David Miliband: Trump to blame for Ebola outbreak that has killed thousands

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Former foreign secretary David Miliband has denounced “bloody frustrating” cuts in overseas aid by the Labour government.

Claims that such aid spending is a waste of money makes him want to “scratch my fingernails on the chalk board” in exasperation, he says.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Mr Miliband, who runs the US based International Rescue Committee aid organisation, also fiercely criticises cuts in aid by Donald Trump.

In a wide ranging discussion with The Independent Editor-in-Chief Geordie Greig, he said the cuts are to blame for the outbreak of the deadly Ebola disease in Africa which has claimed more than 3,000 lives since May.

Mr Miliband, a cabinet minister in the administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, refused to say how he feels about younger brother Ed, who beat him in the 2010 Labour leadership contest, being appointed to his old job as foreign secretary by prime minister Andy Burnham.

But he praised Mr Burnham’s “open, intelligent, can-do mentality” to governing, commenting enigmatically: “He knows you have to pedal the bicycle if you want it to go forward.”

As president and chief executive of the IRC, Mr Miliband has seen its annual budget slashed from $1.5 billion to $1 billion by the Trump regime.

He is also dismayed by successive cuts in international development by British governments, including Sir Keir Starmer’s controversial decision to reduce it from 0.5 per cent of national income to 0.3 per cent, adding to cuts by the previous Tory government.

“It is short-sighted, it's not good for Britain, and it's the wrong decision. I'm absolutely clear about that,” he said.

The way to justify such spending is not to talk in abstract terms about percentages, he maintains, but about its life and death impact.

“What we've got to say is 45 million children around the world are acutely malnourished. Britain should be part of a drive to solve that. Fourteen million women have a life-threatening episode in childbirth, and about 2 million of them die of bleeding. That is a solvable problem.

“All I'm saying is a fraction of the total spend can make a life-changing difference for people.

“It makes me scratch my fingernails on the chalkboard that the aid budget is being cut at a time when we have more evidence of what works in delivering effective aid than ever before.

“There's no excuse that, ‘oh, we don't know how to spend the money’. We've got randomised controlled trials (showing) how the money makes a difference. So it's bloody frustrating.”

The Ebola outbreak in DR Congo is a perfect example of how Trump’s cuts have backfired, Mr Milband says.

After the US government cut the IRC’s funding in the DR Congo - “surprise, surprise Ebola comes back because there's no proper washing facilities, no proper latrines and no proper infection prevention and control.”

During the interview Mr Miliband is determined to avoid reopening the notorious Labour blood feud with his brother Ed resulting from the 2010 Labour leadership battle.

“I’m not getting into that. The PM made his decisions, it’s up to him,” he said.

But he goes on to blithely discount the notion that Ed might reverse Labour cuts in the UK aid budget. Even if he wanted to he couldn’t, because chancellor John Healey would decide – not his brother, he said.

“Sadly, as I know from my previous service, the foreign secretary doesn't control the aid budget, the chancellor of the exchequer controls the size of it.

“The truth is the Treasury is king and queen and ace of how much is spent on different things. All the Foreign Secretary can do is to decide where to spend it.”

Mr Miliband is similarly reluctant to say if reports were true that he explored the possibility of cabinet comeback when Mr Burnham replaced Mr Starmer.

He chooses his words carefully but did not deny it outright: “In the end the choices about who goes into government are for the PM. I’m not the right person to ask about that because it was never up to me what jobs to give out.”

Mr Burnham, with whom he entered Parliament as a novice MP in 2001, has made a good start in Number 10, Mr Miliband said.

“Andy has created a can-do mentality. He is open, he's intelligent. Also he’s got this thing of ‘don't take no for an answer’. When he says, ‘I'm gonna stamp out homelessness in the country,’ and someone says, ‘Yeah, but it turned out to be more difficult in Manchester than you expected,’ he says, ‘Yeah, too damn right, but because it's more difficult, I don't give up.’"

Mr Burnham has an “urgent and purposeful positivity,” he said.

Mr Miliband expanded on this using an eccentric metaphor he attributes to 1960s and 1970s Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.

“Andy knows that you have to pedal the bicycle if you want it to go forward. It's an old Harold Wilson thing. If you don't pedal, the bike falls over. He wants to pedal it with energy and with focus.”

In fact, although Wilson did use the analogy to describe leading the Labour Party, it was first coined by Labour’s Nye Bevan, health minister when the NHS was founded in the 1940s.