Foreign aid and a mad dash to give away our money
IN just over three weeks’ time Philip Hammond will stand at the Commons Despatch Box and deliver the first Budget since the election. Yet whatever decisions he takes one fact underlies everything: money does not grow on trees. And since the only money any government has is derived from taxation – from you and me, in other words – that means we pay for everything.
You would think then that all government spending would be examined with a fine toothcomb to make sure it stood the test of good value for money. And in theory that is what happens: bodies such as the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee exist to do just that.
You hardly need me to tell you that while the theory says one thing, practice says something very different. Waste is endemic in public spending.
And there is no clearer example of this than foreign aid. Report after report shows how wasteful so much aid really is. We’ll come to some of the details later. But what makes it so maddening is that instead of re-examining the very idea of aid in the light of the evidence, we now have a target – set by law under David Cameron – that insists we must hand over 0.7 per cent of our GDP, come what may, every year.
No matter how wasteful aid may have been in previous years the law now demands that we dream up ways to waste even more money. And the money for that aid comes from our hard-earned taxes. No wonder eminent economist Lord Bauer described aid as the process by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries.
SO it’s vital that the Daily Express’s Stop The Foreign Aid Madness crusade succeeds – because madness is indeed the word. As a result of the 0.7 per cent target last year the Government handed over £13.3billion in aid.
There could be a time when in all conscience we could agree that it is right to have handed over £13.3billion in one year. In the face of some terrible disaster or famine we might – as a wealthy country – decide that our charitable instincts lead us