Global Britain now speaks with one voice

The merger of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) with the Department for International Development (Dfid) is a long-overdue Whitehall reform. Far from being a distraction from the Government’s current strategy for dealing with Covid-19, this reconstruction complements it and is needed now more than ever. The Prime Minister placed the announcement within the context of delivering a “global Britain”, a concept that has greater resonance now the UK has left the EU. We will need to be more open, more outward-looking and more engaged with the world than for many years.

This is best achieved through a combination of hard power – the military – and soft power, the diplomatic, trade and aid links that need greater cohesion. The idea that two powerful departments could vie with one another for the projection of British interests overseas was always hard to justify. Indeed, what used to be called the Overseas Development Administration was part of the FCO until 1997, when Tony Blair’s government hived it off into a separate ministry. Under the Coalition, Dfid was given a guaranteed, statutory budget of 0.7 per cent of GDP, now around to £15 billion.

Most OECD countries combine their aid and foreign policy within a single department, which makes the almost unhinged opposition to this move even harder to understand. The country does not want its foreign and development policies dictated by the vast, non-governmental aid industry which has lobbied against a reform that is in the interests of this country and its taxpayers. In fact, although many people would like to see less spent on aid, the 0.7 per cent commitment remains (though with GDP falling as a result of the pandemic, the UK will be a less generous “giant cashpoint in the sky” as Mr Johnson put it).

The Prime Minister set out a cogent and perfectly reasonable case for this merger which deserved a more considered response than the knee-jerk objections from the Opposition. Labour feels proprietorial about Dfid having set it up, but the opportunity that a merger offers for the country to project its values and culture in unison is surely to be welcomed, not denounced.

Moreover, as the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, foreign policy is inextricably linked with health security, prosperity and development issues. It needs to speak with one strategic voice – and now it can.