Catriona Stewart: Cutting overseas aid shows the moral bankruptcy of Johnson and Patel

When asked if she would condemn such booing, she said it was the right of football supporters to boo the anti-racism gesture if they like. It’s their party and they can boo if they choose.

Both Mr Johnson and Ms Patel might diverge on the booing front but they join forces in having both condemned gesture politics.

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Footballers taking the knee before games is, they have both said, nothing but gesture politics and they’re simply not in to it.

Ain’t no stunning hypocrisy like a politician’s stunning hypocrisy. The Conservative government is fuelled by gesture – from the small things, Union flags limply dangling behind Tory talking heads on TV, to its little Britain, anti-global agenda setting.

Despite an attempt at a rebellion, led by a credible coalition of a former PM, former cabinet ministers and former ministers, Rishi Sunak’s UK overseas aid cut, from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income, passed on Wednesday by 35 votes.

There is a clause that allows for the amount to be raised once “conditions are right” to do so but that could take four to five years, essentially kicking the issue down the road to be dealt with by a future government.

This cut amounts to around £4 billion, in terms of numbers. In practical terms, according to NGOs and charities, it means some 11,000 girls in rural Pakistan may no longer be able to attend school.

Unicef, the UN’s children’s fund, will see a drop in funding of 60% while the UN’s family planning agency, UNFPA, will lose £130 million, an 85% cut.

And this is just a tiny taster of what has been lost and who will be affected.

It also represents a u-turn from the government. The 2019 Conservative manifesto made a commitment to continue overseas aid at 0.7%. As Theresa May, suddenly the voice of concern and reason, pointed out in the Commons, the government had said it would “proudly” maintain the 0.7% aid level.

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It now says, in light of unprecedented pandemic borrowing, the UK must prioritise its own. Yet, while it is failing to support children overseas, it similarly failed to serve the needs of British children too.

Footballer Marcus Rashford, one of those who took the knee, diverges from the Prime Minister on racism and also on public spending. Last year, the 23-year-old striker raised millions of pounds to feed children when the government cut spending for holiday hunger programmes to outrage from the electorate.

That decision from the Tories was a clunking misstep in perception of public tolerance.

The government is not fretting over electoral mistakes here, however. It has pursued a relentless campaign of decisions designed to shore up some imaginary notion of a robustly sovereign Britain, proudly united behind flag and new £200 million royal yacht.

Instead, it looks insular and insecure, a plutocratic government imagining it is one with the people.

The punishing new nationality and borders bill is designed to be punitive towards refugees and asylum seekers. Among its many cruelties, it redefines the offence of facilitating an asylum seeker’s journey to the UK, which could punish families who seek to bring relatives to join them here, or target those who steer boats across the English Channel.

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If a government is looking askance at global displacement and seeking preventative measures, then foreign aid is one such step.

Priti Patel and her mob believe that tough deterrent measures are a vote winner and is drafting legislation that, the government believes, will appease an electorate with an appetite to pull up the draw bridge and help itself first.

Will this hostile narrative continue to play in the way the Tory party wishes it to?

The outrage caused by the racism shown to England’s black football players, and to the government’s failure to support those players’ anti-racism campaigning, shows Johnson and Patel missed the mood. They failed to take the moral route and instead took the route of populist gesture, preferring in every case to exploit the vulnerable to play to a cheaply immoral support base.

Let’s also remember the leak that Dido Harding wanted to end NHS England’s reliance on doctors and nurses born overseas and the resulting stooshie.

Dismissing anti-racist action, undermining foreign-born medical staff, developing hostile immigration policies, and now cutting foreign aid – all against a Brexit backdrop.

What of Global Britain now but an empty notion of embarrassingly insular self-importance.

Will we stand for it?

The pandemic has had a dizzying effect on our sense of our place in the world. At once, our boundaries shrunk so that all our focus was on the here and now – overseas travel all but stopped and all concentration focused on how to protect ourselves and our NHS from the virus.

At the same time, it has concentrated our feeling of connection. That grinding halt to travel generated a narrative about people's desperation for a summer holiday with far less focus on how tough it is for those of us with loved ones overseas, not knowing when we might see them again.

For the great many people with family and friends abroad, it has heightened the need to reach outwards and remain part of the global community.

To facilitate this, we know the vaccine programme must be a worldwide effort. Against humanitarian discussions, while they may not be entirely altruistic, about how to ensure all are safe from Covid-19, the current government’s persistent insularity is particularly jarring.

Boris Johnson fancies himself a man of action – he must end Little Britain’s anti-global intolerance and stop this string of hostile gestures before so much more damage is done.

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