'If we wish to ensure stability across the globe, slow the spread of authoritarianism, and prevent conflict, we must invest in the future of the developing world.'

Sarah Olney is the Lib Dem MP for Richmond Park

The case for foreign aid is, by its very nature, an emotional one. I doubt there are many people in our country today who have not seen the heart wrenching images of half-starved children in Iraq, Syria, or Somalia that form the core of aid agencies’ fundraising drives. Unfortunately, the issue with emotional arguments is that the closer to home a disaster is, the more it occupies our mind, pushing more distant tragedies to the corners of perception.

This winter, as we head into the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation, it is easy to think that the economic problems we face at home mean that we should not be generous abroad. However, the reality is that we cannot afford not to be.

There are more than 27 million refugees in the world today by Amnesty International’s estimates. These are men, women, and children who have fled conflict and persecution, seeking tenuous safety beyond their borders. However, they are not the only people leaving their homes for foreign lands.

Every year, more than 21.5 million people are displaced by drought, famine, natural disasters, and the effects of climate change, with this number set to rise almost exponentially in the coming decade. While many of these displaced people can return home quickly, others cannot. Left with nothing to their names they are unable to return to their former homes and lack the resources to begin again.

Then there is a third group. Those seeking a way to escape the poverty that stalks them every day. These are people living in communities where the lack of economic opportunity means that if they stayed, their families and children would slip ever closer towards total deprivation.

When members of all these groups make the hazardous trip to our borders in search of safety, it is not a decision they take lightly. They come to our shores because there is nothing left for them at home.

Successive home secretaries have promised to crack down on migration, using warships and threats of deportations to stop channel crossings. They whip up hatred and fear, portraying migrants on our shores as an “invasion of our southern coast”. What Suella Braverman and Priti Patel have failed to realise is that for those crossing the channel, this is their last resort. One cannot deter someone with nothing left to lose.

Yet, while we bolster our defences in the English Channel, the Conservatives have robbed the UK of one of its best tools to prevent migration, foreign aid. In 2020, the Government announced its plans to reduce the amount of Official Development Assistance (ODA) from 0.7% of GNI to 0.5%. In real terms this meant an almost £3 billion reduction in government spending on foreign aid.

The immediate effect this has had on the ground is devastating. In Syria, approximately 24 million people now rely on aid to survive, and yet, our aid contributions to the country have fallen by an estimated £200 million. To put this in context, when one British aid project in a camp for Syrian refugees had its funding cut by £500,000, it had to stop feeding almost 10,000 families for an entire month.

While the reasons refugees give for leaving camps in Lebanon and Turkey are myriad, dire conditions and the spiralling economic situation in their host countries are widely cited. The 85,000 strong “caravan of light”, a mass migration of Syrians out of Turkish camps this summer, may have been sparked by fears of deportation back to Syria, but scratch deeper and you find activists and refugees alike citing deteriorating conditions in the camps as a driving force for their new migration.

By slashing humanitarian aid, we are driving refugees away from refugee camps in surrounding nations and onto a perilous journey to the west.

While immediate humanitarian assistance that feeds and clothes refugees around the world is vital, it is only one small part of the picture. Foreign aid is not simply a gift we give to those less fortunate than ourselves to be removed when times are hard at home. It is an investment that allows us to challenge global issues and build a safer, more stable world.

Poverty and conflict are widely understood to be closely interconnected. Democracies in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $1500 will on average only last 8 years. By contrast, as GDP increases, researchers at New York University found that stability also rises. Once the $6000 threshold is reached, there is only a 1 in 500 chance of the democratic government falling and to date, no existing democratic government in a country with a GDP per capita of over $9000 has ever fallen to authoritarianism.

Just as poverty can breed conflict, education and growth are also inextricably linked. According to the OECD, providing every child with access to education and the skills needed to participate in society would boost lower-income countries’ GDP by an average of 28% per year. Indeed, it is interesting to note that no country in the modern era has ever achieved rapid and continuous growth without a literacy rate of at least 40%.

With education must also come investment in sanitation and healthcare. It is a fact of life that no matter where children are born, the more time they have to spend accessing clean water or caring for sick parents and relatives, the less time they will be able to spend studying.

The answer then is obvious. If we wish to ensure stability across the globe, slow the spread of authoritarianism, and prevent conflict, we must invest in the future of the developing world.

Over the next 10 years, the Government plans to more than double defence spending to almost £100 billion per year. Perhaps, instead of reacting to the increasing fragility of the international stage by building new warships and training another generation of young men and women to fight in our wars, our defence would be better served by strengthening the poorest regions of the world before they break apart.

The decision to cut foreign aid is agonisingly short-sighted. It is symptomatic of a Government that is desperately trying to curry favour with that section of our society that believes we must pull up the drawbridge, double the guard, and get our own house in order before we intervene elsewhere.

Unfortunately for them, the world is not as large as it once was. We live in a global community where we cannot simply bury our heads in the sand and hope that if we build a wall of guns and steel around our island the world will pass us by.

There is a pragmatic case for foreign aid which can be summarized as spending pennies to save pounds. Building schools and feeding refugees is cheaper than laying down warships and paying border guards. It’s time that ministers like Braverman and Patel stop building higher walls and deeper moats and start pressing their colleagues to solve the issues that make people approach them in the first place.

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