Don't make the poor pay for war

Cutting foreign aid for defence spending is unnecessary and doesn't work anyway, writes George Pitcher

There’s a story, as old as the Judean hills, of a very rich man who wears the finest linen suits and who ignores a beggar at his fancy gates, called Lazarus. Poor Lazarus has a miserable life; even the dogs take nourishment from him by licking his sores.

Both men die and Lazarus is taken by angels into the bosom of Abraham, while the oligarch resides in hellish torment. He cries out to Abraham, begging him to send Lazarus to comfort him. But Abraham replies that Lazarus was tormented while the rich man lived it up and now their roles are reversed. And, anyway, the gulf between them is too great to bridge.

The story is told usually as one of judgment, that those who allow others to suffer will suffer so themselves. But note that Lazarus dwells in the afterlife with Abraham, the father of the Jews, rather than with an almighty God of justice. So this is as much a story of this world as the next.

And note also that Lazarus suffers at the expense of the rich man, precisely because he is rich, as it were, so there is an equation between them. It’s a zero-sum game. This is a story of how the poor pay for the rich in this life. A story, indeed, as old as the hills.

Always with us? More’s the pity…

It comes to mind again this week as our prime minister, Keir Starmer, cuts the UK’s foreign aid budget to increase defence spending in the face of Russia’s emboldened threat to Ukraine and the rest of Europe. As Dave Spart might put it, once again the world’s poor and oppressed are made to pay up for war-mongering rich countries.

Riding on the back of US defence spending

No one should doubt that western European countries need to make up for the heavily discounted ride they have taken on the back of US defence spending over many decades. It’s just that the source of the cash to do so conjures the zero-sum game of that rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.

British foreign secretary David Lammy is far from alone in having pointed out that it’s way past time to move from freezing to seizing Russian assets held by western nations. The UK froze nearly £20 billion of Russian assets in 2023 after the outbreak of the Ukraine war; the European total was more like £50 billion. By contrast, Starmer has just slashed the foreign aid budget to add a meagre £6bn in real terms to defence spending per year from 2027. As the old music-hall song has it, it’s the poor what gets the blame…

Don’t antagonise the bully’s best friend

At the time of writing, Starmer is arriving in the US and, naturally, he could tell president Donald Trump that he’s boosting UK defence spending with seized Russian assets and that Trump should follow suit (the US and its allies have some £280million in frozen Russian assets). But Starmer somehow doesn’t look like the kind of guy who would want to antagonise the bully’s new best friend in the playground.

So, as far as the UK is concerned, it’ll be the poor who pick up the bill. And not the British poor, but those in the impoverished southern hemisphere without a vote. It’s not even as if this policy of squeezing the poor dry will work. It’ll lead to further famine and conflict and consequently mass migration, which can only add to the western burden of cost.

As the old story with which I began has it, looking after only ourselves just doesn’t work out well. Especially when it’s the poorest who bear the brunt. The precedents are as old as capitalism itself; certainly as old as Marxism. More recently, we had to laugh into our gruel when chancellor George Osborne assured us that “we’re all in this together” during his austerity drive 15 years ago. If he’d meant a word of it, we’d barely be able to move now for people, like him, drawing seven-figure incomes from the City.

Easy to forget Starmer is Labour

And that’s not a party-political point. It’s worth reminding ourselves, because he makes it easy to overlook, that Starmer is a Labour politician. The scriptural observation that the poor are always with us is axiomatic when it becomes clear that the only reason most of the world is poor is because some of the world is rich.

The politician’s spin on that is that fewer people are poor because some people are rich. On this model, the rich pay their taxes so that the poor benefit from subsidised services. Until, that is, a Russian autocrat in a collapsing economy invades a neighbour and we need the money back to fight him off from invading us too.

Perhaps the careless wealthy will pay, either through those taxes, or possibly even on the day of judgment. But, like the rich man who ignored Lazarus, we will always pay for taking money from the poor in the form of a shrivelled spirit that only ever recognises costs over values.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.