If Keir Starmer wants to win back disillusioned voters deserting his party for the Liberal Democrats or the Greens, he could do worse than rediscover Labour’s longstanding moral commitment to international development.
Since cutting the overseas aid budget to fund higher defence spending – losing the excellent Anneliese Dodds in the process – Labour has had little to say on the subject, aside from the fact that 0.3% of national income is the new normal.
But despite the cuts, Foreign Office sources insist that behind the scenes there is a renewed commitment to winning the argument for “the impact and benefits of international development”. If so, it could not come at a more propitious moment.
There are a series of milestones over the next 12 months and more at which development campaigners argue that the government has a crucial opportunity to work for change, even with its drastically diminished aid budget.
First, the development minister, Jenny Chapman, recently confirmed that the UK would host a summit on development cooperation in the first half of this year. She was at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa this weekend, hearing directly from the continent’s leaders. Another UK-convened summit, on illicit financial flows, will follow.
Most importantly, though, it is the UK’s turn to chair the G20 group of economies, in 2027, for which the buildup has already quietly begun in Whitehall. With members including Brazil, China and India – and so broader than the G7 – this is the forum Gordon Brown did much to promote following the global financial crash, convening its leaders in London’s Docklands in 2009 for a crisis-fighting summit.
The G20 has since become the home of discussions about issues including debt relief and the world financial system. It was the G20 that agreed a standstill for government debt repayments in 2020, for example, as the Covid pandemic was ripping through the world economy.
Yet this year the group’s chair is Donald Trump, who plans to strip away the focus on development and the climate emergency championed by the four preceding chairs, all from the global south – Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa.
Indeed, fired up by false claims of widespread persecution against the white population, Trump has even suggested that he may refuse even to invite the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
The Washington thinktank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has characterised Trump’s approach as a shift towards a “narrower, more nationalised vision”, which “raises fundamental questions about the G20’s purpose, legitimacy and effectiveness at a moment when multilateralism itself is increasingly under strain”.
That means the UK will have to pick up the baton next January at a fraught time, when the future of the institution is in flux, but that is exactly why it will be so important.
One theme in particular where campaigners believe progress is possible is on easing the burden of unsustainable debt, a key aim of the Make Poverty History push, in which Brown was so closely involved.
Analysis by the campaign group Debt Justice shows that average debt repayments for countries in the global south hit 19.2% of government revenue in 2025. That was the highest level since 1990, eating into spending on critical public services such as health and education.
There is a G20 process for renegotiating unsustainable debts: the Common Framework. But it is lengthy and cumbersome and can be held hostage by private-sector bondholders.
Five years on from requesting debt restructuring via the framework, the Ethiopian government is facing the threat of legal action from its private-sector creditors in London, which tends to be the backdrop for actions of this kind since so much international debt is issued under British law.
One demand of campaigners is for UK legislation that would force private-sector creditors to take part in any renegotiation. But the bigger prize would be to secure a commitment to outright debt relief for some countries, perhaps capping their repayments at some percentage of revenues.
There are also increasingly interesting global conversations, albeit driven by necessity, about the opportunities for greater global south sovereignty over development, in a world where aid flows are diminishing. These include, for example, the Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama’s “Accra reset”.
“Our world as we know it is at an inflection point,” he told an audience at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos. “Africa intends to be at the table in determining what the new global order will look like.”
Romilly Greenhill, the director of Bond, the umbrella body for UK development organisations, says: “This is a timely moment for the UK to demonstrate its value as an inclusive convener and to rebuild relationships with lower-income countries following the UK aid cuts.” She argues that tax cooperation, and reform of the Bretton Woods institutions that wield such power over the global south – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – must also be on the table.
Another veteran campaigner, Matthew Martin, the director of Development Finance International, argues: “The UK should focus on restoring the G20 to being a key decision-making forum for dealing with the three urgent crises of our time: debt, climate and inequality.”
The issues are complex and nuanced, and will require deft politics, but the prize could be great – and show that new, fairer alliances can be forged in the ashes of the old global order. And even if Labour’s efforts are in vain, the hard diplomatic yards would have the happy side-effect of reconnecting the party with its internationalist heart.
