Opinion: Return of the rebel – Andrew Mitchell's UK aid comeback

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s appointment of Andrew Mitchell as minister of state for international development in the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, attending Cabinet, is very interesting politically and very good news for the world’s most vulnerable people. Mitchell has been an outspoken critic of Conservative policy on international development over the last two years, including Sunak's own decision as chancellor in 2020 to slash the aid budget by around 30%, from 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5%. The fact that Sunak has brought the leader of the aid rebellion back into government is interesting politically and a refreshing sign that Sunak is at least willing to listen to dissenting views around the Cabinet table. It is also good news for global development. Mitchell was a very effective international development secretary from 2010-2012, not least because he had shadowed the job for five years. I am confident his appointment will mean improvements in U.K. international development policy in the next two years. But he won’t be able to turn back the clock overnight. Probably the fastest change Mitchell can make — and maybe the most important too — is to refocus U.K. international assistance on poverty. Liz Truss as foreign secretary sought to use U.K. aid as leverage for trade deals, in a hark back to the bad old days of the Pergau Dam scandal when Thatcher used U.K. aid to sweeten an arms deal with Malaysia. I think Mitchell will change this. He will want to make sure the U.K. does much more about the famine in the Horn of Africa, and finally, stop all aid to China. As international development secretary, he worked with Bill and Melinda French Gates and the Gates Foundation and other European and Group of Seven countries to increase aid for immunization and family planning. After cutting funding for girls’ education by 25%, the U.K.’s Global Education Summit in 2021 was a flop. If Mitchell can put poverty back at the heart of U.K. aid, he can help the United Kingdom hold its head higher in the future. It will take a little longer to restore the aid budget to 0.7%. Sunak cut aid by one-third. The speed of the cut was reckless. Mitchell’s almost successful rebellion forced Sunak to promise the cut was temporary to 2024-25. The imminent mini-budget will tell us whether the Office for Budget Responsibility thinks we are back on track to meet Sunak’s fiscal tests for restoring the aid budget. If the budget as a whole is sustainable, we should be. Mitchell from the back benches has asked for a sensible, gradual increase to 0.6% in 2023-24 and then 0.7% in 2024-25. I imagine in Cabinet he’d be willing to push that back by one year, as long as it could be announced earlier. This would give time to make better decisions about the increase than the appallingly sudden cuts. The last big question is about the Department of International Development itself, which Mitchell led so effectively, and Boris Johnson abolished the moment COVID-19 gave him the excuse. Mitchell said at the time that this was “at a stroke destroying a key aspect of global Britain.” It has proved to be the case. A bad decision for U.K. international development and arguably even worse for the Foreign Office which coveted the official development assistance budget and then made a hash of it. Merging government departments is complicated. The merger is still not really complete. Even DFID’s old office in Whitehall is boarded up and unused. So the merger could be stopped and reversed. But reopening DFID should be better planned than closing it was, and it will take time to replace the expertise it has lost. I won’t expect news on this imminently. But I am confident that Mitchell will be arguing for it around the Cabinet table, which will be a change for the better.