In the latest in the ‘African Arguments’ series, Tom Porteous provides a succinct and very useful overview of some of the highs and lows of Britain's Africa policies under the Labour government. Although it doesn't break new ground, the book serves as an excellent overview of the issues involved in trying to design and implement reformist policies in a continent as diverse and afflicted as Africa.

Porteous sets out to answer three main questions: why and how did Africa become a major theme in UK foreign policy under the Labour party? What were Britain's policies and strategies in Africa between 1997 and 2007, and how did they evolve? And, how effective were those policies in meeting their aims? Having worked as a BBC journalist covering Africa, as a conflict management adviser for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) (2000–3), and currently as London Director of Human Rights Watch, Porteous is uniquely well placed to provide the answers to those questions. He does so with admirable clarity while at the same time remaining sensitive to the genuine dilemmas that confronted the British government.

After a brief introduction, the book is organised into four chapters. These explore the players involved in making the UK's Africa policies, the policies themselves, the limits of Britain's leverage on the African continent, and potential future directions. Porteous argues that Africa became an important area of focus for Blair's foreign policy for a combination of reasons. Chief among them were Labour's manifesto commitment to create a new Department for International Development (DfID), Robin Cook's call for UK foreign policies to take ethical considerations more seriously, the ‘growing clout’ within the Labour party establishment of a variety of development and humanitarian NGOs like Oxfam and Christian Aid, and media and public opinion concerns that something needed to be done to alleviate Africa's appalling predicament.

After Blair's election to power in May 1997, the picture Porteous paints of Britain's Africa policy is largely one of the rise of DfID and the fall of the FCO. So much so that he suggests, in Africa at least, Britain's approach became virtually synonymous with its development policies. This was not without its problems – not least the fact that ‘DfID did not have a broad enough view of the continent. Its resources and staff were deployed only in those countries where it had a major aid programme, and it therefore had little institutional understanding of what was going on in the rest of Africa’ (p. 24). Especially in his first term, Blair's attention to Africa was sporadic but important when it came, not least in defusing the so-called ‘arms-to-Africa affair’, and securing some important arms deals. After 9/11, Blair devoted considerably more energy to fixing what he called ‘a scar on the world's conscience’. Porteous discusses this primarily through the vehicle of the Commission for Africa, which issued its report Our Common Interest in 2005.

In answer to his second question, Porteous identifies four main elements of the UK's Africa policies, each of which was exemplified in the Commission for Africa: (1) the idea of ‘enhanced partnership’ with African governments committed to good governance, conflict prevention and poverty reduction; (2) the big push for a massive increase in aid, debt relief, trade and investment as the primary means of stimulating economic development; (3) efforts to strengthen UK networking and relations with non-state actors, including celebrities, to increase UK leverage in Africa; and (4) traditional concerns about protecting and promoting the UK national interest in Africa. These were soon supplemented with growing concerns about Africa's significance for counterterrorism, energy security, commerce, migration and climate change.

In terms of their effectiveness, Porteous argues that the results of the UK's policies were decidedly mixed. On the positive side, he acknowledges that there were ‘quite impressive’ results concerning aid and debt relief. In contrast, very little genuine progress was made in terms of trade and investment. Britain's policies also encountered difficulties when some of its closest friends on the continent started behaving badly, particularly the leaders of Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia, who Blair had previously heralded as Africa's new saviours. Overall, however, Porteous's central argument is that ‘the UK government wielded rather less leverage and influence over African state and non-state actors than UK politicians and officials appeared to assume’ (pp. 102–3). Nor is the government likely to increase its leverage until it learns to generate deeper ‘knowledge of the political contexts in which it operates and more modesty about its influence and what it can achieve’ (p. 146). This is exemplified by an observation Porteous makes about Tony Blair: ‘For all his apparent enthusiasm for healing Africa he failed to grasp the central issue: “African politics”’ (p. 56).