Yes, Rishi Sunak is right to cut foreign aid. Here’s why.
Edward Howard.
In a recent and controversial decision, Chancellor Rishi Sunak is announced his plan to cut foreign aid from its 0.7% legal requirement to 0.5%, in order to save money for the COVID relief spending hole. And while many on the left have unsurprisingly criticised this – Sir Keir Starmer, Layla Moran, Owen Jones, James O’Brien and Caroline Lucas for example - there are a lot on the right who also object. Tim Montgomerie, David Davis and even the Father of the House Sir Peter Bottomley have objected to the change. They claim it is cruel, breaks a manifesto pledge and undermines the UK internationally.
But despite all of this, cutting foreign aid is a good thing. Here’s why.
Firstly, the concept in and of itself is a baffling one. Why on Earth would a country as currently unequal and full of deprived areas like Britain give so much of our own money to foreign countries, who in many cases can clearly not only pay for their own – like China the 2nd largest economy in the world, Nigeria which has space programmes, Pakistan which has nuclear weapons for example – but who often at best spend it on niche and vestigial projects, and at worst openly waste and abuse that money for their own ends.
For the former, we need only to look at the huge controversy surrounding the £5 million spent on the Ethiopian pop group Yegna – who were dubbed their country’s equivalent of the Spice Girls, go figure - of which, when their funding was cancelled, Labour MPs criticised the move. Or the £133,584 sent to China’s Sun Yat-Sen University to investigate migrant smoking habits. Meanwhile, for the latter, an aid scheme in Pakistan was given £300 million to give citizens there cash or cards, but reports suggest that at least a quarter of the recipients didn’t consist of the country’s poorest. Or how about the use of foreign aid in Afghanistan, despite that country’s continuing corruption and terrorist issues, of which experts have warned undermined the funds in the first place?
Secondly, the general public may have a lot more sympathy if that money was being spent wisely. There is more than enough evidence to point to the contrary. Listing all of the mismanagements with foreign aid would fill a book’s worth of errors, but here are some good examples. Take for example, the hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on North Korea from the foreign aid budget; not only are they one of the worst dictatorial and human rights abusers on Earth, but the supposed aim of the aid there – ‘boosting Western values and improving relations’ – seems to not have returned the favour in investment. This is presumably so that the Hermit Kingdom can spend it on more important things like its nuclear arsenal and gulags, as brutally described in the excellent book Escape From Camp 14. But there’s more.
How about how the scandal back in 2018, whereby the charity Oxfam were condemned for having used foreign aid grants in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake there to have sex with prostitutes along with other sexual misconduct, and alleged coverups were involved? Or how about allegations of fraud, of which could lose the British government £300 million per annum – 3% of the overall budget in that area – of which due to the ‘dangerous work’ taken by the department overseas could be a big underestimate? That’s not even counting the numerous other dictatorships that the money goes to, of who by their design inevitably means money won’t go to the right place, whether it be to the Ayatollahs of Iran or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. As the Express noted at the time, such money could have filled financial black holes in Britain, and with austerity in full swing at that point in the mid-2010s, it does leave a slightly rotten taste in the mouth.
There is also a moral reason to cut foreign aid, as initially oxymoronic as that may sound. At a time when unemployment is set to spike, and many will be on the dole, why would we spend so much more on supposed ‘good causes’ around the world than on our own citizens who desperately need it far more and are the ones the government are directly responsible for? This is not even to mention the other difficult measures that the government will have to make. One the one hand, they don’t want to go for austerity again, fearing a possible rage from their new Red Wall constituents, or go too gung ho on tax rises and increases as they are also worried about the wrath of their core Middle England vote.
It would be at least a step in the right direction, which is popular with the public, among most parties, age groups and voting blocs, with 66% of Britons overall in favour of cuts. Very tellingly, those sections of society where it isn’t a majority vote – Labour Party and Liberal Democrat voters and 18-24 year olds – it’s more slim than that statement would initially imply. It’s obvious as to why; increasing or continuing foreign aid spending as it currently stands is the equivalent of a poor family who love their children giving their money to a rich family who couldn’t care less about theirs, and often squander it on themselves. It is an unfair and poorly handled system, and from that, any cuts would be suffice; they can be used both to finance the current COVID spending hole, and public service spending, of which the Tory government promised to do last year.
