It is six months since the Labour Party won the United Kingdom’s general election — a perfect opportunity to assess whether it is meeting its bold promise to “turn the page” on what it condemned as a “degraded” international development program after 14 years of Conservative rule.
How much has changed since Keir Starmer entered Downing Street last July? Is it possible to detect a different approach, or has that manifesto pledge crashed into the harsh reality of a government with other priorities, and with little money to spare? And what is the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s thunderbolts fired at foreign aid and climate action?
Devex brought together three experts — Tamsyn Barton, the former head of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, the U.K. aid watchdog; Romilly Greenhill, the chief executive of the Bond network for U.K. aid organizations; and Myles Wickstead, an associate program director at the foreign policy agency Wilton Park — to review Labour’s record so far.