BRITAIN
THE nature of politics is about choices. Some are forced on governments by circumstance. Others are self-imposed. The Labour Government’s decision to cut the aid budget to pay for an increase in defence spending is firmly in the latter category. It is also very wrong – forcing the world’s poor to pay for Britain’s safety and security. This is a false economy. Cutting overseas aid will make the world more unstable, not less. The very crises that fuels conflict – poverty, failed states, climate disasters, and mass displacement – will only worsen with less development funding. Labour’s logic is self-defeating: diverting financial resources from aid to defence does not buy security; it undermines it.
The numbers tell the story. Despite government attempts to inflate the amounts involved, in real terms the extra £6bn for defence is tiny relative to Britain’s GDP. The UK could easily absorb this through borrowing – especially in a global financial system where pound sterling is heavily traded – or, if the government prefers, through a modest wealth tax. Yet, Sir Keir Starmer has chosen to frame this as a zero-sum game, where aid must give way to security. But why? Because this is not about economic necessity – it’s about political positioning. Labour wants to prove that it can be fiscally disciplined even when the numbers don’t demand it. It wants to neutralise Tory attacks, even when the real battle is over priorities, not affordability.
It is also a move that aligns with Donald Trump’s worldview. The US President wants to close down the US government’s main overseas aid agency, treating it as an expensive indulgence rather than a pillar of foreign policy. A UK prime minister that echoes Mr Trump’s “America first” instincts on defence and aid will likely meet with congeniality. Starmer has been searching hard for common ground since President Trump was re-elected. On aid and defence spending he has found it.
Labour doesn’t just believe in fiscal discipline; it believes that it must adopt financial rectitude and has constructed a justification for that belief. The problem is that by accepting Conservative trade-offs, Labour locks itself into an orthodoxy that it may later need to break. In a volatile world, Britain – outside the EU – must boost high-value exports and cut reliance on fragile supply chains. Even under Joe Biden, the UK was kept out of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, which strengthened transatlantic industrial policy. Will Downing Street ever admit that Britain’s real limit is productive capacity and not budget deficits?
Britain’s fiscal constraint is artificial, but its resource constraints are real. Energy, food, and manufacturing are matters of national security, not just market functions. Without investment, dependence on key imports makes the UK vulnerable to supply-chain shocks and price inflation. If every pound spent requires a cut elsewhere, recent announcements by Labour’s Ed Miliband and Steve Reed wouldn’t have mattered.
Keir Starmer often presents himself as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue – claiming to be adapting to circumstances rather than adhering to dogma. Yet, such pragmatism is itself a belief system, one that treats capitalism’s rules as fixed and unchangeable, markets as being beyond politics, and history as a one-way street where past mistakes justify permanent and crippling caution. In doing so, Starmer isn’t just rejecting viable alternatives – he’s rewriting history to suggest they were never an option to begin with.
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