That’s not even going in to the more truly cynical reasons as to why foreign aid is really being used; for geopolitical and strategic reasons. The money, while used to supposedly fund investment in many poorer parts of the world, is often used by Western governments to cynically buy soft power and allyships in many of those countries in order to secure their influence there. If it sounds neo-colonial in its attitude, that’s because it is. Orwell Prize-nominated writer Kenan Malik has rightly noted that ‘a high proportion of foreign aid is in the form of loans, which cripple developing countries through the accumulation of debt’ all the while ‘western governments have exploited their ability to borrow money at low rates… minting money on the backs of the poor’, and that China also behaves similarly in that they use ‘aid as a means of leveraging political influence’, making it sound like a carefully crafted cynical Ponzi scheme, which is what it is. Such means of geopolitics and proxy allies made sense for countries like Britain and others during other times where European empires dominated much of the Earth, when their international standing was threatened in major conflicts, and during the Cold War, where backing anti-communist dictatorships to contain the spread of it was more humane than a full on nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
However, it doesn’t now when there’s nothing to be gained from continuing to interfere in regions that are meant to be independent. The only people who benefit from that arrangement are the richest in both British society and these other countries; the former keep their investments and business interests safe and in line, while the latter continue to become heavily rich, at the expense (no pun intended) of the poorest in their society, who often lack basic human needs, including those of democratic rights and basic items, like food or water. The irony of much of the left continuing to condemn the British Empire – despite the much good that it objectively did – while blindly praising this sort of neo-colonialism is apparently not lost on anyone who cares. That’s not even going in to the possible explanations as to the spending of this money in known corrupt countries for more alarming reasons, like Pakistan receiving foreign aid as a potential bribe to stop nuclear weapons getting in to the hands of terrorists. But that is unconfirmed speculation, so let’s move on.
Some of the criticism about cutting foreign aid seems to be misplaced as well. Firstly, it isn’t cruel, as many claim. Given that this is a temporary cut – often stressed by Sunak and others that it will be reversed one day – and that the money is going to be used on the poorest in British society, it’s more of a case of putting priorities first as opposed to simply being cruel to be kind. Meanwhile, there are complaints of it breaking a manifesto pledge. While this is correct, what is also fact is that not only is this a move popular with the British public – which ought on to sweeten that pill – but that given that this is a temporary change due to coronavirus lockdown spending hole that no-one saw coming makes this a somewhat unfair criticism of the government here. They didn’t know this was going to happen, and that money will have to be paid back somehow, so why not go with a temporary move the British public like? It also doesn’t undermine the UK internationally, as we’re still the second highest spenders of foreign aid in the G7, not to mention how Britain was clearly well respected as a nation way before when the department was put in place. I’m not sure why cutting it would do us such shame when keeping it maintained following the Oxfam and Ethiopian Spice Girls scandals apparently didn’t, but as you do.
Finally, given that civil servants often struggle to spend all of it - due to the amount of money they have, and the limited time they have to use it – one can only wonder why they wouldn’t just simply use it for British services and public finances, whereby at least we know where the money is going, and similar issues of overfunding and hard to meet deadlines aren’t an issue. Another charge that comes up is that it isn’t that much money to spend, being only 0.7% of our GDP, all the while only being £15.9 billion overall. This is partially true, but the context undermines their argument. Despite how low that sum of money is, it is more than the British government spends on the police, which given that Britain’s crime rate is consistently rising, seems to be a big kick in the teeth. Besides, the same people who would argue that Trident costs too much – despite being the same amount of money as foreign aid in terms of GDP, and actually having a productive use – would bulk if you made the same criticism against foreign aid.
These are the reasons that cutting foreign aid is a good thing. It refocuses the funds on where they should be spent, would allow for public finances cuts which is supported by the public at large, and would make a better difference in the UK. And while it has been criticised, the government shouldn’t back down; it’s too important a move to squander on media or left-wing pressure. This government may have a lot to answer for, mainly in terms of the COVID crisis, its attitudes towards marriage, its laissez-faire behaviour towards the culture wars, its reluctance to tackle immigration, among other things. But their reforms to foreign aid aren’t one of them. In this, I among many of my fellow Tories, back this move entirely. The only problem is that it doesn’t go far enough, but that’s a discussion for another time.