‘Spend more aid cash on military peacekeepers’

MILITARY peacekeeping missions should be funded by more money from Britain’s aid budget, Rory Stewart said.

He vowed to push for an overhaul of the rules governing the way funding was spent.

Under current rules, only 15 per cent of the £14.1billion aid budget can be spent on peacekeeping. This was up from 7 per cent in 2017 but Mr Stewart said he would push for this to be increased further.

The UK has a commitment enshrined in law to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on official development assistance.

Mr Stewart also said he wanted to spend less aid money on ‘expensive’ contractors and more on British experts.

He said he wanted millions more pounds of aid money invested in tackling climate change and the environment, pledging to make the department ‘green’. He said: ‘Essentially I want to green this department, I want to make sure everything we do is pushing ahead on climate and environment. We are facing a climate cataclysm, the ice shelf is going ten times more quickly than we predicated.

‘We are in danger of losing an enormous number of species around the world and that’s even before you look at the impact on humans.The way to solve that has to be international.’ He said he wanted to put more money into British universities to develop the next generation of solar panels.

Speaking about threats abroad, he also warned of a possible ‘Cold War 2.0’ with China and the US and that Britain had become ‘too distracted’ in such issues because of Brexit.