Judging by the pasty grey complexions on show at Portcullis House, nobody in Whitehall had seen a ray of sunlight in weeks. Except, of course, Alan Duncan, whose glowing tan tells of a man who is travelling the world as Minister for International Development. His CV glows golden as well, and reads like a first class ticket to Cabinet: St John’s PPE, Oxford Union President and Kennedy Scholar to boot. And yet, after an unsuccessful leadership bid in 2005, the sun isn’t yet shining on his political career, and he is stuck playing second fiddle to Andrew Mitchell at the Department for International Development (DFID).
Duncan may be short of power at DFID, but he is certainly not short of money. While most ministries are struggling with shrinking budgets, DFID is struggling to find ways to spend its rapidly growing allowance, which from 2013 will amount to 0.7% of British GDP. The increased funding is the result of a manifesto pledge by the Conservatives – in 2010, they attempted to try and detoxify the Tory brand after the notorious 2005 election campaign, widely criticised for straying too far to the right. But a recent study by Politics Home in association with YouGov indicates that while the policy pleases Labour and Lib Dem voters, it doesn’t satisfy Tories nearly as much. 18% of Conservative voters have a very unfavourable view of international aid, higher than for other political parties. Duncan explains the trend as an “out of date view that all aid is left-wing, not very practical and squandered.” But Duncan and his all-Tory ministerial team are working with the DFID to change this stereotype, winning plaudits the world over for the efficacy and transparency of the DFID’s programs. “We don’t give any money to African dictators, to stash away in Swiss bank accounts. We aren’t naive like that.” Winning the argument on international development (particularly against those to the right of the Conservative party) has taken on even greater priority for in recent months, as the government finds itself ever more frequently branded as ‘compassionless’ for its neglect of the poor and vulnerable.
I tried to explore the idea of compassion with Duncan by asking how much priority a government should give to its citizens. He automatically replied, “We give 99% priority to home because less than 1% of spending goes to international development. No one really who is reasonable can baulk at this level of spending going to international development.” But I wasn’t baulking at how large our aid budget is, but rather at how small. When I made my point clear, Duncan seemed rather bemused: he is so used to defending his government’s international development policies from right wing attacks, he didn’t really have an answer prepared for those who say we don’t give enough. “It doesn’t make sense for us to be too much out of line with other countries who help poorer countries.” However, he concedes that 0.7% of GDP, a figure which emerged from calculations made by development economists several decades ago, is a completely arbitrary figure.
But 0.7% of GDP will give DFID enough funding to eclipse most other departments, most notably the Foreign Office, which it will out spend by a factor of six to one by 2013. This reflects a growing belief in Whitehall that power is projected most effectively not just through military and diplomatic channels, but through economic assistance as well. British diplomats across the developing world are finding their power usurped by a new rival whose gargantuan funds provide a loud voice. When I ask Duncan whether DFID is overtaking the FCO as the primary instrument for Britain’s overseas influence, he produces a diplomatic reply. “One of the great successes of the coalition government is to have built the national Security Council structure which binds the FCO, DFID and the MOD into a coherent partnership with a single united British purpose”. But of course the objectives of the three departments are poles apart, and near impossible to reconcile. The reality is that a constant power struggle exists on the ground, which the FCO seems bound to lose.
However, one area in which these departments do have overlapping goals is in the promotion of ‘British values’, a powerful cocktail of moral absolutism and neo-colonial paternalism which jars at times with the ideals of the global south. In fact, he says, “We do not give budgetary support to any country we disapprove of for whatever reason”. Often, this interventionist stance puts Britain in the awkward position of promoting democracy with one hand, but castigating democratic decisions with the other. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in Uganda, where a bill which tried to introduce the death penalty for homosexuality was riding through parliament on the crest of a wave of public support. Britain and her allies intervened, and the bill is gone, for now. Duncan argues that Britain’s actions are not hypocritical because “you can’t look at foreign policy as a black and white moral choice, there are all sorts of grey areas where you have to balance human rights with freedoms.”
While Duncan may have a nuanced approach to diplomacy, many British celebrities certainly seem to see it in exactly the black and white moral terms which he so readily dismisses. No one more so than Bob Geldof, whose tireless campaigning to help the African poor has been heavily criticised by many in the aid industry for oversimplifying the problems at hand. Duncan, however, is clearly a fan. “I think the criticisms of the likes of Bob Geldof are trite…He makes a younger generation appreciate the importance of development.” But I hesitate to subscribe to the idea that awareness is an end in itself. Raising western awareness will often put political pressure on politicians to react, but the reductive understanding which ‘awareness’ implies will often encourage the wrong reaction.
This is certainly the case with the Kony 2012 campaign, which Duncan respects as a demonstration that “we now live in a world where people who do dreadful things are not going to get away with it.” But what exactly the Kony video has done in bringing anyone to justice is unclear. For Duncan, “proper prosecution through the ICC, will hopefully be a powerful force in making people govern their own countries properly.” But the ICC’s authority is being undermined in Africa by accusations that it engages in selective justice by only investigating atrocities in that self-same continent. Duncan shrugs off the criticism, suggesting it is just a reflection of the high number of conflicts that Africa has endured in recent decades.
Only after a barrage of policy questions on African issues does Duncan finally admit that he “doesn’t lead on Africa”. For a man who was blagging, he put up an impressive effort. It is the same sort of blagging skill which allowed him to cruise through his finals with only 4 weeks of revision. “I had originally left eight weeks to revise for finals but then the Labour government lost the vote of confidence so the campaign started…. It was going to be one week for each paper and it ended up being one week for two papers”. In the end, things worked out for Duncan at Oxford. I have the feeling the same will happen in politics.