How should the UK engage in the world? Make it green and prioritise solidarity
Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash
Deborah Doane
One of the hottest topics at the moment across the political spectrum is how Britain should (re)shape its international alliances. We’ve left the EU. We’ve cut aid spending to a bare minimum. And we’re grappling with the complexity of a reliable friendship gone sour, in the form of US/UK relations at a time when the world is at its most insecure since WWII.
Meanwhile, most of the British public is wanting to shift relations away from the US and are looking towards Europe instead, according to new polling this week from the British Foreign Policy Group (BFPG). Trust in the US, they note, has dropped to an all-time low of 27%, down from 53% just two years ago. And whilst people do think the EU should be our strongest relationship (49% of Britons), including strong support for defence cooperation and trade, they don’t necessarily want to compromise on some of the terms of engagement, like fishing rights or being able to trade with others.
It’s within this context that Chatham House fellow Roli Asthana provided a helpful framing for how Britain should shape its foreign policy, which she dubbed “International Manchesterism”, building on Burnham’s idea of a Makerfield Test for all new British policies. “Energy price spikes, supply‑chain disruptions, geopolitical tensions and investment flows all reverberate through places like Makerfield,” she writes. She proposes that we use domestic “economic security and resilience as a lens to establish a clear line of sight between Britain’s international engagement and delivery at the local level.”
This is helpful in so far as it shows the direct links between how we engage in the world and how it impacts on us locally. By moving away from an ‘us vs them’ zero sum game, we may be able to shift to something far more useful – and hopefully more ethical, too.
I might also add two things to Asthana’s analysis: First, a deeper “green test” than the idea she puts forward about ‘energy resilience’.
“The North-West and other lagging regions have been particularly exposed to international price spikes because of older housing stock, high gas dependency, elevated fuel‑poverty rates and concentration of energy‑intensive industries…” That requires diversified gas supply, expanded storage, deeper cooperation on offshore wind and hydrogen, and a commitment to ensuring that global energy transitions generate regional jobs rather than bypassing them.
She rightfully acknowledges the need to transition our energy – but this plays out in a much deeper way in terms of our foreign policy objectives. The green agenda is absolutely front and centre, so why not name it as such? Climate change is impacting everything from migration – where people are leaving water stressed regions – to food security, to our economic well-being. On the latter, Verdant’s report this week showed the very real economic cost of a climate change-induced heatwave. In June alone, it cost the economy £2.6 Bn.
From a foreign policy perspective, we need to ask: does it advance dealing with climate change or exacerbate the impacts? Energy resilience alone, as a test of our foreign policy, will not do the trick. And whilst we do need to think about domestic industries – as Asthana has noted – we also need to support industries abroad. How, for example, can we seek to support advancement of green industries in countries with whom we trade, like green steel in India, providing both market access and investment? Andy Burnham has already noted that he considers climate change to be a national security issue. Let’s deeply embed this in our trade, aid and defence policy too and name it as such.
Solidarity not Aid
And secondly, I would add a solidarity test. If that sounds wooly, it’s not. It’s a key principle of British values, including our value to respect others and to build tolerance. Aligning with the BFPG survey, it would mean closer alignment with our European allies, of course, but it could also mean supporting civil society freedoms in countries where human rights are at risk; and moving away from more formal alliances with countries who threaten those rights, like the US. Solidarity also keeps our support for embattled countries like Ukraine; and aligned with the population of Gaza or the Palestinian population in the West Bank, facing the illegal occupation from Israel. It’s a key principle in upholding International Law, another core British value.
One of the key pillars of foreign policy is the Aid budget, which will be cut to a paltry 0.3% expenditure of GNI in the next few years. The government are no doubt gambling on the fact that the British public doesn’t care, in spite of the last breath of campaigners who want it to stay on the agenda. Only 19% of Britons support returning to 0.7%, a long-ago OECD target for ODA, according to the BFPG data.
Controversially, for someone who has worked in the Aid sector, I don’t advocate for a return to 0.7%. (The Green Party, meanwhile, actually has a policy of raising Aid to 1%, a substantial jump from where we’re likely to be, by the time of the next general election.). Few people realise that 50% of the aid budget was spent in-country on refugees; whilst much of the remainder of it was mired in neo-colonial “do as we say” behaviour that in reality only benefitted a few big kleptocracies and big companies, or propped up the white saviourism as led by many of our own British International NGOs.
Other measures, like debt relief - and indeed trade - would do far more to support the world’s poorest than aid. ODI Global, for one, has advocated for more effort to be placed on domestic resource mobilisation, like taxation, and cutting illicit finance flows.
The more ambitious proposals than the worn out Aid argument – and rooted in the principle of solidarity – are those put forward by the Global Public Investment (GPI) community who aim to replace aid with a system in which everyone pays in, but everyone can benefit too. GPI sees countries addressing shared global challenges together (from pandemics to climate change), rather than the old one-directional flow of money from rich countries to poor ones, moving towards a genuinely democratically governed finance pool. Of course the richer countries will ultimately pay more, but it ends the decades-old system of the neo-colonial aid package. This is now supported by 30 countries in the global majority. Can the UK be the first G7 to get on Board?
Will it raise us to 0.7% of GNI or 1%. That becomes secondary. But will it make us safer? Yes. Because solidarity also builds resilience and trust.
Andy Burnham wrote in the Times a couple of weeks ago: “Keeping people safe is the first responsibility of any government and increasing our national security, in every sense, will be my first priority if I become prime minister. We face an increasingly dangerous world, with growing Russian aggression, conflict in the Middle East, climate and energy insecurity, and technology rapidly changing the nature of war abroad and our security at home.”
I don’t know if the Makerfield test – or indeed ‘International Manchesterism’ - will achieve this primary foreign policy aim. But I do know that embedding a ‘Green’ test and a ‘Solidarity’ test might just.