Cameron’s new job: Defending his legacy on foreign aid!
( and, guess what, he announces it in the Left-wing Guardian . . . )
DAVID Cameron will seek to defend his legacy on foreign aid by chairing a high-profile commission on overseas development, it emerged last night.
The former prime minister, who enshrined Britain’s controversial 0.7 per cent aid spending target in law, announced he has accepted the unpaid academic position.
The commission will carry out research on the impact of aid in ‘fragile and conflict-affected states’ – countries he prioritised for spending while in Downing Street. Mr Cameron and his team will publish a major report next year on how aid money can be spent more effectively.
Last night Tory backbenchers said it was typical of Mr Cameron that he wanted to prioritise foreign aid as his key legacy. They asked why he was speaking about international development when he left Britain’s social care system in crisis when he left office.
Under Mr Cameron, the amount of money spent on aid soared to more than £12billion a year. This makes the UK one of the few countries in the world to spend 0.7 per cent of its national budget on overseas development. He also shifted aid funding to ‘fragile’ states, a move which critics say has ended up fuelling corruption.
Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, said: ‘The only impact we have seen from his obsession to spend more and more money on overseas aid has been to see huge quantities of it wasted on barmy schemes, money poured into corrupt countries and money diverted away from social care in the UK.
‘It is not the kind of legacy I would be seeking if I were him.’ Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, added: ‘ Perhaps Mr Cameron will now concentrate all his effort on his new job and leave it to the elected prime minister to prioritise implementing the will of the people.’
Mr Cameron has been seeking a new role ever since he resigned as prime minister after last June’s Brexit vote. In September, he stepped down as an MP and is believed to have earned tens of thousands of pounds making speeches since then.
News of his new aid role, which he has written about in a piece for the Guardian, comes just weeks after he revealed he had been appointed president of Alzheimer’s Research UK.
The aid commission, together with the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, will hold five evidence sessions in the coming months and will report next year. It will look at how aid money can be spent better, given that half the population will be living in fragile states by 2020.
The position will be unpaid, and is said to have been inspired by an anti- corruption summit Mr Cameron hosted last year, at which he was caught on camera describing certain countries as corrupt.
As well as massively increasing the aid budget during his time in Number 10, Mr Cameron also changed the rules so that 50 per cent of funding had to be targeted towards ‘fragile and conflict-afflicted’ states. Before his intervention, only 30 per cent had been spent on such countries. Critics say this has led to the amount of aid money being channelled into the world’s top 20 most corrupt countries increasing by a third.
Last month, the spending watchdog warned that Mr Cameron’s decision to plough billions more into overseas support and to target it on fragile states increased the ‘risk’ of wrongdoing.
The National Audit Office found that the number of fraud allegations involving the UK’s aid budget has quadrupled in the five years since the 0.7 per cent target was set. Some money may have ended up into the hands of extremists.