Foreign aid: An open letter to David Lammy

Dear David, I trust you are well. I am writing to you about foreign aid cuts.

Red Nose Day, 2019

In response to Stacy Dooley’s visit to Uganda in 2019, you sought to redress the Red Nose Day narrative which, in your words, promoted a “white saviour” colonial attitude to Africa. You opined on the Victoria Derbyshire show: “Comic Relief is a 20-year-old formula that asks comedians to perform and sends celebrities – most often white – out to Africa, and that image evokes for lots of ethnic minorities in Britain a colonial image of a white beautiful heroine holding a black child, with no agency, no parents in sight.”

Bruised Nose Day, 2020?

I fully understood your concerns about colonialism, but were you best placed to speak for sub-Saharan Africans, or fair in your estimation of the Red Nose Day movement? Lenny Henry strongly disagreed with you. Red Nose Day suffered a Bruised Nose Day after your interjection, losing as much as £8 million in donations.

A unique Red Nose advocacy

Prior to being Lammy-ied, Red Nose Day facilitated beautifully poignant and otherwise impractical encounters between celebrities like Ed Sheeran and, for example, a West African musician: two culturally separated artists drumming out their favourite beats on rackety old driftwood logs, laughing and carrying-on, music the magnet drawing out their common brotherhood across race, ethnicity and culture.

I’m glad Ed Sheeran went, because the going is theologically significant for Christians. As Jesus came to dwell among humanity (“but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” Phil.2v7), humanity began to relate to Jesus (God) as a person.

There is something innately human about joining in community with other people. Red Nose Day understood that dynamic. TV audiences could relate to Ed Sheeran vicariously (i.e. in a representative way): if British viewers could see themselves in Ed (a national treasure and custodian of the Western dream of success), they could meet this West African musician through Ed.

The going is so important, Mr Lammy, yet you declined successive invitations to go.

Many celebrities who did go stayed in community with Africans, using their influence as friends. Through his Band Aid experiences, a movement you verbally thumped in 2019, Bono from U2 influenced Bill and Melinda Gates to invest billions of dollars into eradicating AIDS from Africa, while former US President George W. Bush awarded significant funding to help eliminate poverty.

Hard Nose Day, 2025

Considering your outspokenness against colonialism, think of my surprise when you as Foreign Secretary gave your “hard-headed decision” speech about cutting Foreign Aid to the Majority World. I refer to this as your Hard Nose Day.

Foreign Aid cuts by the United States and United Kingdom are measurable in the loss of human life:

US: 5–700,000 deaths (Centre for Global Development, 16 December 2025).

UK: circa 365,000 deaths (The Independent newspaper, 6 June 2025).

Total lives lost in 2025 = circa 1million people.

I write publicly because the world’s poor matter deeply to the heart of God.

I write because Jesus was born into a poor, non-Caucasian family and taught humanity the lesson that the poorest person (Luke 16v19-31) is of equal value to the richest billionaire. In fact, after His resurrection Jesus stayed in community with the poor, “… Whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” Matt. 25v40).

Egality was new to the history of ideas and everyone, from the British legal system to British Humanism, stole Jesus’ intellectual property and made it their own. To ignore the effects of withdrawing Foreign Aid, therefore, is to undermine the premise of Western civilisation – that everyone matters to God.

In your “hard nose day” speech, however, your conscience was piqued by China’s new opportunity to capitalise on territory gains due to UK Foreign Aid cuts. Mr Lammy, is your policy not the worst example of European colonial attrition towards Africa since Victorian times – what is called Foreign Aid Colonialism?

A very hard nose day. In fact, actions that possibly contravene the European Convention of Human Rights (Rome, 4/11/1950) – Article 3: “No-one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment (which might include the withdrawal of food from starving people) or punishment.”

Forget lampooning tired and threadbare caricatures of colonialism; in 2025 you sent a mammoth Death Star to Africa through those aid cuts, striking down every principle of Holy Scripture in relation to caring for orphans, clothing the destitute and feeding the poor.

Mr. Lammy, is this the Labour Party founded by a Christian, J. Keir Hardie?

I ask you and your government to reverse this unconscionable and amoral act.

As Jesus says: “Whatever you do for the least of these brothers of mine, you do for me.”