When Keir Starmer announced the switch in spending from foreign aid to defence, the response from the Labour Party seemed surprisingly muted. Now we know why.
Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, did not want to disrupt the prime minister’s visit to Donald Trump and was saving her resignation for afterwards.
Her loyalty to the prime minister, the government and the party resembles that of Robin Cook in 2003. He resigned as foreign secretary over the decision to join the US invasion of Iraq, but he did so respecting Tony Blair’s integrity, and very much more in sorrow than in anger – as resignations on matters of principle ought to be.
Dodds’s resignation letter says that she agrees that “we must increase defence spending”. In this, she differs from Diane Abbott, the former shadow home secretary, who argued in The Independent yesterday that more spending on defence will make us less safe.
Indeed, Dodds goes further even than Starmer, who has announced an increase from 2.3 per cent of national income to 2.5 per cent in 2027, and 3 per cent in the next parliament. “Even 3 per cent may only be the start,” she writes.
She argues that “it will be impossible to raise the substantial resources needed just through tactical cuts to public spending”. She does not say so explicitly, but plainly believes that taxes must rise even further than the record-breaking increase in last October’s Budget. “These are unprecedented times, when strategic decisions for the sake of our country’s security cannot be ducked,” she says.
Like Cook’s resignation, hers is not going to alter the government’s course. There does not even have to be a vote in the House of Commons on the cut in foreign aid, and Alan Campbell, the chief whip, is determined to avoid one. The Conservatives would support it in any case, but a vote would expose Labour’s division.
There are many Labour MPs who share Dodds’s view that the foreign aid cut will “deeply” harm the UK’s reputation, and who agree with her sharpest line: “This decision is already being portrayed as following in President Trump’s slipstream of cuts to USAID”, America’s international development agency.
Cook may have respected Blair’s decision, but his resignation lent weight to those accusing Blair of being the American president’s poodle. The same is going to happen to Starmer now.
The significance of Cook’s resignation was that it was the tip of an iceberg. Labour MPs were split down the middle over the Iraq war, and members outside parliament were mostly opposed to it.
So it is with foreign aid – and not just foreign aid, because it is easy to be in favour of good-sounding things when you do not have to say how they will be paid for. Dodds speaks for what I suspect is a majority of Labour members outside parliament who think that, if defence spending has to rise, it should be paid for by higher taxes.
If Cook’s resignation was a warning of trouble to come, then so is Dodds’s.
Blair, of course, went on to win another general election after the Iraq war. He survived as prime minister for far longer than seemed possible, given that he had broken the back of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 2003 – but then he was an exceptional politician who had been prime minister for six years by then, and had a substantial record of achievement to show for it.
Starmer, on the other hand, faces his first resignation of a minister attending cabinet on an issue of principle, one that pits him against his party, after less than eight months in government. The first big test will either be a possible parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, which could see a Labour stronghold turn into a Reform win, or the council elections in May.
It is all the more damaging because Dodds was an ally of his, promoted to shadow chancellor at a time when it would have been too divisive to appoint Rachel Reeves.
But the significance of her resignation is that Dodds represents the mainstream view in the Labour Party. That means trouble ahead for Starmer.
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