A contest between populism, diplomacy and aid is looming in Britain

told Parliament in June that he planned to merge Britain’s Department for International Development with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office , he mocked it as a “giant cashpoint in the sky”. Its do-gooders, now under the auspices of the clunkily-named Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office , may soon have rather less cash to dispense. According to whispers whooshing around Whitehall, the government is thinking of breaking its promise to keep spending 0.

On the whole, the cash has been well spent, but it has sometimes been tricky to dish it all out. Even last year’s weakgrowth meant an extra £600m had to be divvied up. In an era of covid-imposed recession and looming mass unemployment at home, a populist government was likely to start balking at such generosity to foreigners, however deserving.

The figure has become totemic. But dropping it to, say, 0.6% would still leave Britain as one of the world’s biggest donors. As the anti-aid lobby points out, Britain is the sole country in the. And it was already being whittled away, as the government began to define aid more elastically. The Ministry of Defence, the Department of International Trade and other ministries now often mark down spending abroad as aid.

The bigger concern is the merger, which officially occurred on September 1st. Whether or not spending is cut as a proportion ofis likely to slice up the cash less effectively. “It’s not a merger, it’s the demolition ofIt is not difficult to work out why mandarins generally favour it. In the past two decades the diplomatic service has been hollowed out by drastic budget cuts, sorely weakening its hand in traditional diplomacy.

’s top civil servant has been shunted off as a “special envoy” for famine prevention. The rejigging of the new department is being overseen mainly byup into little pieces and scatter it,” says Nicholas Westcott, a former diplomat who runs the Royal African Society. “They want to make it hard to separate it out again.

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