'Foolish' cuts risk progress on Aids, says ex-minister

Chris Smith issues grave warning at Independent event

- RACHEL SCHRAER GLOBAL HEALTH CORRESPONDENT

The first MP to come out as HIV positive has warned that “foolish” government cuts to foreign spending risk sending the Aids pandemic back to the days of the 1980s, when his diagnosis felt like a death sentence.

Chris Smith, a former secretary of state, made his HIV positive status public in 2005, having been the first British MP to come out as gay in the mid-1980s.

In a striking intervention, he told a gathering of campaigners, charities and journalists organised by The Independent: “The real tragedy of what’s now happening with the cuts to aid from the US, from the UK [is that poorer countries around the world] will be back to what I was facing in 1987.”

In November, the UK announced a 15 per cent cut to its contribution to the biggest international funder of HIV treatment and prevention, as part of deep cuts to overseas aid spending in a bid to shift money to defence.

“The UK government made a very foolish decision in my view,” said Lord Smith, now chancellor of the University of Cambridge. They made the wise decision that we needed to invest more in defence, but they made the very foolish decision to raid the international aid budget in order to finance that. That was a mistake.”

Lord Smith was addressing the audience of a screening of The Independent’s chief international correspondent Bel Trew’s documentary, Death Sentence, on the deadly cost of America’s cuts to HIV services at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. The event was to mark World Aids Day.

The UK has worsened Donald Trump’s decision to slash the vast majority of foreign aid funding when he took office in January.