Name: It's liberal hysteria to think cutting foreign aid will turn Britain into an international pariah
Brand: telegraph.co.uk
SKU: telegraph-co-uk-379
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

It's liberal hysteria to think cutting foreign aid will turn Britain into an international pariah

preview

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, defence 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 . 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&nbsp;–&nbsp;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 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby – 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 .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 taxpayer’s money in recent years on peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Is this to be regarded solely as “military spending”, while paying for rice-growing in the world’s only growing economy should be counted as generous, lovely foreign aid?There is already talk of a on this tiny but sensible piece of money-saving. The MPs thinking of it should bear in mind that their own grandstanding may not be cost-free. Among the voting public, 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. They recognise that a significant amount of the foreign aid budget is wasted, and that we have quite a number of problems at home that it would be good to be financially generous towards.The public also understand 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, the public 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.Douglas Murray is the author of ‘The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity’Related TopicsThe Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our.You need to be a subscriber to join the conversation. Find out more.Show commentsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

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, defence or policing any less important than foreign aid?If you were a Conservative in the Cameron era, of course the answer was “yes”. Because...

public

Douglas Murray

Think ahead with the latest news, comment, analysis and video. Subscribe here: https://telegraph.co.uk/customer/subscribe

It's liberal hysteria to think cutting foreign aid will turn Britain into an international pariah

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS