Borrowing to give

On BBC Breakfast this morning, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell claimed it was 'morally right' for the government to engage in international aid.

It comes as the government is finally considering ending aid for Russia and China. Aid for India is set to be frozen at current levels.

Laughably, the BBC reports that

Labour says too much of the UK's aid budget is being mis-spent.

I suppose 13 years wasn't long enough to address that problem.

I stand by my previous comments on international aid:

Borrowing to give is irresponsible. It is bad enough that taxpayers' wealth is confiscated for the government's chosen humanitarian projects, but it is indefensible that they are stealing from future generations.

If the government got out of the aid game, would charitable work in the Third World cease? No. Private citizens in Britain and around the world would continue to support worthwhile projects, according to their own priorities. And if the charities involved were true charities, entirely reliant on voluntary donations, there would be proper competition between them to deliver aid as efficiently as possible.

What's really needed, though, is trade, not aid. Abolishing the CAP, and trading freely with food producers in the developing world, would do far more to help them than handouts, both immediately and in the long term. If we legalised drugs, and cut out the criminal middle-men, poor farmers of high-demand crops would benefit still further.

India: no more aid, thanks

In July, I reported on an India Times story that suggested the UK would finally be cutting back aid to India.

Now, the Indian Express reports,

The External Affairs Ministry has instructed the Finance Ministry to inform London that India will not accept further aid from next April.

Last week, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told the ministry that “internal discussions” within UK’s Department for International Development — which accounts for over 80% of all bilateral aid to India — were “to limit the aid further and channelise it to specific projects of their choice in certain states instead of routing it through the Central government”.

“Rather than wait for such a situation to develop... it would be better if our decision not to avail any further DFID assistance with effect from 1st April 2011 could be conveyed to the British side in an appropriate manner at the earliest,” she wrote to Finance Secretary Ashok Chawla.

Ahead of Cameron’s visit, India had considered rejecting DFID offer in view of the “negative publicity of Indian poverty promoted by DFID”.

Hat tip, BOM and AidWatch.

I guess the DFID will now be able to donate more to Oxfam.

Ending aid to India

The Register reports:

Indian defence chiefs have approved $11bn of funds to boost the country's submarine fleet. The cash is intended to see India become the first non-Western nation to deploy long-touted, much feared "air independent propulsion" (AIP) submarine technology.

Meanwhile, the India Times reports:

Under pressure to reduce its foreign assistance, Prime Minister David Cameron may scale down the 250 million-pound British aid given to India annually, saying wealthy local people could do more to help their poor countrymen.

International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has signalled that the "250 million pounds of public money spent annually on nuclear-armed India could be scaled back."
...

Last month, Britain, shocked by reports of massive embezzlement in India in the use of millions of pounds granted as aid for 'sarva-shiksha abhiyan', promised "zero tolerance to corruption" and launched an "immediate inquiry".
...
Cutting foreign aid to countries like India was the most important suggestion by voters to Chancellor George Osborne, who launched a Treasury's Spending Challenge website to ask people for ideas on where the funding cuts axe should fall.

As hundreds of suggestions poured in, the most popular was for international development funding to bear some of the brunt of the pain.

Jo Johnson, a Conservative MP and brother of London Mayor Boris Johnson, wrote in The Financial Times: "India can now fund its own development needs, considerable though they are in a country with 450 million poor. It has a defence budget of USD 31.5 billion, plans for a prestige- boosting moon-shot and a substantial foreign aid programme of its own".

He added: "India is not China; but as a claimant to a permanent Security Council seat and a place at the top table of world affairs, it is also no longer a natural aid recipient".

It is daft that we're currently borrowing to give, and international aid would be fraught with problems even if we had no deficit and no debt. But at least the Coalition is finally looking to refocus aid on countries that struggle to provide for themselves. It is a testament to the profligacy and corruption of New Labour that aid to India was not cut off years ago.

International aid - immoral, irresponsible, wasteful, and counterproductive

Melanie Phillips has written an excellent article on international aid:

When the Conservatives announced that they intended to ring-fence the international aid budget, many eyebrows were raised.

Currently, this country spends about £3 billion every year on such aid. The Coalition has pledged to increase this total to meet the UN target of 0.7per cent of national output by 2013.

Since only the health service is also to be ring-fenced against the draconian spending cuts threatened for the rest of the public sector and expected to be outlined in next Tuesday’s Budget, many have asked how the Government can justify spending even more on humanitarian assistance abroad while causing increasing hardship at home.

Surely a government’s first duty when the country has a £155 billion deficit is to its own people? And why is a Conservative Prime Minister adopting an attitude that is more commonly identified with the Left?

The reason is not the presence in the coalition of the Lib Dems. It is principally because of David Cameron’s driving imperative to transform the image of the Conservative Party from nasty to nice. And a precondition of niceness is that hearts must bleed for the wretched of the earth.

As I see it, there are four main problems with international aid:

1. Fake charity is immoral. Real charity occurs when an individual voluntarily parts with a portion of his wealth in order to support a cause he believes in. Fake charity occurs when the government confiscates our wealth to spend on humanitarian causes that they believe in.
   
2. Borrowing to give is irresponsible. It is bad enough that taxpayers' wealth is confiscated for the government's chosen humanitarian projects, but it is indefensible that they are stealing from future generations. Think of all the good that could be done at home and abroad with the £30 billion we spend each year on debt interest. If we carry on as we are, that figure will soon be £70 billion. This trajectory is not sustainable; our first priority must be to get our own house in order.
   
3. International aid is wasteful. As Gerald Warner asks, Why are we giving India £1 billion in aid if it can afford Moon missions?
4. International aid is counterproductive. It sustains a culture of dependence, fuels overpopulation, and provides support to warlords, terrorists, and tyrants.

Phillips's article focuses on the fourth point:

In Somalia, warlords extracted from the aid agencies as much as 80 per cent of what the aid supplies were worth.

After the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, which left 40,000 dead and displaced 2.5 million people, Dutch relief workers were forced to pay a levy of up to 25 per cent of the aid to the terrorist Tamil Tigers.

In Sudan in the Eighties and Nineties, where two million were slaughtered, the government army that committed these atrocities fed itself on food aid that it stole. The truth is that this aid kept the genocide going.

...

in Gaza — to which the Cameron government has just committed a £19 million first instalment of a five- year £100 million aid package — UNRWA admitted last year that the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hamas had stolen 3,500 blankets and more than 400 food packages, including 200 tons of rice and flour, that were supposed to be distributed to Gaza residents.

Phillips concludes,

Ultimately, international aid is not about rescuing the starving of the world. Instead, it is all about burnishing the self-image of the person, organisation or government doing the giving. That’s why blind eyes are so resolutely turned to the way aid is used as the life-support system for tyrants and mass murderers.

There is surely a case for saying that, rather than being ring-fenced as Cameron’s government vows to do, the entire international aid programme should be axed — along with the department that administers it.

Failing that, it should be renamed the Department for the Perpetuation of War, Tyranny and Terror. Now that would be transparency.

As for the generous-minded members of the public who want to dip into their pockets to relieve distress, they would be well advised to give the international aid racket a miss and donate to charities caring for the poor, old or disabled in this country instead.

I recommend the whole article.

If we really cared about the plight of millions of people in the third world, we would renounce the CAP, exit the EU, and engage in mutually beneficial free trade.