Among all his bold promises, Boris will never be forgiven if he doesn’t tackle this foreign aid farce

DOES Boris Johnson really care about the millions of mostly working class, sometimes poor, former Labour voters who ‘lent’ him their support in the General Election?

Over the coming months we will discover whether the Treasury is prepared to divert resources from London and the South-East to infrastructure projects in the Midlands and the North.

But whatever happens we may be certain that hardheaded people won’t be impressed by stories of vast amounts of taxpayers’ money being spent on unnecessary or worthless causes in countries perfectly capable of looking after themselves.

Dismaying

On Tuesday, the Mail reported that the Government gave £151 million to China and India last year. China is the world’s second largest economy. India is in the throes of overtaking Britain to become the fifth largest. Both have space programmes and massive defence expenditure.

What is so dismaying is that ministers have previously undertaken to stop giving aid to these wealthy, fast-growing countries. Yet the amount doled out to them last year represented an increase of 12 per cent on 2017.

Schemes funded by the British taxpayer included nearly £ 1 million on a programme to study air pollution in a Chinese mega- city. Whitehall officials stumped up £ 443,284 for India to improve weather forecasting techniques.

What will hard-pressed voters in new Tory seats in Stoke and Sedgefield make of such outrageous extravagance? The question assumes they are aware of it, which they may not be. The all- powerful BBC apparently didn’t think the rise in aid to India and China worth reporting.

If people do know about it, I wager they will be aghast and angry. How can a decent government spend large sums of public money on frivolous projects abroad when huge swathes of Britain have been consistently ignored?

Some people may argue that in the great scheme of things £151 million is not an enormous sum. Well, it could be used to prevent the closure of dozens of public libraries, or build half a new hospital, or fund hundreds of new police officers sorely needed in crimeridden streets.

And, of course, that sum represents the money lavished on China and India in a single year. Over the past few years, many hundreds of millions of pounds have been channelled to the two countries. Why didn’t we spend those precious resources on our own people?

There is no conceivable moral justification for the Government’s largesse. But there is a practical explanation. By law, the aid budget is set at 0.7 per cent of GDP (the value of all goods and services produced) and so it increases every year as the economy grows. Meanwhile other departmental spending is squeezed.

So there are hundreds of civil servants sitting around in Whitehall, dreaming up new ways to spend the ever-burgeoning aid budget, which now stands at £14.6 billion a year — about one third of our annual defence expenditure.

Over at the Department for Business, someone had the brilliant idea of forking out £81,091 on an Indian scheme to use text messages to give people advice on problem drinking. What a wheeze!

Some bright spark at the Department for Health and Social Care hit on the notion of bunging the Chinese £1.1 million for a programme to reduce salt intake. What an innovative way of wasting public money!

I wonder what Chinese and Indian officials make of the little ‘goody’ bags that keep coming their way? Yet another example of the famed British eccentricity? Or do they simply think we are stark, raving mad?

Since Boris Johnson has only been Prime Minister for five months, it would hardly be fair to blame him for such lunacy.

But there is no doubt that he is aware of the excesses.

Early last year, he told the Financial Times: ‘We can’t keep spending huge sums of British taxpayers’ money as though we were some independent Scandinavian NGO [ nongovernmental organisation].’

He added: ‘ The present system is leading to inevitable waste as money is shoved out of the door to meet the 0.7 per cent target.’ That is what caused the increase in superfluous aid to China and India, and the embracing of madcap causes.

But the two countries are far from being the only undeserving recipients. The entire aid budget is riddled with waste, corruption and inefficiency. It must be re-examined from top to bottom.

For one thing, about a third of the annual £14.6 billion is given to multilateral organisations, such as the EU and United Nations, whose often poorly costed and badly administered aid programmes are only fleetingly scrutinised by British civil servants.

When we leave the EU, some £ 1.4 billion of British taxpayers’ money will no longer be distributed by Brussels. It would be madness simply to divert these funds to the Department for International Development’s (DfID) bilateral aid programmes, which are themselves often of questionable value.

Curious

If you don’t believe me, listen to Rory Stewart, who was a middle-ranking minister in DfID between July 2016 and January 2018. He was appointed Secretary of State at DfID in May 2019, before resigning three months later when Mr Johnson was elected Tory leader.

Between his spells at DfID, he made a speech at Yale University in which he candidly admitted that ‘not a great deal has been achieved with foreign aid’. He said it was ‘ very curious’ that Britain, alone among the world’s richest nations, hits the global aid target of 0.7 per cent of GDP.

Among several instances of failed aid programmes in Africa cited by Mr Stewart was dirt-poor Malawi, which has gobbled up £4.5 billion of aid over the past half century with little, if anything, to show for it.

As soon as he returned to DfID, Mr Stewart instantly forgot his well- founded reservations. We must hope the same does not happen to Mr Johnson now that he is securely installed in No10.

Of course Britain should give foreign aid. Humanitarian aid ( which accounts for 15 per cent of the budget) is vital, and could easily be increased. But there should be a proper audit of how effectively money is being spent on programmes.

Some are undoubtedly beneficial. As one of Europe’s foremost donors of humanitarian aid to Syria, Britain has done wonderful work in helping those fleeing from the carnage.

Reform

But what about Rwanda, a brutally run and impoverished country, which has received hundreds of millions of pounds of British aid since 2010? Somehow President Paul Kagame was able to strike a £30 million deal to sponsor Arsenal Football Club in 2018.

The Government has given £107 million over the past two years to the International Rescue Committee, whose President, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, is paid nearly £750,000 a year. That is an obscene amount for the head of an NGO.

According to reports, Mr Johnson may allow the Foreign Office to subsume DfID so that there is greater control over the aid budget. What is needed is a root-and-branch reform of the whole system — and a jettisoning of the 0.7 per cent legal commitment.

The question the PM needs to ask himself is this: What will struggling ex- Labour voters in Sedgefield and Stoke think if Whitehall continues to pour hundreds of millions of pounds down the throats of undeserving foreign recipients? I can promise him it won’t be favourable.