BRITAIN! GET ANGRY... AND WE WILL END THE MADNESS
Business guru’s rocket for politicians who spend on nations awash with cash
THE PEOPLE of the United Kingdom are among the most generous on the planet. Not a global appeal for help after a natural disaster goes by without the Brits digging deep and sending millions to help the victims of earthquake, famine or hurricane.
So what I have to say today is not about our country stopping doing the right thing. It is not about walking down the other side of the road at times of acute distress.
It is not about bringing to an end paying out hard-earned tax pounds to fund long-term projects in the developing world that build governmental capacity, educate those deprived of simple literacy or help provide refuge to victims of grotesque mutilation or persecution.
What I seek to do is make you, the typically generous Brit, very angry indeed… and then do something about it!
When I was at the CBI, and also when I served as Minister of State for UK Trade and Investment, I became incensed at the number of occasions I came across our overseas aid budget being spent on infrastructure projects where UK businesses were closed out from doing work. This resulted in UK jobs and tax-generating profits being lost while Japanese, American or French businesses building a bridge here or a power station there were paid for by us!
When the Americans or French give aid, the receiving country’s people get the benefit, but those providing the aid also benefit.
When we give aid, the target country benefits – and so does one of our rival countries at our expense. You couldn’t make it up.
The Blair government abolished so-called Tied Aid – offering aid on the condition that it be used to procure goods or services from the provider – as a sop to the Socialists, and the Japanese and French have been laughing all the way to the bank at our expense ever since.
There are very few countries that give their money away without conditions; tied aid is the norm around the world, except for old Muggins, the UK. How does it feel today to know that our aid budget has given up millions of pounds so that the Chinese can employ Chinese people to build stuff in African countries paid for by us?
Then along came Cameron and abused the British taxpayers’ generosity in an even more scary way. Instead of looking at each project on its merits and deciding on spending cash (or not) in accordance with budgetary constraints – as every town hall and Government department has to do year in year out – the international aid budget was set at 0.7 per cent UK gross national income, whatever that may be.
So as the economy grows, so does the dosh available to spend every year on aid projects. And, what’s more, it is ring-fenced. So as education and the police suffer cuts the sums available for distribution around the world actually go up.
I could point out the many bonkers schemes your money has gone to under this system: from hundreds of millions to India, a country that hosts a Formula One Grand Prix and funds a £600million space programme, to £48 million to China – yes, that’s right, to the second-richest country on earth – to grow carbon-munching trees near polluting power stations.
LAST week’s Mail on Sunday documented examples of naive largesse by the bucketload. And there is always the nagging doubt that our money finds itself ending up in Swiss bank accounts held by corrupt politicians, or facilitates soldiers selling grain to starving people in the regions they are there to help.
This madness has to stop for its own sake. The more profligate the spending overseas, the more ridiculous the projects that are supported, the greater the loss of credibility of the whole concept will be among the British public.
What is a noble idea – being world class in helping those less fortunate lead better, safer and more healthy lives – will die for want of public support, not because the concept is wrong but because so much of the money is wasted.
Those nameless, faceless, unaccountable officials who spend our money in this fashion do so with such lack of rigour or regard simply because they can. It’s not their money. If they were spending their own cash they would look at each project so differently.
It is unlike any other branch of Government spending. The NHS, for example, is ring-fenced but its spending does not automatically increase as the country does better year on year. We might be meeting our two per cent of GDP obligations to NATO on defence spending but next year that spending is not going to increase automatically.
With our overseas aid budget, officials have dosh coming out of their ears. It is human nature to be less than rigorous in due diligence and application when you not only have more than enough but you know for sure that there’s even more where that last lot came from.
Those people in charge of countries whose people are in dire need of our help must think it’s their collective birthdays; all you need to do is plead poverty, put the pressure
on, and those Brits will pay, again and again.
The personal accounts of those in charge of these states can become enriched from their countries’ resources since the welfare of their people will be taken care of by the UK taxpayer who is making big sacrifices at home, who gets no conditionality as to jobs in return, who has no say in where the money goes or what it achieves, who can’t judge its efficacy and who knows for sure that, if the UK economy does better next year through that hard work and sacrifice, then those personal bank accounts will just get even larger.
And don’t expect things would change under a Labour government. Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott all voted for the aid budget to be enshrined in law, so they think this state of affairs is fine.
They believe in spending other people’s money on their own ideology; indeed they’ve developed it to a fine art.
BUT the problem with their creed is that, when they are in power, they always eventually run out of other people’s money to spend. They nurse their socialism in the womb of The Struggle, secure in the knowledge as they brandish their placards that they couldn’t be trusted to run a whelk stall let alone a serious economy.
No sensible PM who wants a quality overseas aid programme which will endure over the decades with the support of the British people would maintain a system that automatically increases the sum doled out every year in such an indiscriminate fashion.
The Great British Public have stopped laughing at this now, Mr Cameron, they have moved to the ‘up with this we will not put’ stage.
When you are forced to change the policy and climb down from an obviously broken model in the face of opprobrium from everywhere, the real losers will be the very people, the genuine cases – the impoverished, the fearful, the illiterate, the unhealthy, the persecuted – whom we all want to help.
The baby will have well and truly gone down the plughole with the bath water and that will be down to following a path to hell that is paved with good intentions.