Aid rebels told not to betray voters
Former Cabinet minister warns Tory MPs not to lose sight of their principles ahead of key spending vote
CONSERVATIVE rebels have been warned not to return to the “dark” days of 2019 by “messing around with legislation and breaking conventions” to “make a political point”.
Government sources compared a looming rebellion over foreign aid spending to the parliamentary coups at the height of Brexit, which saw backbenchers seize control of the Commons Order Paper with the help of opposition parties. “It won’t end up helping with humanitarian spending,” one source insisted. The warning came as Esther McVey, the former Cabinet minister, today suggests the rebels, including Theresa May, the former Prime Minister, were out of touch with public opinion and should return to “Conservative principles”.
Tory MPs led by Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, are attempting to compel ministers to reverse their decision to slash overseas development spending temporarily from 0.7 per cent of gross national income to 0.5 per cent. The decision was taken last year due to the “economic emergency” arising from the Covid pandemic. Boris Johnson chose to suspend the 0.7 per cent target despite its inclusion in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto.
The MPs have now offered an “olive branch” to the Government, which would see a minister stand at the Commons Dispatch Box and commit to reinstating the 0.7 per cent target next year, by which time, they say, the economy will have improved.
In the meantime, more than 30 Tory MPs have publicly vowed to vote in support of an amendment to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) Bill in the Commons tomorrow. If selected by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, and approved by a majority of MPs, the amendment would require the Government to provide the aid-spending shortfall from Aria’s proposed £800 million budget.
Last night, Mr Mitchell said: “We are cautiously optimistic we have the numbers required to defeat the government so one would hope that common sense might prevail and the Treasury accept our olive branch of returning to the 0.7 promise next year rather than this.”
He added: “We are not the rebels. The Government is rebelling against a very clear manifesto commitment. It cannot be right to balance the books on the backs of the poorest people on the planet.”
But a government source suggested the amendment would fail to restore the target as the legislation being debated tomorrow could not be used to make such a change. “The impact of the vote in itself wouldn’t solve the problem they are trying to solve,” the source said.
“This is going back to the bad old days of a Parliament that is willing to mess around with legislation and break conventions to make a political point. It is only a political point and won’t end up helping with humanitarian spending.”
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Ms McVey, who leads the Blue Collar Conservatism campaign group, states: “It should be crystal clear that we simply don’t have the same money now as we had a few years ago for foreign aid. If we stubbornly insist on sticking to David Cameron’s target of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP – dreamt up in a very different economic and political era – we will end up going into deeper debt in order to finance other countries, and paying interest on that borrowed money.”
She adds that the budget should remain at 0.5 per cent in the “short term”, continuing: “Ask the public, in particular in those red wall seats the Conservatives won at the last general election, and the vast majority agree that such a move would make sense. Indeed, opinion polls have consistently shown that at least two thirds of Britons believe that the 0.7 per cent figure is too high... As we emerge from this miserable period in our nation’s history, the moment has come to be honest with the public about what we can and can’t afford.”
Britain faces a post-lockdown fiscal nightmare of a permanently higher deficit and a much greater national debt burden, at the very time when global interest rates could be about to rise. Spending has been ratcheted higher as a share of GDP, yet the Tories propose even more with their big-government agenda. One of the few programmes to which this hopelessly profligate Tory government has proposed a significant cut is foreign aid. This is popular. A poll from last year found that around two-thirds of voters would reduce the spend, including 92 per cent of Conservative supporters. Yet even this small saving – described by the Government as “temporary” and still leaving us high in the top league of international donors – is opposed by a virtue-signalling gang of backbench Tory MPs. By trying to reverse the cuts, they are setting themselves against the interests and instincts of their own constituents. If a Tory government cannot even trim foreign aid slightly, how can it claim to be truly fiscally conservative? It might as well rename itself the social democrats.
David Cameron misguidedly fixed into law the United Nations’ target of spending 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income on aid in a radically different era, when he assumed that the his party could only win by wooing high-earning, socially liberal voters in London. The reality was very different, as Brexit demonstrated: the future lay in capturing millions of lost culturally conservative voters, especially outside London. The hard-pressed aren’t so happy with the idea of redistributing cash from the poor taxpayers of the donor country to the government of the recipient, and while some aid can do good, it can also be shamefully wasted. A study following aid cash to 22 countries found that as much of a sixth of it wound up in bank accounts. A better way to help the world is to ensure poor countries have plentiful cheap Covid jabs – which is exactly what the Government has been doing with Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccines, sold at cost.
Britain is good at private charitable donations and investment in the developing world, and has helped fight global poverty by championing free trade and the free movement of capital. That’s what true philosophical conservatives should focus on: not courting Left-wing dinner party approval. Boris Johnson must remain steadfast. Any MP who stands in the way of this valiant effort deserves to feel the wrath of the voters.