Foreign Aid — A Question of Priorities

By Steve Johnson. Whilst money for schools, housing, social services and soldiers is all being drastically cut back by the Lib-Con coalition, one area of Government spending remains sacrosanct.

The Government’s £9.1 billion a year spending on Foreign Aid is officially inviolate. One of the few Manifesto pledges of either Coalition Party to be honoured, and one pledged not by the beards-and-sandals wing of the LibDems but by “Dave” Cameron’s New Tories. Cuts may impoverish the poorest sections of the indigenous British people, but nothing must interrupt the flow of their taxes to sundry allegedly needy foreigners. Indeed, the VAT picked from the pockets of Britain’s poorest is to go up to keep the gravy train of Foreign Aid flowing.

Where does it all go? Pretty well everywhere, actually. 102 countries around the world get a cut of the British taxpayers’ money dished out by the Department for International Development (DFID). Including Singapore, whose impoverished starveling masses enjoy the fourth highest Gross Domestic Product per head in the World and a standard of living 46% higher than our own. Anyone visiting this vibrant island city-state will be struck by many things, such as its orderly, disciplined, patriotic people, its tidiness and prosperity, the high standard of living of its people earned by their own hard work, their vibrant communities and solid family-based society and indeed the wisdom and farsightedness of its Government over the last 40 years, in sad contrast to ours. But poverty and want are probably less evident than anywhere else on Earth. Yet the British taxpayer has forked out £8.7 million in Foreign Aid to Singapore over the last 5 years.

Other impoverished Third World hellholes to benefit from the British taxpayer’s bounty in the last 5 years include the Czech Republic, Hungary, Malta and Slovenia.  £380,000 in Foreign Aid has also been given to the starving sheikhs of Saudi Arabia. It’s so cheering to see that big-hearted Dave Cameron has pledged to ensure that these impoverished oil magnates won’t need to fear having to eat their camels for want of continuing British aid money.  Perhaps the sheikhs will remember Dave’s generosity with our money next time they meet in their OPEC oil cartel to consider another hike in petrol prices…

However, the money extracted from our pockets in tax to go to the starving children of Prague, Singapore and Riyadh is small beer in the Foreign Aid scheme of things. As it should be, when there are worse pits of poverty needing our help. Like the Peoples’ Republic of China, an economic superpower with an economy bigger than ours. The £40.2 million in Foreign Aid we gave them last year was insignificant compared with the billions China spends every year on its manned space programme, its massive military build-up, or even the £20,000 million they spent in 2008 on the Peking Olympics. But it funds vital lifesaving humanitarian efforts like the “storytelling project” to tell Chinese children about “climate change”. No doubt British children who will have to go without decent schools to fund this will be glad the money that could have bought them textbooks and new classrooms is instead being spent on telling fairy stories to Chinese children.

The biggest recipient of your Foreign Aid tax money is another notable Third World basket case, India. With one of the fastest growing and now biggest economies in the World, the Indians’ need for the £275 million of British taxpayers’ money they got last year will be obvious to even the most flinty-hearted reader. It may be small beer set against the billions India spends on its nuclear weapons programme, or a space programme shamingly bigger and better than Britain’s. But every little helps. Readers will feel a positive glow of beneficence to know that, as India’s economy has grown at several times the rate of Britain’s over the past ten years, Britain’s Government Foreign Aid to India has tripled.  Those who have been thrown on the dole because their jobs, like hundreds of thousands of others in Britain, have been offshored to Indian call centres and software houses will no doubt feel particularly proud of Labour’s generosity to India and the Tory/LibDem determination to let nothing like training unemployed Britons or finding them jobs stand in the way of the continued flow of our money to that country. Curiously the only curmudgeonly voice of dissent comes from the Indian Government.  They have said they are fed up with receiving foreign charity, and anyway have set up their own foreign aid programme now they are rich enough to have their own taxpayers’ money to waste. So it may be that Dave’s generosity with our money is curtailed at the receiving end.

In fairness, some of our Foreign Aid money goes to countries that actually are poor and needy. If, mostly, not to the poor and needy people in those countries.  The second biggest aid recipient, Ethiopia, is indeed poor and starving. As it was when St. Bob Geldof organised the Band Aid concerts for it in 1984, raising over £40 million “to feed the starving children”. Actually it has now emerged that most of that money went to buy guns and ammunition for the Tigre Peoples’ Liberation Front in its war against the then Marxists in Addis Ababa. The gullible but warm-hearted teenage girls in Britain who forked out to St.Bob may or may not have desired to effect regime change in Addis Ababa. But that’s what it seems they paid for.

