How David Lammy could bring real change to UK aid

David Lammy offered a striking insight into his thinking in a speech to a United Kingdom think tank recently, promising: “I will take the responsibility of being the first foreign secretary descended from the slave trade incredibly seriously.” The remark underlined how the man now in charge of both U.K. diplomacy and development policy, following Labour’s decisive election victory, is dramatically different to past holders of a post often seen as the epitome of the country’s elitism and conservatism. Never before has the job been taken by someone who has thought so deeply about his country’s complicated relationship with the global south, or by someone so shaped by his own family’s painful history under the crimes of the British Empire. Lammy also has front-line experience of the aid sector, as a former trustee for ActionAid UK. He used to knock doors to raise money for Christian Aid — as “a young man with big Michael Jackson hair,” as he joked when delivering a 2022 lecture. So, what approach can we expect from a man who rose from childhood poverty in a single-parent London home to become a friend of Barack Obama, a figure powerful enough to defeat an internal Labour attempt to restore a separate aid department — a move that would have divided his own empire? The party’s election manifesto offered frustratingly few clues, drawing criticism for rejecting a reversal of the botched merger that created the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and for failing to set out a path back to spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid, despite attacking the outgoing Conservative government for having “degraded” development work. Labour has even dropped talk of “a new model for international development,” seemingly now content to simply “strengthen” its role within the giant FCDO, following a review of “capability” gaps and “accountability lines,” as it briefed aid organizations after the manifesto launch. The new government sparked further alarm after its election victory with a reshuffle that appointed a development minister, Anneliese Dodds, with no preparation for the post and with a second job — appearing, astonishingly, to make the role part-time. Although Dodds calls herself the international development minister, those words are missing from her official title. Some in the sector suspect that was Lammy’s decision, to make crystal clear that development will be his domain. So far, so murky. But the foreign secretary has at least set out his core beliefs for reimagining development — and this is where the story gets more interesting than the manifesto’s more-of-the-same mantra. In that 2022 lecture, the future secretary of state for foreign, commonwealth and development affairs — his full title — launched an outspoken attack on forms of aid delivery that are “patronizing or paternalistic” instead of “two-way partnerships based on respect and mutual trust.” Lammy argued the true scandal during the COVID-19 pandemic was not high-income nations’ hoarding of vaccines, but their failure to share intellectual property and manufacturing capacity so lower-income countries were not “waiting for our leftovers.” “You have got to ask why the international development sector weren’t shouting that loudly,” he said, chiding his audience to think more radically and to make its ambition “nothing less than redistributing power to people.” It is a theme Lammy returned at Labour’s annual conference last October, when he attacked NGOs that tug heartstrings with images of people in low-income nations with “a swollen belly and flies around them” – accusing them of “old-fashioned colonial models” that undermine the fight against poverty. During the lecture, he even harked back to the birth of development after the First World War to emphasize his determination to pull it up by its roots, describing how it started as “a plan to extract even more profit from the colonies” at a time of domestic economic crisis. “U.K. politicians reasoned that if British colonies were given loans for capital projects that required British imports, unemployment at home would reduce,” he said, arguing that this remained the motivation until the 1960s. Lammy returned to the theme when describing his approach as “progressive realism,” promising “a new Africa strategy that does more than merely offer aid,” one based on “long-term win-win partnerships — rather than following an outdated model of patronage.” Some in the U.K. aid sector are excited that this philosophy shows here, at last, is a politician who will champion localization of aid, who will “channel funds through local partners, not through the country offices of the big NGOs,” as one figure put it to me. Time will tell, but tensions with Dodds seem inevitable, if Lammy claims development as his sphere — in contrast to the freedom granted to Andrew Mitchell, the outgoing Conservative development minister who wrote a well-received strategy of his own last year. One insider suggested “David will want to do good in the world” and, in a world racked by war and the rise of the far right, will quickly find that development is the only part of his portfolio where that will be possible. His team said Lammy has made 17 visits to the global south in the last two years, engaging with 61 governments, and in his own words, has detected “a powerful sense from the Global South that Britain has abandoned them.” He is visiting India this week. Lammy has also pointed to his “ties to the Caribbean and Africa” when vowing to crack down on tax-dodging in overseas territories that “fuels dictators” and has made the U.K. a “money laundering superpower” – although similar promises have been made in Downing Street before. Just as important, it is questionable whether Lammy will have time to exert tight control, even if he wishes to, given he must also rebuild the U.K.’s battered post-Brexit relationship with the rest of Europe and prepare for a potential return of Donald Trump across the Atlantic. Strikingly, underlining the importance of warmer relations with Brussels, Lammy’s first development policy announcement was that the U.K. will use its aid budget to help the EU cut the number of asylum-seekers arriving from Africa. On the second challenge, he has much ground to make up, having memorably branded the former U.S. president “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser” and “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” during Trump’s first term in the White House. Sounding somewhat sheepish, Lammy told an interviewer: “I was on the back bench at that period, free to say what I felt. We’ve now moved into, I think, a slightly different place.” A charm offensive among Republicans in Washington is underway, and would be stepped up. More immediately, he must decide whether to ban U.K. arms sales to Israel over its alleged breaches of humanitarian law in Gaza, having attacked the current government for keeping its legal advice secret. Lammy is a self-declared “son of the Caribbean,” now running the office that once ran the empire that enslaved his ancestors, at a pivotal moment he calls “the end of the post-colonial era.” He is determined the wind of change will blow through it, but it is not clear what practical policy shifts will follow — or whether Lammy will have the time and space to pursue them.