The announcement on June 16th of a merger between the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) roused the admonishment of the great and the good of former ministers and the aid sector, but it’s a move that’s been on the cards for a long time. 

The constituency of Tories who have affection for an ‘aid’ budget has always been small, with the rest resenting the 2013 legislation which requires the UK to invest 0.7 per cent of GNI on Overseas Development Assistance (ODA). The trajectory from Cameron to now has only seen DFID’s independence further undermined, with attempts to alter the internationally agreed OECD-DAC rules of what can qualify as ‘Overseas Development Assistance,’ and more and more of the budget parcelled out to the FCO, MoD and other departments to serve the ‘British national interest.’

These strategies have been successful in chipping away at the integrity of ODA’s focus on tackling poverty, so the full-frontal merger is a brutal cards on the table moment for Johnson’s administration. It is a move designed to shun the perceived ‘establishment’ of the Brexiteer imagination – those supporting an independent DFID and those who supported Remain can be cast in much the same light in the right-wing press. But the truth is that abolishing the aid budget is a popular policy across the spectrum, nevermind with Johnson’s base. 

Accordingly, Keir Starmer had nothing much to say to defend DFID except branding it a “distraction” from the humiliating u-turn on free school meals. Preet Kaur, the Shadow DFID Secretary, made appeals to Britain’s “soft power,” “leadership” and the “value for money” DFID gives the UK taxpayer. The Left response has been muted, with many making the same appeals to maintaining British influence. That such Conservative talking points could prevail is an indication of the distance we have to travel to instil a robust concept of global justice into British politics. 

This is the problem with how DFID is understood: it is presented as charity, rather than the very bare minimum the UK can do to redress the devastating impact it has had on countries in the Global South – an impact which secured extraordinary wealth for Britain’s ruling elite. While we only finished paying off slaveowners who lost their ‘property’ in 2015, not a single penny has left British coffers in the form of reparations to those states and peoples the empire exploited. We are yet to have a serious conversation in the UK about global justice because we are yet to look with honesty to the UK’s history – one which has recently been undergoing much-needed excavation from black activists and the Black Lives Matter movement. 

If we compare the trillions of pounds that would quickly add up in reparations to the yearly £12-14 billion spent on aid, it quickly looks like pocket change. This isn’t to say that this funding isn’t needed or necessary; aid does save lives, and DFID does have a better record than most for transparent and effective development funding – if we ignore its approach to economic development, of course.

But the ‘charity’ of DFID hides the real scale of the money that continues to be siphoned out of countries in the Global South, and the barriers many governments face in being able to take needed policy action.

Tax evasion and avoidance from footloose multinationals cost Southern countries $50-100 billion every year that could be used for direct government intervention. Trading rules and investment treaties have shrunk the policy space that would allow countries to legislate in the interests of their citizens without fear of legal action in private courts. Conditionalities from institutions such as the IMF and World Bank require governments to impose austerity to access needed finance, driving inequality and further instability and ramping up privatisation and the grip of finance on their economies.

These are all things the UK could take a stand on, if reparations were too difficult to sell to a British public that has been brought up on a diet of Windsors, Winstons and Union Jacks. But they won’t. After all, these policies uphold the interests of the dominant factions of British capital. And this announcement from Johnson is just another clarification that they aren’t going to start any time soon. 

And this takes me to the bigger beast on the horizon. What scares me most about this announcement is not the merger itself, which is largely symbolic when they have already been doing everything legally possible to undermine overseas assistance already. It’s that in a global moment when renewing and deepening our multilateralism has never been more urgent, Johnson is opting to prioritise national retrenchment over co-operation.

This same pattern can be seen in President Trump’s attempt to capture the patent for the Covid-19 vaccine – which was never about ensuring free and equal access for Americans but rather about acting as a vector for his national pharmaceutical industry. Similarly, France’s curtailing foreign food imports was not based on proof that they were spreading the virus, yet left farmers in the Global South with rotting yields and collapsed supply chains. 

If this is the post-coronavirus politics, then the challenge ahead in tackling climate change, which will require unprecedented co-operation and compromise, is simply off the table. There is no such thing as a national Green New Deal. If we are to build back better after this pandemic, then our ambitions need to be broad enough to extend to a British foreign policy that reimagines multilateralism. The pandemic has brought the urgency of this project into focus.