Boris Johnson faces aid rebellion by Tory MPs

Boris Johnson faces one of the biggest rebellions of his premiership on Monday as backbench Tory MPs try to force the prime minister to reverse his £4bn annual cut to Britain’s aid budget.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced in November that the UK is abandoning its pledge to provide 0.7 per cent of gross national income as international aid — citing the shock to the nation’s finances from tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some rebel Tory MPs, led by the former aid secretary Andrew Mitchell, are trying to force ministers to lift the figure back from 0.5 per cent to 0.7 per cent of GDP.

More than 30 MPs, including former prime minister Theresa May, have publicly pledged to vote in support of a Mitchell amendment to the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (Aria) bill — if it selected by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, in the Commons on Monday.

The unusual amendment would — if backed by the House of Commons — force the government to reinstate the £4bn of aid spending via Aria. That particular bill was chosen for the Mitchell amendment because there were only five spending bills in last month’s Queen’s Speech and four do not come before parliament until the winter.

While 30 rebels would not be enough to defeat the government, other sympathetic MPs have withheld their names to prevent the whips exerting last-minute pressure on them, according to colleagues.

Prime minister Boris Johnson has not been defeated in a House of Commons vote since winning the last general election in December 2019, which gave him a majority of more than 80.

If you promise something in a manifesto you should think very, very carefully about breaking that promise

However, even if he sees off the rebellion on international aid the government is expected to face repeated defeats in the House of Lords over the issue.

 “The government and every single member of parliament promised at the last election, just 18 months ago, that we would stand by the commitment to the poorest people in the world of spending 0.7 per cent of our gross national income on development and aid,” Mitchell told the FT.

“The government has broken that promise, broken that commitment and has not put it to the House of Commons . . . if you promise something in a manifesto you should think very, very carefully about breaking that promise.”

Tom Tugendhat, chair of the foreign affairs select committee, said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the rebels had enough numbers.

He told Sky News: “We need to look at the way that some of the aid is being cut in places like Syria, where we know that the war has costs thousands of lives and left millions displaced, or in Lebanon, where they are hosting a displaced population of possibly as much as a quarter . . . of their own population.”

David Davis, former Brexit secretary, said there was a moral and practical case for reinstating Britain’s aid pledge, which was in the 2019 election manifesto.

“Stepping back from that during a pandemic and at the dawn of a new era of multilateralism is an act of diplomatic self-harm, not to mention the deadly consequences for the poorest people in the most fragile nations on Earth,” he wrote in the Guardian. “Having cut our aid this year we must guarantee our return to 0.7 per cent in short order.”

But Matt Hancock, health secretary, said on Sunday that the government’s decision to cut international aid was “entirely reasonable” given the financial circumstances it was in. “We face a once-in-300-year economic interruption. The cost of that to the exchequer has been hundreds of billions of pounds,” he said.

“It is reasonable, absolutely reasonable in the circumstances when we are delivering over £10 billion of aid as a country and we’re making available this vaccine at cost and we have such a strong history in this area, it is absolutely reasonable to take the decision that the government has.”

Hancock said the “biggest gift” the UK had given to the world was by insisting that the AstraZeneca vaccine would be made available at cost.