From the FT:
Should David Cameron, prime minister, execute another of his elegant U-turns – this time on the large sums going to poor countries riddled with corruption? Certainly pressure for him to think again about foreign aid is growing. The latest blast comes from Sir Edward Clay, our former high commissioner to Kenya. In a powerful paper for the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, Sir Edward says corruption is endemic among many countries receiving UK aid yet checks on the way that our money is spent are thoroughly inadequate.
Sir Edward, who appeared before the committee on Tuesday, is highly critical of the government’s target of giving 0.7 per cent of gross national product in aid. He says it is damaging, it ties the government’s hands and it removes “from taxpayers the right to make a judgment” on the stewardship of aid. The target, which has not yet been enacted into law, is worth £9.1bn a year – “more than we spend on policing, more than on the Olympics... more than the UN spends on global peacekeeping”..
Wednesday, 6 July 2011
One for Umbongo
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3 comments:
£9.1 bill more than on the olympics? 'e's 'aving a bubble.
VFTS, not "£9.1 more than..." but "£9.1 bn, more than..." so you've a comma missing. Agreed, the highest figure I've seen for cost of Olympics was about £13 bn, but not all of that was wasted (i.e. stolen) and a lot of it went straight into boosting land values (public cost, private gain, as per usual).
More to the point, the aid budget is year in, year out. The Olympics was just a one-off.
I saw a clip earlier of PMQs and Brown was castigating Cameron on U-turns even them. It was a bit lost though because a] iDave was not yet PM and b] Gordo himself was claiming, at the time, to have saved the world.
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