Daily Mail

The great aid scandal

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SHORTLY after taking over as Internatio­nal Developmen­t Secretary last year, Priti Patel promised a complete overhaul of the way aid money was doled out. Far too much was wasted or stolen, she said, cheating not only the taxpayer but also those in genuine need in the poorest parts of the world.

Well, she’s certainly changed her tune. In an interview with The Guardian, she now says her department is running a ‘lean and mean ship’ and that newspaper stories exposing waste and incompeten­ce are never ‘100 per cent accurate’.

Yet strangely, when asked to point out inaccuraci­es in any of seven such stories published by the Mail in the past year – £ 1billion given away in cash, millions for the elderly in China, £5million to promote a girl band in Ethiopia – she couldn’t.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest scandal of all – that we must lavish 0.7 per cent of national income (£13billion a year and rising) – on foreign aid when our own elderly care system is in crisis. Does Miss Patel dispute that mystifying fact? BREXIT talks finally began yesterday with a welcome pledge from chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier that he would work ‘with the UK and never against the UK’ – followed swiftly by Britain’s first concession. Brexit Secretary David Davis had wanted to open trade talks on day one, but has agreed to discuss the so- called divorce settlement first. Very well – all we have to do now is calculate our massive contributi­on to EU projects and institutio­ns over the past four decades and work out how much Brussels owes

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