The criticisms were many. ‘It will only help people in London.’ ‘It’s for people buying huge houses.’ ‘It will just benefit those who already own homes.’ ‘It won’t fix the supply problem – if anything it will drive up demand and make the whole thing worse.’
I had many meetings in the Terracotta Room in No. 10 over six years, but the gathering on 11 November 2013 stands out. The room was full of the first three dozen people who had bought their homes through Help to Buy. Mostly in their twenties and thirties, they stood nervously around the fringes of the room, clutching cups of tea or coffee. Almost every story I was told that day was the same. The deposits they had been asked for were too big. Young people with rich parents could buy houses. So could wealthy foreigners. But hard-working people without the ‘bank of Mum and Dad’ could not. For all those couples, Help to Buy was a life-changer.
Six years on, there are over 210,000 people living in homes of their own thanks to the scheme. Four-fifths of them are first-time buyers. Ninety-five per cent are outside London. The average cost of their homes is well below the national average. And, crucially, half of those homes are new-builds – contributing to a 41 per cent increase in private house-building since the scheme was launched.
I am always cautious about advocating state interference in free markets, but occasionally a nudge from a long-termist government is needed if you are to help people to fulfil their dreams. And that is what politics should be about.
Sadly, politics is also about whatever nature throws at you. And as 2013 became 2014, nature threw everything it had got at Britain. Coastal storms hit East Anglia, and floods inundated Kent. Rainfall turned the Somerset Levels into lakes, and lashed Wales and the south coast. Then, in February, the cliffs at Dawlish in Devon collapsed, destroying the mainline railway track and cutting Cornwall off from the rest of the country.
I knew by now the dangers of a tardy response to disasters, so I visited several of the places affected. I hadn’t yet made it to the Somerset Levels. This low-lying manmade environment was dredged and irrigated centuries ago. But not enough had been done to protect it. Some experts genuinely thought we should let the floods run their course. I was outraged – you can’t say that about someone’s home, someone’s farm. If it’s a place where people live, then it needs to be protected.
Sadly, the Environment Agency had failed on that score. It seemed to worry more these days about newts and butterflies than homes and livelihoods. And while the number of homes and businesses that were flooded was just a tenth of that in the floods of 2007, the papers portrayed us as fiddling while Britain was submerged.
To make up for our slow start, we had to go overboard to compensate. I visited Somerset several times, and chaired a series of COBR meetings. I saw the local MP for Bridgwater and West Somerset, Ian Liddell-Grainger, on a weekly basis, and promised the people living there that we would dredge all the waterways – I’d do it myself if I had to.
Something else required quick action that winter too. The coastal route which runs close to the sea, hugging the red cliffs of Dawlish on its way to Cornwall, is rightly famous, but giant waves had swept away a section of the sea wall at this pretty Devon seaside town. In February, I walked along the line that remained, and saw the destruction: the track dangling in the wind like a rope bridge, a defining image of the storm.
I regarded this as a real test for Britain. Were we going to put on a replacement bus service for the next two years, or were we going to get on and fix the track in two months? Thanks to Network Rail’s engineers working day and night in their fluorescent orange jackets, there was indeed ‘action this day’. And by April I was on the first train back into Dawlish, alongside elated townsfolk and the ‘Orange Army’ that had saved the day.
Nature’s crises don’t always come at you like bolts of lightning. An outbreak of bovine TB had led to tens of thousands of otherwise healthy cattle being slaughtered, at huge cost to the taxpayer. The disease was carried, in part, by badgers; it was clear that the TB ‘hot spots’ contained large numbers of infected badgers (which, as well as infecting cattle, were dying horrible and protracted deaths). No government wanted to grip the problem. And while it was true that cattle movement restrictions and vaccinations would help, there wasn’t a country in the world that had successfully dealt with a similar situation that hadn’t used some form of culling.
Of course it would be unpopular. People dressed as bloodied badgers became a common sight at protests. ‘What about the badgers?’ they’d cry. Well, what about the cattle? The lives of the cattle – let alone the livelihoods of the farmers and rural communities – didn’t come into it for them. It was another example of the absolutism and illogicality of the animal-rights lobby: opposed to culling, full stop, even though far more animals would be saved than humanely killed, and it would re-establish an ecological system with healthy cattle and healthy badgers.
This was one of those absolutely thankless tasks in politics, when doing the right thing is not very pleasant and not at all popular. Culling had worked in Ireland, and by 2018 we were beginning to see mounting evidence of reduced infection rates in areas where culling had taken place in the UK, with reason to hope that we would finally get on top of the disease over the next decade.
And by 2018 we had learned something else, too. For just as the economic-growth statistics had proved wildly pessimistic (as we saw in Chapter 31), so the cost-of-living figures were wrong too. We know now that living standards actually rose more quickly in the five years after 2011 – the supposed austerity years – than in the five years after 2002, Labour’s supposed boom years.
