Cutting aid to fund defence won’t help us build a better world

There’s a story, as old as the Judean hills, of a very rich man who wears the finest linen suits but who ignores a beggar called Lazarus at his fancy gates. Poor Lazarus has a miserable life; “even the dogs came and licked his sores” (Luke 16:19-31).

Both men die and Lazarus is taken by angels into the bosom of Abraham, while the oligarch resides in hellish torment. He cries out to Abraham, begging him to send Lazarus to comfort him. But Abraham replies that Lazarus was tormented while the rich man lived it up, and now their roles are reversed. And, anyway, the gulf between them is too great to bridge.

The only reason most of the world is poor is because some of the world is rich

The story is told usually as one of judgment, that those who allow others to suffer will suffer so themselves. But note that Lazarus suffers at the expense of the rich man, precisely because he is rich, as it were. There is an equation between them. It’s a zero-sum game. This is also a story of how the poor pay for the rich in this life. 

Restoring the balance

The story comes to mind again this week as our prime minister, Keir Starmer, cuts the UK’s foreign aid budget to increase defence spending in the face of Russia’s emboldened threat to Ukraine and the rest of Europe. No one should doubt that Western European countries need to make up for the heavily discounted ride they have taken on the back of US defence spending over many decades. It’s just that the source of the cash to do so conjures the zero-sum game of that rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.

British foreign secretary David Lammy is far from alone in having pointed out that it’s way past time to move from freezing to seizing Russian assets held in Western nations. The UK froze nearly £20 billion of Russian assets in 2023 after the outbreak of the Ukraine war; the European total was more like £50 billion. By contrast, Starmer has just slashed the foreign aid budget to add a meagre £6 billion to defence per year from 2027.

At the time of writing, Starmer is arriving in the US and, naturally, he could tell President Donald Trump that he’s boosting UK defence spending with seized Russian assets and that Trump should follow suit (the US and its allies have some £280million in frozen Russian assets). But Starmer doesn’t look like the kind of guy who would want to antagonise the bully’s new best friend in the playground.

The poorest pay

So, as far as the UK is concerned, it’ll be the poor who pick up the bill. And not the British poor, but those in the impoverished southern hemisphere without a vote. It’s not even as if this policy will work. It will lead to further famine and conflict - and consequently mass migration - which can only add to the Western burden of cost.

As the biblical story with which I began has it, looking after only ourselves just doesn’t work out well. Especially when it’s the poorest who bear the brunt. The precedents are as old as capitalism itself, certainly as old as Marxism. We had to laugh into our gruel when then-chancellor George Osborne assured us that “we’re all in this together” during his austerity drive 15 years ago. If he’d meant a word of it, we’d barely be able to move now for people, like him, drawing seven-figure incomes from the City.

Looking after only ourselves just doesn’t work out well

And that’s not a party-political point. It’s worth reminding ourselves - because he makes it easy to overlook - that Starmer is a Labour politician. The scriptural observation that the poor are always with us is axiomatic when it becomes clear that the only reason most of the world is poor is because some of the world is rich.

The politician’s spin on that is fewer people are poor because some people are rich. On this model, the rich pay their taxes so that the poor benefit from subsidised services. Until, that is, a Russian autocrat in a collapsing economy invades a neighbour and we need the money back to stop him from invading us, too.

Perhaps the careless wealthy will pay, either through those taxes, or possibly on the day of judgment. But, like the rich man who ignored Lazarus, we will always pay for taking money from the poor in a shrivelled spirit that only ever recognises costs over values.