This final case study chapter returns to the theme of finance for development explored in Chapter 5. Alongside debt relief, overseas aid was viewed as an important instrument in raising the money necessary to finance poverty reduction. Despite sharing this common objective, however, Gordon Brown separated the management of aid and debt relief along policy lines demarcated at home. While the Chancellor embedded the issue of debt relief within New Labour's macroeconomic strategy, Brown transposed into the international realm the Treasury's ‘golden rule’ for borrowing and spending, and the manner in which government had framed the welfare state at home.

Gordon Brown's influence here was unmistakeable and these domestic principles would underpin his own proposals for a ‘global New Deal’ or ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’. The centrepiece of this development pact was the International Finance Facility (IFF). In both political and personal terms, so significant was the IFF that one biographer called it Brown's ‘single most important political priority’ aside from reaching Number 10 itself. Brown viewed it as enabling Britain to finally meet the United Nations target set in 1970 for 0.7 per cent of its GDP to be allocated to foreign aid. Although a broadly symbolic target, it remains to this day one that provides a gauge as to the significance (or lack thereof) that a government attaches to international development. Therefore, although New Labour might have claimed that overseas development was ‘not just about aid’, so emblematic was this target that if Brown and his New Labour government were genuinely committed to improving the lives of millions across the developing world – irrespective of their other endeavours in this field – they would have to make meeting this longstanding goal a clear priority for Britain and the rest of the international donor community.

The IFF would enable this target to be met by drawing upon two distinct themes that appeared in New Labour's domestic political economy. The first developed the Treasury's commitment to a credible and prudent fiscal policy, and its ‘golden rule’ of ‘borrowing to invest’.