On February 25, 2025, UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, announced increased defence spending and cuts to aid. Catholic aid agency CAFOD issued a statement denouncing the decision, arguing that this will mean that “in some of the most vulnerable places on earth, more people will die and many more will lose their livelihoods.”
Now, a year later, Director of Advocacy and Communications at CAFOD, Neil Thorns, in an interview with Vatican News, has demonstrated that their statement was justified. He argued that while the government’s rationale was that in an unstable world, greater defence spending would ensure peace, in fact, in the words of Pope Paul VI, the way to work for peace in the world is to work for justice. “You are not going to create that through greater defence spending,” Thorns explained.
Rather, peace is created through investing in aid. “That is the thing that creates stability; it creates peace and harmony across societies”, he noted.
With the UK’s cuts to aid, 2.9 million fewer children in some of the poorest areas of the world will be able to attend school. Not only that, Thorns argued, but another 12 million people will be denied access to clean water and sanitation. And this creates instability. “If you create instability in a country, then you create essentially violence. That violence might mean that people leave that country, and they’re forced to leave and try to come to other countries, again, creating instability”, Thorns explains.
Read the article and click through to listen to Neil Thorns, here.