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Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 15 July 2025

Debate

United Kingdom: Soft Power

Contribution

I think my noble friend Lady Chapman has answered these points. There is part of a spending review and lots of decisions have not yet been made. We will get more detail in the next few weeks and certainly by November. However, I shall repeat what I said before on our soft power and our focus on economic development: ODA is not the only tool in our toolkit. When African leaders speak to me, and certainly those in the global South, they do not say they want aid; they say they want economic diversification, inward investment and value addition. Our City of London is one of the biggest providers of capital to African companies—it is those sorts of areas of soft power that we need to focus on. The partnership approach we are now taking is that we are listening to the continent and responding to it.

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