Trade versus aid

A loud blast from my past today, with Boris Johnson announcing that the UK will be merging its Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) with the Department for International Development (DfID).  My first job after graduating university, exactly fifty years ago this summer, was in the economics department of the FCO in Whitehall. I was particularly interested in development economics, so I soon found myself working on aid-related issues.

The UK aid program at the time was run by a body called the Overseas Development Administration or ODA. It had recently lost its status as a separate ministry and become part of the FCO, but was very prickly about asserting its independence as much as possible. The FCO had an interest in using aid funds to pursue the UK's overall foreign policy interests, while the ODA stood for aid pure and simple, directed to those most in need.

The ODA even resisted pressure to "tie" UK aid to UK exports, something the FCO and the Trade Department strongly favoured. If the UK gave a country money to buy a fleet of ambulances, the FCO view was that the vehicles should be UK made. The ODA always said no to this, and at least in my day, the ODA usually prevailed*.

Over the years there have been a lot of changes, well summarized in this Wikipedia article. The ODA re-acquired full status as a Ministry, becoming the ODM, then lost its independence and was folded into the FCO.  It assumed its present identity as DfID in 1997. In general, Labour governments have tried to keep the aid agency independent, while Tories have preferred to lump it back in with the FCO, so Johnson's announcement today is in keeping with history.

It is clear that Johnson's government seeks to make the UK's aid program highly political. It appears, for example, that the government is much more inclined to direct UK aid funds to countries bordering Russia which, based on their income levels, are arguably not appropriate recipients of aid at all, rather than to genuinely poor Third World countries. Unsurprisingly, then, the announcement has been met with a chorus of dismay, not just from aid-oriented charities but also from some of Johnson's predecessors, including Tony Blair and, more surprisingly, David Cameron.

The result of this merger, set to happen in the fall, is depressingly predictable: it will be bad for aid and it will be bad for UK diplomacy.  And there's one practical consideration that could have big ramifications. In my day, attending a meeting at the ODA involved a pleasant ten-minute walk through St James's Park to their offices. Now, much of the DfID workforce is located in East Kilbride, just south of Glasgow. With Scottish nationalist sentiment on the rise again, will BoJo dare to shift some of those jobs back to London?  Stay tuned.

* I must have been reasonably diplomatic in my dealings with the ODA, because when an opportunity came up for someone to work for the Caribbean Development Bank in Barbados, paid out of the ODA budget, I got the gig. That ultimately led to me pitching up here in Canada, but that's another story.