Boris Johnson faces shock Commons defeat over foreign aid cuts
Boris Johnson is facing his first Commons defeat since his 2019 landslide victory after rebel Conservative MPs announced their intention to hijack government legislation and force the PM to restore Britain’s aid budget.
On Wednesday evening, Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative former chief whip, tabled a surprise amendment to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill, which is due to return to the Commons on Monday.
The legislation will set up a new “high-risk, high-reward” research agency in the UK, but because some of the funding from the new agency is likely to fall within Britain’s aid budget, the rebels believe that parliamentary rules will allow them to amend the bill to reverse the government’s aid cuts.
The government’s decision to break its manifesto pledge and cut the overseas aid budget from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of national income sparked outrage among many Conservative MPs when it was announced last year, but there was no Commons vote on the decision.
It will be up to Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, to decide whether the amendment is selected for consideration when the Bill returns to the Commons for further consideration on Monday.
Announcing the move, Mitchell said: “The cuts are now having a devastating impact on the ground and are leading to unnecessary loss of life”. He called on the government to think again and “keep its very clear pledge to British voters and uphold Britain’s promise to the rest of the world.”
Several senior Conservatives have already backed the amendment, including former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, former Brexit secretary David Davis, the former Northern Ireland secretary Karen Bradley and the former immigration minister Caroline Nokes.
In total, 16 Conservative MPs have publicly backed the amendment, which would require 45 Conservative rebels to defeat the government in a Commons vote. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, one of the rebels, Tobias Ellwood, said he was “quietly, cautiously confident that we’re going to get that number”.
The unexpected vote comes at an awkward time for the PM, who is set to chair the G7 summit in Cornwall next week to “unite leading democracies to help the world fight and then build back better from coronavirus”. The UK is the only G7 nation to cut its aid spending.
A government spokesman said: “In 2021, we will spend more than £10bn to improve global health, fight poverty and tackle climate change.”
“While the seismic impact of the pandemic has forced us to take tough but necessary decisions, the government is committed to returning to spending 0.7 per cent of GNI (Gross National Income) on aid when the fiscal situation allows.”