26 years after St. Bob asked 40 million hungry Ethiopians whether they knew it was Christmas there are now 80 million hungry Ethiopians. Still dependent on foreign aid to continue to breed at one of the highest population growth rates in the World – as that noted neo-fascist extremist Winston S. Churchill observed of this sort of foreign aid “we feed: they breed” .  The attempts of the Ethiopian Government Band Aid’s guns put in power to conquer Lebensraum in Eritrea and Somalia having failed (at some considerable expense in military expenditure our Foreign Aid helped them afford) the Ethiopians continue to try to feed more and more people on the same amount of arid mountainous land. Much of which is turning to desert due to soil exhaustion and erosion because all the trees have been cut down for firewood and fields. It is far from obvious how throwing more British aid money at this mess helps. Although it does ensure that there will be lots more people than there would have been to die horribly when the inevitable limit on the carrying capacity of their habitat to feed them begins to bite.

In these circumstances, any aid which does not help the people at whom it is targeted limit their population through more widely available birth control, and education in how to use it and why, is likely to prove tragically self-defeating. Otherwise, as they starve in the desert they have made of their homeland, a hundred or so million horribly dying Ethiopians may not feel entirely grateful that we went without schools and roads to get them to that appalling pass.

Third in the queue with the begging bowl is Afghanistan. Whose people would no doubt happily forego our aid handouts if we also took our soldiers out of their country and stopped turning it into a war zone. No doubt the puppet Mayor of Kabul, Hamid Karzai, on the other hand, is grateful for any money he can get. And his notoriously corrupt and brutal police appreciate the Afghan village boys they spend much of their time raping being nice and well fed, as they continue to win hearts and minds from the Taliban.

The rest of our money goes on genuine Third World basket cases like Rwanda and the Congo. Although oil-rich Nigeria is not left out, being 7th in the recipient list. Whilst many of these countries do indeed have desperately poor and needy people, very little of our aid money actually penetrates the layers of official corruption as rampant as hunger in these lands to reach those who need it. In a typical example, Oxfam’s Joseph Wangaloo told the BBC in March that of aid sent to his area in Uganda “definitely very close to 70% did not reach the people who expected to benefit”.  When this was pointed out to the Government’s DFID Foreign Aid department by one of its own staff recently the official response was swift and decisive – the official concerned was sacked. Former headmaster Howard Horsley was working for DFID in Ghana, the 10th biggest recipient of British aid. “When I reported my suspicions of corruption and mismanagement I was hopeful that DFID would investigate thoroughly as I requested them to do as the most senior person present” Mr Horsley told the BBC. “Instead I was dismissed”.

Some aid recipient countries, such as the 11th on the list, the “Democratic Republic” of the Congo face the additional challenge that rival gangs of corrupt tyrants are fighting over who gets first snout at the aid trough. The “Democratic Republic”, as its name suggests to the seasoned observer of the African political scene, was a brutal and corrupt tyranny for decades after the savage civil war following independence was won by one Mobutu Sese Seko ( the latter two words of his official  Presidential monicker being an untranslatably obscene boast about his manly prowess). After this delightful statesman passed on, leaving a fortune in bank accounts in Geneva, sundry tribal warlords and bandit chiefs have been squabbling bloodily over the estate (sorry, Third World nation), in the course of which 5.4 million hapless Congolese have perished. How throwing our taxpayers’ hard-earned cash at this bloodsoaked mess helps anyone may not seem entirely clear.

No doubt the Third World despots and corrupt officials who trouser our aid money are duly grateful. As are the Swiss banks wherein they stash it. And the German limo manufacturers on whose products they spend it. Whether new Mercs and Beemers and wings on the Presidential Palace in Africa and Asia are more important than new roads, jobs and classrooms in Acton and Accrington is clearly a value judgement. One on which we and Messrs Cameron might beg to differ. It must, however, be common ground that far less of each taxpayer’s pound spent on building a school in Barking or a road in Batley ends up being spent on local officials’ limousines and local warlords’ Kalashnikovs than it would if invested in Foreign Aid in Africa or Afghanistan…

But no doubt the White working folk remaining in such areas agree with the Tories and LibDems – and their New Labour predecessors – that preserving every penny for the starving Singaporeans, sheikhs and Swiss bankers is a moral imperative that transcends any need for schools for our children, jobs for our workers, or infrastructure for our economy.   They would not be so churlish as to suggest that foreign aid is simply a process whereby money is transferred from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.