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6 hours ago
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Your humble civil servants are watching with fascinated horror as our terrified prime minister tries to secure the guy ropes for a rapidly shrinking UK tent, in the hope that it can survive geopolitical storms from the east and west.
Spare a thought, then, for the one government department that has repeatedly found itself politically outside that tent and does so again now – the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
Since stumbling out of the ashes of the Boris Johnson-propelled merger in 2020 between the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Foreign Office, the hits have just kept on coming for the FCDO’s diplomats and aid workers. There has been the abandonment of the longstanding 0.7% aid target, a shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Donald Trump’s gleeful evisceration of USAid, and last week’s savage and historic cut to the development budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income, swiftly followed by the resignation of Annaliese Dodds, its well-regarded international development minister.
And their reward for enduring all that? Being conscripted into last week’s “rather fraught” operation to help the PM to cosy up to Trump – the very leader who, according to Dodds, has provided the blueprint for the gutting of their own department. Yet, the most heart-breaking bit for FCDO’s 17,000-odd staff may be to come, according to the Institute for Government, as they decide how exactly to follow the instruction and axe myriad projects, many of which help deliver life-saving interventions in the world’s poorest countries.
I’ve spoken to current and former FCDO employees about Keir Starmer’s decision, and their reaction to the speed and scale of the cut has been one of shock and disorientation. It’s not just that slashing aid in order to spend more on defence will prove to be wrong and self-defeating morally, diplomatically and economically. It’s not even that this decision is soul-destroying in its frightening implication – based on the grim consensus shared with the likes of Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch – that the civil service must now get behind a national effort to beat ploughshares into swords. After all, civil servants are forbidden from publicly endorsing the recent boos and brickbats against the policy issued by Romilly Greenhill of the international development network Bond, David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee, Halima Begum of Oxfam and other prominent charity leaders. We are required by law to implement the policies of the government of the day. And we have no problem with that.
What alarms civil servants is how this decision was made. First, its timing: there is no serious alternative to the idea that it was made – sweetened by the offer of yet another state visit – primarily to win favour with Trump ahead of the PM’s visit to the Oval Office. This was a blood-offering, a libation, a lubricant offered to a petulant demigod in the hope that mirroring the orange genie’s recent decision to gut USAid would help get Sir Keir to first base with the Donald. As civil servants, the fawning, the grovelling, the coquettish simpering to power, was very hard to watch. What’s next, prime minister, an invitation to No 10 for a personalised hydrotherapy session?
More worryingly, the decision to reduce aid spending down to a 25-year low seems to bypass the usual checks and balances that, in the British system, helps to mitigate the executive making terrible decisions. Judging by the concerns raised by ministers and most of the parliamentary Labour party’s various factions, there was little cabinet discussion of the decision and no serious assessment of the impact of this particular decision. Combine that with a lack of parliamentary scrutiny and the PM’s side-stepping of the pesky inconveniences presented by the comprehensive spending review later this year and the politically troublesome prospect of revisiting tax and borrowing rules, and what we see is a riot of red flags. Or orange ones.
The extent to which aid spending is a Good Thing isn’t really the point – on this subject you will find a diversity of opinion among the UK’s half a million or so civil servants, the vast majority of whom work outside London and have never darkened the gilded stairways of King Charles Street.
But most civil servants, reluctantly or not, have felt nothing but pride in #UKAid, even after – as I wrote back in 2019 – the Conservative government decided to fold DfID into the Foreign Office like a Fabergé egg into a dusty satchel. The British public, too, have shown that they, like their American cousins, broadly support aid spending in the national interest, and don’t think we should follow the US lead to drastically reduce it. Starmer will need to be very careful that, in pursuing a “Trump, baby, Trump” strategy, he doesn’t widen an already growing democratic deficit.
In the meantime, don’t be surprised if you see FCDO’s civil servants – with their admirable history of whistleblowing – follow the lead of their doughty USAid counterparts, who are already fastidiously documenting the domestic and international impact of the suspension of American aid spending. The truth is out there, and they’ll know where to look.
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The author works for the UK civil service
