A New Relationship with the Third World

By Andrew Brons MEP. Foreign aid is just the thing you want if you seek to polarise people. Leafy suburb public sector professionals are for it before you so much as ask, like a defining characteristic of their species, just as self-employed, white van man is against it, as though being so were an entrance ritual to his guild.

Political parties must identify their supporters and potential supporters and mould their message in the image of those from whom they seek support. Can leafy suburb public sector man and self employed white van man ever see eye to eye on this issue? My belief that they can is the premise on which this article is based.

As a party that is almost the emblem of white van man, in both senses of that phrase, our starting presumption (and perhaps our inevitable conclusion) is that we are against it.

Why should we be against it? Is there no generosity, no charity in the cylinder head of white van man?

Generosity and charity are difficult concepts. They do not mean simply giving for the benefit of others; they mean giving at one’s own expense for the benefit of others.

Politicians who insist that foreign aid must be left unshorn, when every other budget item is given a haircut are not giving at their own expense; they are giving at ours, without our express or even implied consent.

They are taking the moral element out of charity and generosity. Charity and generosity without consent or the moral element is little short of theft.

Taxation to pay for indivisible items for the common good can always be justified and could never be described as theft. Taxation for somebody else’s benefit, without the express consent of the donor can never be justified.

Governments that provide benefits for others at minimal marginal cost, however, are not exceeding their authority.

Much foreign aid is given to countries, like India, that has many hugely rich citizens as well as many very poor ones, itself provides aid to poorer countries and spends money on luxury items like nuclear weapons and even a space programme.

Even when aid is given to truly poor countries, it so often ends up in the pockets of the rich and corrupt.

Let us look at one area of aid that really is a matter of life and death: health care provision.

This is an area in which countries in the affluent North and West of the planet have been recipients of welfare at the expense of countries in the South and East.

Yes, I have got it the right way around! We have been plundering the Third World of their health care workers who were trained from resources that are few and not easily replaced.

These qualified workers — doctors as well as nurses, the brightest and the best, rare gems in some countries, are recruited to work in the health care systems of Europe and North America, to save those countries the expense of training their own people!

The President of Mali, in an address to the European Parliament in 2010 complained that a high percentage of its qualified health care staff and other graduates were recruited to work in Europe and North America.

This practice must stop; we must educate and train our own people to work in our health services.

Indeed, I believe that we must go further than that. We must help these countries to build their health systems so that nobody has to die or suffer from chronic conditions.

No, I am not talking of foreign aid — beloved by some and resented by others.

I am not talking of substantial amounts of state money, paid from our taxes, being sent to foreign climes.

We have a huge wealth of real generosity, coupled with valuable experience, especially among health care workers. We also have equipment that has been superseded by technological improvements, both health care equipment and IT equipment; and we have training programmes in which the marginal cost of an extra distance learning student would be minimal.

I believe that people freed from compulsory ‘generosity’ would more than match it with real generosity of time and of money.

Each hospital in the UK could ‘adopt’ a hospital in the Third World, provide it with resources that have been superseded in the UK hospital but that are capable of being utilised in countries with few resources.

Most important of all, the UK hospital could provide training programmes for bright school leavers in Third World countries, who would receive free distance education and training and sign up with the health services in their own countries for a life time’s commitment.

Retired practitioners might be prepared to travel to poor countries to train bright school leavers to qualify to provide health care for their populations.

Charity and generosity by individuals at their own expense, synergised by the help of government co-ordination, at minimal cost, can be generous, charitable and effective.

It is analogous to firms of lawyers that co-ordinate the pro-bono work of partners and associates in their own time.

We are right to oppose foreign aid in its present form and a failure to do so would put our core vote at risk.

However, a failure to put anything in its place would prevent forever, our reaching into the leafy suburbs inhabited by those of a liberal persuasion but who admit secretly, to themselves if to nobody else, that “we have a point.”