‘Blood is on their hands’ – how your MP voted on £4bn aid cuts

By: Jonathan Stevenson
Date: 14 July 2021

Last night MPs voted by 333 votes to 298 to approve the government’s cuts of around £4 billion per year to the UK aid budget for the foreseeable future.

It means the budget will now stand at 0.5% of national income rather than the 0.7% mandated by law and promised in the 2019 Conservative manifesto.

The cuts are additional to the reduction that would have taken place anyway because national income has fallen during the pandemic.

The devastating likely consequences of these cuts from a million girls losing out on schooling to 250,000 more mother and child deaths have previously been outlined by charities and the UN.

Despite representing just 1% of the £400 billion of spending on the pandemic, a majority of Conservative MPs were unmoved.

A test designed to be failed

Opening the debate, the prime minister Boris Johnson tried to claim that the decision was about when to return to 0.7%, rather than whether to do so, after the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, unveiled a convoluted ‘test’ setting out the conditions for it to be restored.

Yet as former prime minister Theresa May pointed out, the conditions he set out have been met just once in the last twenty years, and could remain unmet for years to come. So effectively, MPs were voting for a permanent reduction.

'We made a promise to the poorest people in the world and the government has broken that promise.'

Former PM Theresa May says it's with "deep regret" that she will vote "against the motion today" as MPs debate the proposed foreign aid cut.https://t.co/kl4dSG2XXQ pic.twitter.com/ZuX8kvH0qV

— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 13, 2021

When even the architect of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ for migrants says the government has gone too far, it really hits home that the government has made a deliberate decision to pull back from international assistance.

Theresa May was one of 25 Conservative MPs who rebelled in the vote, with at least 10 possible rebels using the chancellor’s ‘test’ as an excuse to back down. All opposition parties opposed the cuts.

Aid and global justice

Global Justice Now has long campaigned for the aid budget to be retained at 0.7% alongside our work to ensure that aid is genuinely used to end poverty and inequality in the global south.

Our reaction to the vote that ‘blood is on the hands’ of the MPs who backed the cuts has been widely quoted in the media.

While it is hugely disappointing that these cuts have passed, our work to make sure that the remaining aid budget is spent in the right way continues. Too much aid is used to promote British political and corporate interests, rather than prioritizing the needs of the world’s most marginalized communities.

This trend has accelerated under prime minister Boris Johnson, in particular since he abolished the Department for International Development and gave its budget to the Foreign Office last year.

So despite this setback, we will continue to scrutinise the government’s aid programme and demand that it is not hijacked from its intended mission.

Below you can see how MPs voted last night.

Join the campaign

• Sign the petition against the hijacking of aid >>
• ‘Don’t just defend aid – make it just’ – read our article for New Internationalist >>
• Read more about the campaign >>

Boris Johnson’s slashing of #UKAid is scandalous in the middle of a global pandemic which threatens shocking levels of poverty around the world. But there are also big problems with ‘aid’ and we need to seriously rethink this concept (thread) 1/ https://t.co/mgch9FJBKr

— Nick Dearden (@nickdearden75) July 14, 2021

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Did your MPs vote in favour of the aid cuts?

MPs are listed alphabetically by surname. If you don’t know your MP’s name, put your postcode in here

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Image: BBC Parliament