These were also, supposedly, years when the country was led by ‘the party of the rich’. Yet during my time in office it was the lowest earners who saw the biggest percentage of weekly wage increases, followed by middle earners. Top earners saw no increase. It was, according to the IFS, the biggest compression of income inequality since the 1970s.
Even without such knowledge, I became more and more content with our answers on the cost of living. But at the same time I was becoming increasingly preoccupied with hardships overseas that we in Britain could only imagine.
35
A Distinctive Foreign Policy
I came of age during Live Aid – quite literally. That great global gig took place on the same boiling-hot July day in 1985 as my brother Alex and I held our joint eighteenth and twenty-first birthday party.
I was a massive fan of Bob Geldof’s Boomtown Rats and just about everyone else who was performing – David Bowie, Queen, Elton John, U2 – and had followed Michael Buerk’s eye-opening broadcasts from the famine in Ethiopia that had inspired Geldof to organise this sixteen-hour transatlantic concert. As the famously blunt Irishman pleaded, cajoled and swore on air – what is popularly remembered as ‘Give us your focking money,’ though he never quite put it like that – the duty of rich countries to help poor ones became part of a global consensus, and part of my political creed.
It was one of the joys of becoming prime minister that I could push this agenda, though I would have to wait until the economy started to grow before I had the authority abroad and the political space at home to do so properly.
By that point, in 2013, I also felt as though I’d found my feet on the world stage. I was thinking less about how to do things – the summits, assemblies, councils and incoming state visits – and more about what I wanted to do to shape the global agenda. Take some risks. Go to places British prime ministers hadn’t set foot for years. Confront issues we had overlooked. Forge new relationships. Break old Foreign Office habits. It was a shift from faithfully following the agenda to trying to set it. And it was this shift that I believe enabled me to carve out a distinctive foreign policy.
International development was central to that.
I never saw my support for aid as being at odds with my conservatism. Quite apart from the moral argument about alleviating
the most extreme poverty, there was clear national self-interest. We were helping to insure ourselves against the mass migration, terrorism, pandemics and environmental destruction caused by global poverty. We were also gaining ‘soft power’ by creating the trading partners and allies of the future, and by wielding our influence around the globe.
Over my lifetime, the combination of free markets, smart intervention from states, and people’s devotion to the common good had had a spectacular global impact: every single day for twenty-five years, more than 120,000 people had been lifted out of extreme poverty.
The United Nations set a target in the 1970s that each country should spend 0.7 per cent of its national income on overseas development. Britain had committed to this, but had never hit it – only Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark and the Netherlands had done so. And then at the Gleneagles G8 in 2005 these promises were reaffirmed by the world’s largest developed economies, with the UK pledging to achieve the target from 2013.
My view was simple: we shouldn’t make these promises and then break them. Britain should aspire to lead the world in aid and development. 0.7 per cent of GNI equates to less than two pence in every pound of tax paid.
I knew it wouldn’t be an easy sell. We weren’t rock stars urging fans to feed the world. We were politicians (at a time of anti-politics sentiment) asking for more money (at a time of austerity) to be spent overseas (at a time when the tide was beginning to turn on internationalism). We were also up against a right-wing press determined to reflect those public doubts and make the case against aid – not simply with individual reports rightly exposing stolen or wasted aid, but a sustained campaign against the very principle.
I never wavered. 0.7 per cent was something we could and should do, even in tough times. You couldn’t equate the austerity we faced at home with the grinding poverty suffered overseas. I knew that Britain – one of the most generous countries in the world – got that.
But aid also had to change. It could no longer just be about spending lots of money. We had to root out waste. DFID had been rightly respected for its technical expertise. But under Labour it began to resemble a giant NGO, with approaches that were often quite disconnected from the government’s other foreign-policy objectives. We needed the hardest of taskmasters to overhaul a system that too often lacked transparency, focus and flexibility, and that was Andrew Mitchell’s task when he became secretary of state at DFID in 2010.
We had spent five years in opposition planning how we would combine a growing aid budget with real reform of the aid sector. So when it came to countries that could afford to combat poverty themselves, we ended traditional aid for some (like Russia) and radically reduced it for others (like India). We delivered transparency, publishing full details of every UK aid project online. We established an independent watchdog to monitor spending. We redirected money from poorly performing agencies to the most effective ones, such as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. And we linked all this to commercial diplomacy, carving out a chunk of the aid programme to help create openings for British business, called the Prosperity Fund.
As well as pushing through these important reforms, I wanted to drive a deeper change in our approach to extreme poverty. For a long time we had been treating the symptoms – disease and hunger – and rightly so. But what about the causes, the deep, knotted roots that tethered people to penury for life?
We have grown up with the idea that ‘geography is destiny’. And it’s true that some countries are more prone to, say, earthquakes than others. But people’s fate increasingly rests on whether they live in a state that has a functioning government and institutions or not. It’s often countries with the most resources whose people are the poorest. Geography isn’t destiny; governance is.
