David's back. What does this mean for global priorities?
(1/3) Doing Westminster Better in November 2023
This is Doing Westminster Better, my newsletter about what UK politics means for global priorities. Today, we’re looking at whether the new Foreign Secretary will boost foreign aid, and his links to China.
Stay tuned! Tomorrow, I’ll publish a piece about whether the new Defra leadership will do any better by the animals. The day after, I’ll publish a piece about whether the Prime Minister’s bite is living up to his bite after hosting the world’s first AI Safety Summit.
He’s back
I think it’s fair to say everybody was pretty shocked when David Cameron stepped out of that black car to re-enter Downing Street. It was as if David Tennant was Doctor Who all over again; it was a reshuffle as unexpected as an OpenAI leadership transition.
Now that some dust has settled, what can we say about Cameron’s expected impact on global priorities?
Cameron to push for more foreign aid
The Guardian report that Cameron will write that we have a “moral mission” to “unlock hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade” for foreign aid. This is a crucial change in tone after, under Boris Johnson and Sunak, the Tories have cut our foreign aid budget and redirected some to helping refugees in the UK.
Cameron was the Prime Minister when the UK first met its target to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income on foreign aid, and in 2015 his government enshrined the commitment into law. Post-premiership, he’s spoken out about foreign aid despite being generally quieter than other Tory ex-PMs. When PM Johnson merged the Department for International Development (DFID) into the Foreign Office in 2020, Cameron said it would mean “less respect for the UK overseas”. And six months later, when Johnson’s Chancellor, Sunak, shaved down the 0.7% commitment, hurting the world’s poorest, here’s what Cameron had to say:
Abandoning the 0.7% target for aid would be a moral, strategic and political mistake. Moral, because we should be keeping our promises to the world’s poorest. A strategic error, because we would be signalling retreat from one of the UK’s vital acts of global leadership. And a political mistake because the UK is about to chair the G7 and important climate change negotiations. I hope the PM will stick to his clear manifesto promise, maintain UK leadership and save lives. (source)
But Cameron hasn’t been an unwavering supporter of foreign aid, and it’s still not inevitable that his contribution will amount to more than gesture politics. In just April this year, Cameron said he had become a “realist” about cutting foreign aid.
Cameron’s “moral mission” text will serve as a foreword to a new international development white paper by Andrew Mitchell, the Foreign Office’s Minister for Development and Africa. Cameron and Mitchell have been tight allies for years (one article calls Mitchell a member of “a Cameron supporters club”) and they’re set to work closely in Parliament (Mitchell may stand in for Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton in the House of Commons). Mitchell was Cameron’s original choice for International Development Secretary from their Shadow Cabinet days until a 2012 reshuffle1 and last year, after the foreign aid cut and after DFID’s absorption into the Foreign Office, Sunak put Mitchell back at the helm of the much-diminished international development portfolio. Mitchell seems to genuinely care about international development: when Johnson dropped the 0.7% target, Mitchell led a backbench rebellion (including Cameron’s fellow Tory ex-PM Theresa May), and just last month, he said “I am completely across the arguments for a big replenishment and we expect to do our part.” If anybody can drag the Tories back to 0.7%, it might be Andrew Mitchell.
What’s Cameron and Mitchell’s strategy here? Clearly, they’re picking voice over exit; they’re sticking around to speak their minds in the room where it happens. They’re not going to win the battle of hearts and minds among the general public, just 14% of whom believe we should return to the 0.7% pledge, and they’re not going to persuade many Tory MPs to embrace multilateralism while, for example, Sunak continues to paint the European Convention on Human Rights as antagonistic towards British values.2 Instead, they’re setting a roadmap for wonks and true believers – whether Tories or Labour in, to quote Mitchell, “the highly unlikely3 event” that the Conservatives lose the next general election – to push for increased foreign aid through 2030. That roadmap involves drawing on “leveraging extra state and private funds for aid”, which is probably an attractive framing to Sunak as he and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt weigh tax cuts for the Autumn Budget (FT; paywalled). It also involves moving “away from the old donor-recipient model towards partnerships of mutual respect”; Cameron writes, “Development cannot be a closed shop, where we try to help other countries and communities without heeding their vision for the future”. This seems like a response to important social justice criticisms of Western international development policy, which charge that institutions like the World Bank or IMF wield too much influence over sovereign countries’ free choice in economic growth strategy.
What I’d really like to know is whether Cameron and Mitchell have talked recently to Rory Stewart, who was DFID Minister in the May Cabinet and now advises GiveDirectly. Stewart wrote on X (Twitter):
“A good decision by @RishiSunak - and a brave one. But don’t underestimate the support for Braverman’s populist positions. The PM now has to win a tough fight within his own party”
I’m especially interested in whether, alongside increases to aid quantity, the government will pursue increases in aid quality. That might mean listening to advice from effectiveness-oriented experts, as USAID is doing; and promoting approaches like direct cash transfers, which are proven to be highly cost-effective.
What’s Cameron to China, and China to Cameron?
Our engagement with China matters. We have a responsibility to condemn their crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, and their genocide of Uyghur Muslims. At the same time, we have an obligation to cooperate with them on existential risks, including AI safety and nuclear weapons.4 Understanding Foreign Secretary Cameron’s orientation to China is critical – and commentators speculate China could prove a unique vulnerability for him.
Broadly, there’s two reasons people think Cameron could be weak on China.
Reason #1: His premiership promised a new “golden age” of Sino-British relations, and that looks naively conciliatory today.
