgets) catalysed recruitment into armed jihadist groups who now control vast territories.
Likewise, humanitarian aid does not solve poverty. It does create dependencies, and gives huge powers to international organisations who sometimes utterly abuse it. However, supporting communities to recover from bloody conflicts – which was my line of work – helps reduce violent tensions, and the knock-on effects ripple outwards way beyond aid and conflict zones. Setting up aid programmes that provide long-term economic opportunities – i.e. jobs and funding local businesses – impacts migration, and can especially support women (who manage many informal economies across the world). It’s not perfect, nor infallible, but it can work well. And it saves peoples’ lives.
Siphoning off aid funds to pay for defence, is callous, politically stupid and utterly short-sighted. Our military wars create poverty; countries we bomb and invade are economically shattered by our actions. This is not liberal-think; it is the reality of military interventions. It is a maybe unpalatable reality that defence, development and diplomacy are intertwined pillars – and when they become subservient to each other – especially development to defence – governments perpetually over-reach on military solutions to chronic political conflicts; and that doesn’t ever end well.
On Starmer’s watch, our already heavily-reduced aid budget will be skimmed from 0.58% to 0.3% of the UK gross national income – GNI – (it’s worth saying the government spent 0.2% of the budget within the UK in 2023, so we are looking at a real aid budget of 0.1% of GNI). We will cut humanitarian aid by six billion pounds a year. Butchering aid that directly supports war ravaged economies (pardon the horrible pun)really is shoving all your eggs eggs into a basket full of weapons.
Starmer announced the decapitated aid budget just before he flew to Washington. Six billion extra pounds on defence is one hell of a charm offensive to a US President who claims Ukraine is guilty of being invaded, and wants to cuddle Putin. By the way, do you know that Britain buys 89 percent of its weapons from the US?
