Hat tip: Mark and H
David Cameron is clearly experiencing an unwelcome initiation into what might be dubbed the iceberg school of politics.
You’re steaming confidently along at the bridge of the good ship HMS Government when all of a sudden — wallop!
You’ve hit an iceberg which threatens to sink the ship — and because it was below the waves and your navigational instruments were a bit wonky, you had no idea it was there.
To Mr Cameron’s obvious surprise and irritation, just such an issue has suddenly reared up in the shape of overseas aid.
This was surely just about the last issue on the Prime Ministerial horizon. NHS reform, tuition fees, how to prop up Nick Clegg as the Tories’ human shield — these are creating the obvious turbulence through which the Prime Minister is having to steer.
But who would have thought overseas aid would turn into such a hazard?
After all, so confident was Mr Cameron that the aid programme would demonstrate the bleeding heart of the Tory Party that he ring-fenced a planned increase in such aid to 0.7 per cent of national output, or some £4 billion extra per year.
Yet now, he has discovered that there is an enormous block of public opinion passionately against it. And he appeared not to know it was there until this newspaper — and, ahem, this columnist — caused it to rise above the surface.
As I observed last week, the issue suddenly burst into public view on BBC TV’s Question Time, when I remarked that, at a time of cuts in public services, the money earmarked for overseas aid would be better spent at home.
I added that, far from alleviating global poverty, such aid actually made things worse, since it was so often used by tyrannical regimes to keep people in destitution and oppression.
Surprise, surprise, my observations were booed by the Question Time audience. But as I revealed last week, after that show I was swamped by messages — the vast majority in support of what I had said.
Well, if I had received a huge response after Question Time, I was all but submerged after writing last week’s column. Message after message said the same thing: ‘ . . . can’t understand how the Government can do this . . . Britain is broke and charity begins at home . . . money not helping the needy but propping up corrupt governments . . . most of us think like this . . . how can they be so out of touch . . . please carry on saying it like it is.’
Some of this reaction now appears finally to have got the attention of the Government’s advisers. For Mr Cameron chose the G8 summit to launch an equally passionate defence of his overseas aid programme.
But dear oh dear. He came across with all the maturity and wisdom of a callow teenager in an Oxfam-shop kaftan, singing along with Bob Geldof’s Feed The World in the belief that Live Aid would make poverty history, as the saying goes.
Indeed, the Prime Minister actually referred to his young self watching the Live Aid concert in 1985, and reiterated that he would not renege on aid promises made by world leaders at the Gleneagles summit six years ago.
Yet just weeks ahead of that 2005 conference, where Africa topped the agenda, the International Monetary Fund had published a report entitled ‘Aid Will Not Lift Growth in Africa’.
It would be comforting to discover that the Prime Minister’s views had matured somewhat from his earlier naivety. Alas, apparently not. For he proceeded to trot out the vacuous (and unpleasantly intimidating) cliché that this aid was all about ‘saving lives’ by vaccinating children against diarrhoea, stopping preventable diseases and saving mothers’ lives in childbirth.
For heaven’s sake, does he take us all for abject idiots? We know that the principal destination for UK taxpayers’ aid money is India, which has its own space programme, its own nuclear programme — and even its own foreign aid programme.
As for Africa, whose problems are indeed legion, many experts attest to the fact that aid programmes have made those difficulties far worse.
According to Dambisa Moyo, a former Goldman Sachs economist, aid programmes have left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more likely to experience conflict and unrest. ‘Aid’, she declared, ‘is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.’
Far from saving lives, aid is too often used to end many lives, with warlords stealing it to enable them to slaughter more people.
In her devastating book War Games, which details the regular abuse of international aid programmes, journalist Linda Polman reported that the £90 million raised by the 1985 Live Aid concerts was used by the Ethiopian regime to lure starving villagers into camps — from where around 600,000 were deported and 100,000 subsequently perished along the way.
Despite such a welter of disturbing evidence, Mr Cameron claimed that if we didn’t send aid to countries such as Somalia or Afghanistan, we would end up paying the price of terrorism, crime and mass migration from such countries.
Yet his own Department for International Development was forced to block further British aid to Afghanistan after a secret U.S. government report revealed that nearly £1 billion of international aid had gone missing through institutionalised corruption.
Now, the Prime Minister has further announced plans to funnel £110 million of taxpayers’ cash to Egypt, Tunisia and Middle Eastern countries over the next four years to develop democracy after the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.
But this ‘Spring’ could well turn into a very bleak ‘Winter’. The belief that because such people are demonstrating against tyranny the outcome will be democratic and free societies is naive to the point of imbecility.
The fact is that no one knows just who will emerge on top from such convulsions in the Arab world. Mr Cameron could well end up using British taxpayers’ money to fund the emergence of yet more Islamist regimes deeply hostile to the West.
And all this when, despite the fact that British forces are currently fighting and dying to protect the West against such aggression, the defence budget is actually being cut.
To put the tin lid on it, the big-hearted British people already give more to overseas charities than any people in the world apart from the Americans. The UK is spending twice as much on foreign aid as a share of national wealth as the average spent by the world’s leading economies.
The British donate more to humanitarian causes than anyone else in Europe. On average, they give twice as much as the Norwegians, three times more than the Belgians, six times more than the Germans and seven times more than the French.
Indeed, when personal contributions are added to state donations, Britain gives 0.8 per cent of total output to charitable causes — an even larger total, in other words, than the Government’s professed aim.
So why isn’t this magnificent effort of donations from the public factored into Mr Cameron’s thinking? Why does he imply that the British conscience can only be exercised through government spending — entitling him to fleece the public of yet another £4 billion of their money?
The answer, of course, is that this has precious little to do with relieving need among the wretched of the earth — and everything to do instead with the most cynical kind of political posturing.
But as with other semi-submerged ‘iceberg’ issues — such as immigration, the EU or human rights — overseas aid is where the political elite either ignores or sneers at the common sense in which public opinion is rooted.
The anger that has now surfaced over international aid is the anger of a public which finds itself disenfranchised by the contempt and absence of humility of the political class — of which, alas, the Prime Minister’s recent outburst but the latest example.
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