UK aid cuts: Another blow to the world’s poorest that will fail to make the UK safer

"These times demand a united Britain and we must deploy all our resources to achieve security," the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told the House of Commons last week as he announced sweeping cuts to the UK aid budget, reducing it to 0.3 per cent of gross national income (GNI), to pay for a hike in defence spending. This follows aid cuts under the previous government from 0.7 to 0.5 per cent of GNI. While the Prime Minister agreed to increase aid when fiscal conditions allow, the subsequent resignation of the International Development Minister confirmed the seriousness of the cuts. Alongside the betrayal that this represents to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, with real world consequences measured in lives lost to hunger and preventable diseases, this is a false economy. Even taking the Prime Minister’s argument on its own terms, the logic of drastically and suddenly reducing the UK's aid budget (especially on the back of devastating US aid cuts) in the name of UK security is deeply flawed and risks contributing to global instability now and in the future.

A world of security challenges

There is no doubt that Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine, plus its repeated violations of international law, have created a human catastrophe, with massive loss of life due to violence and conflict. The resulting disruption to farming and shipping has also been felt in increased grain prices the world over. 

Jitters in the UK and Europe over their own security, in the face of Russian aggression and the breakdown of transatlantic security guarantees, should not be taken lightly. However, though significant, these are hardly the only threats to international and UK security – which the ongoing UK Strategic Defence Review was intended to address. Defence leaders have already questioned the logic of how the Prime Minister’s announcement is consistent with responding to the current threat environment. 

We live in an interconnected world, and insecurity and conflicts outside of Europe have impacts at home. For example, the climate crisis and biodiversity loss present a planet-wide existential threat, which will further impact food security in Europe and elsewhere. Conflict and climate change also intersect – disrupting attempts to mitigate environmental destruction and making people more vulnerable. Conflict also creates fertile ground for further violence, including gender-based violence, human rights violations and mass atrocities, and provides space for violent armed groups and organised crime to flourish.

Development and humanitarian assistance play an important role in preventing and addressing insecurity, when employed in ways that are conflict sensitive, that support peacebuilding and locally led responses to crises, and that address the root causes of conflict. With astronomical levels of humanitarian needs, linked to the highest levels of conflict since World War II, these cuts are even more shocking.

Aid can advance good governance, strengthen accountability and support community efforts to tackle insecurity, including policing, promoting arms control and demining, reducing unemployment, or providing services that help to address the reasons that people are compelled to engage in armed violence. Bringing communities, civil society, authorities and armed groups together through peacebuilding, dialogues and mediation can reduce violence at local, national and even international levels. Only a month ago, the UK Foreign Secretary called for a greater focus on preventing conflict around the world. With resources becoming more limited, this focus must not be lost, and the impacts of these cuts must be mitigated. 

A reckless shock to the system

The reduction in the UK aid budget is a sudden and destabilising move, which will directly impact not only vulnerable communities, with a disproportionate impact on women and girls, but also the activists and civil society organisations advocating for better governance, gender equality, responsive policing, compliance with human rights frameworks and more robust environmental policies, and pushing for a fairer, safer world. The impact of a withdrawal by the UK, coupled with USAID cuts on an immense scale – not to mention cuts by the Netherlands, Sweden and others – will derail these efforts. While communities will try to step into the void to encourage peace, treat and feed the most at-risk people, and provide mutual support to affected populations, they will do so with considerably less resources and international assistance. The knock-on impact on stability and human suffering will be huge. For example, Sudanese Emergency Response Rooms are already warning that, against a backdrop of continued fighting and starvation, people are coming to them for food that is no longer there.

There is also the question of who fills the vacuum left by retreating international assistance. It is not as simple as China, Russia and al-Qaeda, as some commentary has suggested – though they may try to exploit the instability that these sudden changes may bring. Relationships between national government agencies, international governments, armed groups, security forces and societies are always more complicated than ‘one in, one out’. This messy web of relationships will realign with potentially violent results.

In protracted conflicts, humanitarian assistance may have supplanted services that unwilling or incapable governments have failed to provide. The retreat of Western aid will also mean a huge disruption to this social contract. When autocrats have failed to guarantee the price of bread and restricted people’s chance to push for an alternative, revolutions have been the consequence – as we saw during the Arab Spring and with the Sudanese revolutions. Without international aid, authorities may find new political pressures from their own people and face serious political turmoil if they do not meet them.

Exactly how these dynamics will play out is impossible to predict – making sudden cuts to the aid system all the more reckless.

Sowing the seeds of future insecurity

History tells us that short-term security approaches have consequences for future stability. Many of the wars of the 1990s, which peacekeepers, diplomats and humanitarians struggled to respond to, had their roots in the Cold War and, prior to that, anticolonial struggles against European empires. The instability and wars that resulted from the backlash to the Arab Spring are linked to decades of support for dictatorships in the name of Western security. Current instability, for example in the Sahel, can be traced back to the ‘war on terror’ policy of providing unaccountable security assistance that failed to strengthen people’s real or perceived safety and security. A focus on military expansion and security force assistance may drive poor governance in different parts of the world, or an arms race – creating the unintended security crisis of the future. Whatever defence approaches are taken to address the UK’s security dilemmas, they must be taken with a view to repercussions down the line.

Aid is not perfect and it is in need of the reforms that many have been calling for, including greater conflict sensitivity, gender responsiveness and more direct support for local responders. Diplomats and military actors must also increase their conflict sensitivity capabilities and adherence to international law. The West needs to rethink its cuts to international assistance, not only due to a clear moral imperative to save lives and, at a minimum, to ‘do no harm’, but also to secure its own future and contribute to peace.

Photo: Sudanese refugees who have fled the conflict in Sudan register for food aid in neighbouring Chad. Flickr/FCDO.