Douglas MURRAY

Tory supporters of the 0.7 per cent target ignore the myriad other forms of assistance the UK provides

There was always something of the moral poseur in David Cameron’s insistence that foreign aid should be ring-fenced. After all, what prime minister has the right to decide what a future government should spend? Who can foresee what eventualities – such as a global pandemic – might emerge to change the fiscal situation of the nation? And why ring-fence the spending of only certain departments? Why not go to town and ring-fence them all? Is education or policing any less important than foreign aid?

If you were a Conservative in the Cameron era, of course the answer was “yes”. Because increasing and indeed ring-fencing international development spending was, like being photographed with huskies, a way to signal that these Conservatives were not “bad” conservatives.

Not that awful, unsuccessful sort who kept winning elections in the Eighties, for instance.

Now the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is facing criticism for finding money to cut in the UK’S international development budget. At a time when this country faces a fiscal situation more dire than at any point in peacetime, some people would like him not to make savings. Or to make them in one area but not another. Nothing could be more ridiculous.

All that is proposed is that foreign aid should be cut to 0.5 per cent of GDP, something that would bring us in line with the G7 average, incidentally. It would lead to a saving of £5 billion. And given that this country faces a Covid bill of at least £210 billion, that should help in a small way. Yet already the critics – including Mr Cameron, Tony Blair, Sir John Major and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury – have leapt up to complain that the spending cut is mean, bad, and in some way makes us an international pariah.

While our foreign aid budget has certainly been able to do some useful and important things in terms of soft power, Mr Sunak’s critics might like to ask themselves whether it has also become a wasteful mess. Tell a department that it must spend a certain amount of money and, of course, it will find things to throw that money at.

In recent years, this has included sending money to China to help pay for rice production. China, incidentally, is the only country in the world whose economy is predicted to actually grow this year.

Obsessing over a cut of 0.2 per cent of GDP also ignores the fact that this country already provides much of what should be counted as foreign aid in the military assistance we offer around the world. The UK has spent many billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in recent years on peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Is this to be regarded solely as “military spending”, while paying for rice production in the world’s only growing economy should be counted as generous, lovely foreign aid?

There is already talk of a Commons rebellion on this tiny but sensible piece of money-saving. The MPS thinking of it should bear in mind that their own grandstanding may prove costly. Cutting international aid spending is an unusually popular policy among nearly all groups of voters. That is because the public is more intelligent than many of our elected representatives. It recognises that a significant proportion of the foreign aid budget is wasted, and that we have quite a number of problems at home towards which it would be good to be financially generous.

The public also understands one of the central principles of charity – which is that it is something you should outsource as little as possible, lest it become about something apart from charity.

As it happens, the British public is exceptionally generous in its own right. In the first six months of this year alone, Britons donated a staggering £5.4 billion to charities at home and abroad. That is more than the amount that the Chancellor is now rightly cutting from the Government’s budget. Charity – including charitable giving abroad – begins at home. It should neither begin nor end in Whitehall.