Look at neighbouring countries with similar starting points and radically different outcomes. Why is Botswana a success story and Zimbabwe a byword for failure? Why is Colombia climbing out of conflict and neighbouring Venezuela in utter chaos? Why are the fortunes of the two Koreas so radically different? The answer is governance and leadership.
Indeed, look back to the situation in Ethiopia that galvanised us in the 1980s. Droughts and food shortages do not make starvation inevitable. Famine is politically inflicted. In 2017, for example, Ethiopia had a drought without a famine, and South Sudan had a famine without a drought.
At a moment when the Western world was losing faith in politics, reflected in the rise of ‘anti-establishment’ populist parties, the developing world was crying out for strong governance. After all, it is vital in allowing us to live peacefully and happily. If your government is corrupt, you’ll have to pay bribes. If there is limited transparency, the wealth and natural resources you should benefit from can be stolen or squandered. If there is no rule of law, you cannot be certain that contracts will be enforced, or that what you have is truly yours. If there is no accurate register of land and property ownership, you cannot borrow against your most valuable asset. If you don’t have tax-collecting authorities, you won’t have any public services. And if you’re denied free and fair elections, you’ll never be able to change anything. The rule of law, property rights, decent government, fair elections – these are the things I called the ‘golden thread’ of truly sustainable development and of real democracy.
I duly increased the proportion of the aid budget spent on countries lacking these things – what we called ‘fragile states’ – from a third to a half. But in an interconnected world, a prime minister cannot tackle any of the really big challenges – poverty, terrorism, climate change, mass migration – without collective political will and action.
That means round-the-clock diplomacy, using every forum to which you belong and every summit you attend. It means creating new institutions to drive your vision, as I did by establishing the Open Government Partnership in 2011, by which wealthy countries help fragile countries on the path to greater accountability and success. It means marshalling all of the best arguments you can, and sometimes giving your fellow leaders a good shove.
Not that it was always an appealing prospect. When Andrew Mitchell first suggested to me that I chair the UN panel on writing the new global goals for development, my first reaction was ‘absolute waste of time’.
Every country on earth is represented in that building in the middle of New York, in what is the only truly global organisation in the world. But it is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a mess of bureaucracy and frequent paralysis. You’re always happy to see it, but equally glad to leave it.
Andrew persisted. In 2000 the Millennium Development Goals had set targets for developing countries and for the direction of aid, from eradicating extreme poverty and hunger to achieving universal primary education. They were not universally met, but significant progress was made in almost all of them. As they were due to expire in 2015, it was unclear what to put in their place.
With the chance to bring clarity, practicality and British interests to the global agenda, I accepted Andrew’s challenge, and buried myself in the detail. My co-chairs were the widely respected president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose party piece was playing guitar and singing a song he had written about climate change. One of the meetings took place in Liberia, a country which demonstrated what this was all about. Ravaged by war, pillaged by despots, ignored by the world, it was 25 per cent poorer than it was forty years ago. It was so dark when I arrived at night that I asked the driver when we would reach the capital, Monrovia. ‘We’re here,’ he answered, as stray dogs wandered down the dirt tracks.
The Millennium Development Goals had focused people’s minds on tackling the most basic outrages of extreme poverty, but there was a sense that the solutions had been handed down from rich countries to poor ones, and that there was no real mention of the environment and climate change. Correcting this
was essential, as were three other clear aims I had in mind.
One: the fight against extreme poverty should be the priority. Some campaigners wanted to make tackling inequality the main focus, in part because it would apply equally to wealthy nations as well as desperately poor ones. I thought this was politically correct nonsense. Tackling inequality is an important challenge, but it is nothing compared with the moral outrage of over 750 million people living in abject poverty, without access to clean water, secure shelter or enough to eat. Lose the focus on absolute poverty and we would lose the whole moral force of the campaign for a better world.
Two: there needed to be a far greater focus on gender equality. Quite apart from being morally right, empowering women is the fastest way for an underdeveloped country to develop more rapidly. I wanted the goals to cover girls’ education, equal pay and the right for women to own and inherit property. But I also wanted them to cover the things which, sometimes due to cultural sensitivity, had been brushed under the carpet. Every year over ten million girls were forced into marriage. Nearly four million were cut through the horrific process of female genital mutilation (FGM). These things weren’t just happening in far-off countries, but in our own. It was time they were ended once and for all.
Three: that governance, corruption and the rule of law – ignored in the original goals – should be put front and centre. This was the aim to which I attached the most importance, because the others depended on it.
The final working meeting was at the UN’s headquarters, where we received the near-final draft papers. Yet there was no punch, no crunch, no sign of the simple set of measurable goals we so needed. I had an idea: why didn’t we, Britain, just write our own draft of the goals? People might be so blown away by this newfangled notion of clarity that they’d simply read the proposals, agree with them and approve them. Thankfully I had long-time Conservative development expert Richard Parr with me. We sat up late into the night and whittled and worked a long laundry list into twelve key goals, combined with a clear introduction.
For the Record Page 61