SNP MP David Linden has urged the UK Government to abandon the “utterly retrograde step” of cutting its foreign aid budget – a move that could cost millions of people access to vaccinations and education.

The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto included a commitment to use 0.7% of the gross national income (GNI) for overseas aid.

That’s now to fall to 0.5% under plans announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who said “sticking rigidly” to the commitment would be “difficult to justify to the British people” in the context of the pandemic. Sunak told Commons the 0.7% commitment could be restored when the UK’s finances change, but it has been enshrined in law since 2015 and one Foreign Office minister, Lady Sugg, resigned over the shift, which she called “fundamentally wrong”.

Andrew Mitchell, previously a Conservative international development secretary, said the cuts could keep a million girls out of school and see up to 5.6 million fewer children vaccinated, something he said could contribute to up to 100,000 preventable deaths.

Yesterday Glasgow East MP Linden took to the floor of the House of Commons to urge Boris Johnson’s government to think again.

Linden, who branded the reduction an “utterly retrograde step”, presented a petition on the matter and quoted from an article carried by The National from Alistair Dutton, director of the charity Sciaf, which emphasised the UK’s “moral duty” and legal obligation to “help those in need”.

The Glasgow-based organisation provides humanitarian aid to impoverished and disenfranchised communities dealing with illness, injury, hunger, violence and more.

READ MORE: David Pratt: UK Government cut will affect real people in desperate situations

Dutton wrote: “The suggestion that the UK cannot afford to maintain its aid budget is obviously false. We have just chosen to increase our defence spending by £16.5 billion. Meanwhile, in line with the 0.7% commitment, the aid budget was reduced by £4bn as economists forecast c.30% fall in GNI this year. Now the aid budget is to be cut by another £4bn.

“How can such an abject failure of global solidarity be reconciled with the Government’s constant assertion of Global Britain?”

He went on: “Don’t be taken in by the Chancellor’s claim that we can’t justify the aid budget. We can. But we’re choosing not to.

“Meanwhile, our responsibilities and duties don’t stop because they’re inconvenient. As poverty, the pandemic and changing climates continue to tear through unimaginably poor communities throughout the world, this is not the time to let the world’s poorest people suffer alone.”

Linden said the drop would mean the breaking of “another promise by the Conservative Party”, stating: “The cut to the aid budget flies in the face of the UK Government’s promise of a ‘global Britain’.”

He went on: “This cut is another example of the UK Government’s path to becoming insular and isolated on the world stage.”

The shift comes after Johnson scrapped the dedicated Department for International Development, which has a large workforce in East Kilbride. Its responsibilities and employees have now been absorbed into the Foreign Office.

Calling on urgent action to “avoid the devastating predicted impact” of the reduction in the aid budget, Linden told the House of Commons: “Although the Covid-19 pandemic has caused nations around the world to face tough challenges both from a public health point of view and a financial point of view, it is absolutely vital that the pandemic does not lead the UK Government to forget the promises made to the public and its commitment to overseas aid.”