Some aid is important and valuable. But some aid is counterproductive and traps countries in dependency, in the same way that the welfare system too often does here. At the same time, a lot of money is wasted. The Government have scrapped some of the worst "awareness" spending in the UK for example, some of the projects that the IPN highlighted in their research last year. The Department still believes that it should be spending taxpayers' money on "raising awareness" though, making the case for aid as part of our role in the world if it can find the right project. And millions of pounds is still going to charities like Oxfam and Christian Aid who waste more than a third of their budget on non-project costs. That is part of the 14p in every £1 of DFID spending that never reaches the frontline, as we showed in a TPA report last year.
With all that in mind, wouldn't it have been fair for DFID to get the kind of settlement that other important areas of spending like education and science did in the Spending Review? It isn't as if the advocates for those areas of spending, or some of those getting sharper cuts like defence and justice, couldn't make a case that is just as persuasive as Mark Pritchard's. A freeze in spending, the same deal as science got, would save £3.7 billion. Plenty of people step up to the plate to defend aid spending in principle, but we aren't talking about an abstract decision over whether we want aid spending or not. The question is whether we should drastically increase the aid budget while others are being cut and taxes - including on the poorest Britons - are rising. I haven't heard a remotely convincing case for this kind of dramatic disparity in how the different budgets are being treated:
In the end, that just isn't how the public want to see their money being spent. Policy Exchange polling before the election made that clear enough. This graph shows net support for more (+) or less (-) spending. All the parties are conniving to ignore the public's wishes and spend more on an area where they would like to spend less.
That is why a lot of the sanctimony from politicians backing drastic increases in the aid budget isn't justified. Big hikes in the DFID budget aren't altruistic. Altruism is when you give your own money. The British public often display striking altruism when there is a disaster here or in another country.
Politicians giving more of other people's money isn't altruism, it's just a flagrant disregard for democracy.
When it comes to their own budgets politicians are just as grasping as they've ever been. While ordinary Londoners were preparing to struggle to work on foot, bicycle or overcrowded bus, Michael Fabricant was telling colleagues they could spend up to £80 of our money on a cab ride home. You could defend him as just passing on IPSA's decision, but his last words were "Enjoy!" That sense of entitlement to spend and enjoy taxpayers' money as if it were their own is still the principal vice of Britain's political class.
