While Britain’s remaining social conservative factions spent the evening after Rishi Sunak’s reshuffle considering where best to place their allegiances, former prime minister-turned Foreign Secretary David Cameron focused his attention on unlocking billions of pounds for foreign aid.
Officials said that the now-Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton took a white paper on aid home “on his first day in office, reading it overnight.” The 150-page document is dedicated to “re-energising” Britain’s approach to international development so the country can play a lead role in meeting UN sustainable development goals, such as eliminating world hunger by 2030.
The foreign secretary has made it clear he will focus on finding extra state and private funds in order to “unlock hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.” But The Daily Telegraph cites “sceptics” who say the new white paper is “full of the same old promises and languages that we’ve heard before.”
Promises that we’ve heard before, but not for some time. Indeed, the Conservative Party has spent the years since Cameron’s premiership shifting focus away from international projects. Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson reduced development spending from 0.7% to 0.5% during the pandemic—a cut that Sunak was just last month pushing back against undoing. And this was after the Tory government shut down its Department for International Development, merging it with the Foreign Office.
At this year’s National Conservatism conference, a host of Tory officials also told those who would listen that their focus was moving away from the international and returning to the national. But, as former diplomat Lord Ricketts pointed out, so-called “compassionate conservative” Cameron and his government saw international development as a “real priority,” and now “the old team is back.”
Climate writer Ben Pile responded to the news by paraphrasing Jordan Peterson, urging the Conservative government to “tidy your room before you save the world.” The socially right-wing and economically left-wing Social Democratic Party added that now is not the time to prioritise foreign aid since “we spend £8 million a day on migrant hotel costs while British people use food banks.”
But the party looks likely to press ahead regardless, with more details set to come forth in the coming months—and this will constitute, as The Telegraph put it, one of Cameron’s “first substantial policy declarations since his surprise return to the Government.”