The Conservatives today take a much tougher stance towards China than they did under Cameron. But it’s not so much that the Notting Hill set directly lost the argument on China as it is that the conversation moved on. China scepticism today is bipartisan and trans-Atlantic; counterfactual history is hard, but I can imagine Cameron remaining PM and hardening his China stance. Ultimately, if Cameron’s willing to be a “realist” (read: play ball with Sunak) on foreign aid, then why not expect him to update towards Sunak’s stance on China?
The Tory right’s answer would be that Sunak is already insufficiently hawkish towards China. Liz Truss has been criticising Sunak for, among other offences, inviting China to the AI Safety Summit. (For what it’s worth, this move was widely celebrated by the AI safety community: you can’t achieve global action without global engagement). Now, IDS has said Cameron’s appointment “suggests that Sunak is intent on doing business with China at all costs” (Times; paywalled).
Reason #2: Cameron has conflicts of interest due to efforts to launch a $1 billion UK–China Fund
This story is, unsurprisingly, really complicated and much coverage has been, in my estimation, reductive or unhelpful. I recommend this FT piece (paywalled).
What do we know? In 2017 and 2018, shortly after his premiership, Cameron was trying to set up a $1 billion private equity fund with investment from Britain and China. In his role as the fund’s Vice President, Cameron exploited his political connections (such as meeting Chancellor Phillip Hammond in 2017). In particular, he took meetings with Chinese officials – vice-premier Ma Kai (in September 2017), president Xi Jinping (in January 2018) and vice-premier Li Keqiang (in October 2018) – to try to secure hundreds of millions from the Chinese state’s largest sovereign fund, the Chinese Investment Corporation (CIC).
Importantly, the project didn’t pan out.
Nevertheless, Cameron looks exposed to potential conflicts of interest. Anneliese Dodds, chair of the Labour Party, says: “The British public will, quite rightly, want to know that the foreign secretary is solely dedicated to representing Britain on the world stage, not promoting his own private interests.” For some context, Cameron was at the centre of Britain's biggest recent lobbying scandal (he connected Greensill Capital with ministers including Chancellor Sunak and Health Secretary Matt Hancock during the pandemic). To some degree, he’s re-entering politics as Mr Conflicts of Interest.
But we might have special reasons to be concerned about Cameron’s entanglement with the CIC, beyond ordinary conflicts of interest concerns. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament have said that “China invests in political influence” and that “it is possible that Daid Cameron’s role as Vice President of a £1bn China–UK investment fund [... was] in some part engineered by the Chinese state to lend credibility to Chinese investment, as well as to the broader China brand.”5 In particular, CIC boss Tu Guangshao and other Chinese officials wanted to Cameron-wash the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure programme which is widely viewed with scepticism by Western leaders, who see it as a strategy for the world’s most powerful non-democracy to foster soft power in developing economies.6
In 2018, Cameron met with Guangshao and publicly praised the Initiative. Last September, The Guardian report, Cameron spoke at two events in the UAE to promote Colombo Port City, a China-backed infrastructure project in Sri Lanka which had once been touted as a “hub” of the Belt and Road Initiative.
So will this affect Cameron’s China approach?
Let’s be cautious of reflexively criticising the Belt and Road Initiative. Western powers shouldn’t get to unilaterally shape the architecture of international development, and infrastructure projects can really stimulate economic growth and bolster quality of life. Let’s be especially cautious of conspiratorial criticism, which casts China as puppeteering the developing world as if those countries lack agency and as if all Western development aid is only charitable, never strategic.
But Cameron’s entanglements are really important: he now directs British international development policy, and financial involvement in Chinese development aid threatens to undermine his authority.
A Cameron spokesperson released this statement:
“David Cameron has consistently made clear at home and abroad that China faces a crucial choice, and encouraged the leadership to embrace the benefits of a globalised, interconnected, rules-based world. [He will] engage with Beijing on global challenges such as climate change and AI, but where there are attempts by the Chinese Communist party to coerce or create dependencies, he will push back against them.” (source)
For the most part, this is a non-statement and doesn’t assuage my concerns. But I will flag that the Cameron spokesperson’s language here implicitly recognises AI safety as a threat on the same scale as climate change. In at least some respects, then, Foreign Secretary Cameron appreciates that he’s re-entering a radically changed global landscape.
Mitchell was appointed Chief Whip. Within a month or so, he resigned over Plebgate, having made classist comments to a police officer: “Best you learn your fucking place. [...] You’re fucking plebs.”
Indeed, Cameron and Mitchell’s proposals are frustrating the anti-internationalist Tory right, who are already frothing after the firing of Suella Braverman.
;)
For good news on China’s existential risk efforts, see this South China Morning Post exclusive on Joe Biden and Xi Jinping agreeing to ban using AI on autonomous weapons including nuclear warheads. For bad news, see this Politico piece on Biden more firmly embracing nuclear deterrence as Jinping embarks on a secret nuclear buildup.
There are, of course, other important reasons to care about China, like the staggering number of farmed animals they kill. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine this is tractable through British foreign policy.
Hence headlines like “Is Lord Cameron a ‘useful idiot’ for the CCP?” from the Conservative-sympathetic Spectator. Oddly, Cameron also has a story about the KGB attempting to recruit him when he was travelling in the Soviet Union between Eton and Oxford.
We should be attentive to how similar this criticism is to the aforementioned critique of Western development aid, that it curtails freedom in developing countries by indebting them to a global power. But you can criticise the US for imposing its values on the world, while recognising that some values – like democracy – should be universal, and worrying that China isn’t in a position to provide global moral leadership.