The Fabian Society | Promising development: the future of aid in an uncertain world | The will to win | 22 September 2025

Reproduced from the Fabian Society.

The weather was better than expected. The crowd was bigger. The atmosphere warmer.

Twenty years ago, I helped to organise the 2005 Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh. A quarter of a million people turned up in solidarity with people they had not met, whose
names they did not know and whose faces they would not see. Why had they come?

Some had been part of the earlier Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt cancellation, often folk motivated by conscience and mobilised at church. Others were the same public sector professionals who had been the backbone of the anti-apartheid movement. Earlier in the year, Nelson Mandela had come out of retirement to speak in Trafalgar Square, telling the crowd: “sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great”. They had answered his call as so often before. And some of them, like me, were recent additions to the movement – in
our 20s and excited to help shape this still-young century, bending history towards a fairer, safer world.

A few days later, the G8 summit was held at Gleneagles. The representatives hammered out a landmark agreement which ensured millions more people got access to AIDS treatment and millions more children went to school. Back then, I was a young, idealistic Labour activist and a development campaigner. Now I’m a middle-aged Labour MP – and still a development campaigner. The intervening decades have only strengthened my conviction that campaigners make things possible, but politicians make things happen. Activism that shapes debates and mobilises public concern is an essential part of our democracy, but so too is the responsiveness of lawmakers: the people who can take that public call for action and turn it into life-saving and world-changing policies and budgets.

Both sides needed each other then and both sides need each other now. We must acknowledge, however, just how profoundly the world has changed since 2005. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has brought war to our continent and a generational moment for our national security. Outrages in Gaza, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are, due to the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, often the first things we see when we wake up and the last things we see before we go to sleep. And a global pandemic and escalating
climate change remind us that some problems know no borders.

One might assume, then, that there would be more public support for development than before: it has become clearer than ever that the line separating ‘over here’ from ‘over there’ is very thin indeed. The reality, however, is that advocating for international development – and in particular international aid – is very much a minority pursuit. What has gone wrong?

First, austerity and the cost-of-living crisis have made life far too hard for too many people living in Britain. To be sure, I still receive many emails from people in Midlothian who believe our obligations do not stop at the borders of either county or country, and plenty of compassionate people will continue to dig deep for the Disasters Emergency Committee, Comic Relief or Christmas Jumper Day, even when they have troubles of their own. But people increasingly tend to talk to me about issues much closer to home – the waiting list their partner is on; their stress when calculating the cost of the weekly shop; the sense that while they work harder and harder, life is still surprisingly tough. It takes a lot of energy to worry about people you haven’t met when the ones you know and love are hard up and fed up.

The government’s job, of course, is to put our shoulder to the wheel on both sets of issues. While it is 20 years since Gleneagles, it is only one year since this government was elected. We
are working around the clock to get the basics right: investing in public services, helping with the cost of living and making the right long-term decisions to ensure growth in every corner of the country.

That sits alongside our efforts to help Britain to stand tall in the world again. We have prioritised trade deals with India, the US and the EU. We convened international partners for a “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine. And we are increasing defence spending as an investment in safety and stability. Giving people security in a world that feels out of control is the first step on the road back to an aid consensus that will allow us to get volumes back up.

People in foundations, NGOs and CLPs who want to see aid increase again have work to do, too. It begins with truly, deeply wanting to win. Too many development activists seem to believe their task is scolding the public for not having a sophisticated enough under standing of seminar room jargon. And all too often, fundraising appeals can make it seem like the need is endless and nothing ever gets better, even though people have given generously year after year. Frequently, the story that reaches the public is: you are collectively guilty of the crimes of the past and your previous ‘saviourist’ efforts have made little difference. Is it any wonder the aid cuts were popular?

So what might a different narrative on aid look like? Let’s start with what everyone believes to be true: the world is dangerous and there is strength in numbers; if we can relieve extreme
suffering, we should; some of the drivers of suffering are issues no one country can fix on their own. That is the intuitive, everyday language of a new movement of solidarity and partnership, rooted in a belief that we must pull together when risks are many and easy solutions few.

Telling that story will require two main changes to how the case for aid is made. First, we have to stop seeking the magic phrase or tactic that makes all the rest redundant. I have sat in too many pitches for funding as someone claims one thing (a viral film, a concert, a ‘frame’) will deliver the return on investment we all want. After a quarter of a century trying to build development support, I am afraid I have concluded that there is only one solution: you have to do all of the things, all of the time. Yes, we need local organising. Yes, we need data-driven research. Yes, we need world-class advocacy. Yes, we need arresting journalism from people we trust – whether in ‘new’ or ‘old’ media – and yes, we need people who can infuse
popular culture with stories of hope and humanity. We need it all – and we need it sustained, at scale. There are no shortcuts.

Second, we need to stop policing the boundaries of what counts as ‘pure’ development as rigidly as we did at the turn of the millennium. Back then, we were worried that DFID, then still a newborn, would be too weak to prevent aid from being instrumentalised for purposes other than poverty reduction. Those who had lived through the Pergau Dam scandal – where UK aid was traded for an arms deal – were rightly keen to establish a clear demarcation of different tools (development aid, diplomacy and defence) serving different purposes.

The conditions we face now, however, are different, and new challenges are keeping policymakers awake. The threat of climate breakdown, a failure of the global food system, or another
pandemic require policymakers to use every tool simultaneously, including development assistance. We cannot advance an argument for aid that says it helps with the challenges that are top of the political agenda but then demand it is kept wholly separate from discussions about their resolution. Aid is not the whole answer to how we make the world safe – just as it was never the whole answer to how we could make poverty history – but it is part of a wider strategy, and we should be confident in the progressive case for promoting it as such.

Twenty years on from that sunny Edinburgh day, politicians continue to make things happen. The question for those mobilising to influence us is this: how comfortable are you with changing your approach in order to make change possible?