The local case for the international cause

All politics is local. A phrase attributed to US Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas O’Neill, and one that any politician forgets at their peril.

As any psychologist will tell you, we think short-term and make decisions on the basis of what we know. In politics, decisions get made by those who have successfully persuaded someone to vote for them. Often, that means ultra-local beats long-term. A wise MP – or rather, an MP who wants to be re-elected – plays local. Even with long-term departmental funding agendas, at best a Government has to plan to deliver within a five-year electoral cycle. Yet we’re on our third Government in three years.

And that doesn’t serve Britain.

This is not an argument for a technocracy, but as democrats we have to be aware of our weaknesses, and a significant weakness is that it is very easy to fight elections on local wins and quick results that don’t pay back over the long term. Economic development operates on a greater scale than one-town constituencies or three-town councils and takes longer than five years. Current growth projections for Britain are poor; and Poland is on track to be wealthier than Britain by just 2030. Like a frog in slowly boiling water, it doesn’t seem that we’ve realised this. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, stagnating in low productivity, and under threat of increasing expansion from China, only a few things stand between us and a slow and steady decline.

I live in a town called Leamington. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Leamington was in decline: a formerly prosperous spa town but one sliding into decay, paint peeling and cracks appearing in the walls of the Regency houses. Then manufacturing grew and later in the twentieth century two things happened: Warwick university opened, and the growth of the gaming sector boomed.

Now, if you go for a drink in the cocktail bars on a Friday, often the people you’ll meet are international – students, or people in their twenties and early thirties here to work in tech or manufacturing. And that transformed the town, magnitudes of times more so than injections of levelling up funding would have done.

But that relies on Britain having a place on the international stage. Our status as a world-leader in areas like services and tech relies on our status as an innovation cluster that draws the best and the brightest worldwide, and that relies on international policy: the soft power of English, the status that comes from international markets for British goods. And looking ahead, that means building the relationships through development with the countries that are going to be superpowers and have the purchasing power in fifty years’ time. Think about the impact of population growth in Africa, which is expected to double by 2050, while its working age population is expected to grow by 450 million people by 2035. Because if we don’t, China will.

We represent investment in aid as an either/or – the idea that either we spend money abroad or spend money in the UK. But that’s a false equivocation, assuming every pound spent has an equal return on investment. That’s true of local development – £500 worth of hanging baskets on the Parade in Leamington is worth less to the town than a timely visa process for a Sri Lankan developer coming to work here – and it’s also true of alleviating poverty.

Where the UK Government makes change through international development, it is more often the case that coldly and simply lives are saved or transformed by economic development: a bathroom built at a school that allows girls to attend secondary education. Any psychologist will also tell you that while we think short-term and make decisions on the basis of what we know, often that’s the wrong thing long-term. A town like Leamington was saved not by pouring money into the high street, but by companies coming to the town and bringing international talent there. The best track to alleviating rural poverty can sometimes be a thriving overseas export market for British beef. To best serve local agendas, to maintain our status as GREAT Britain, we can’t afford to sit out internationally. Politicians forget this at our peril.