International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Pamela Nash Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I confirm that I certainly meant no discourtesy, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I stand by everything I said. I think I agreed with about 0.7% of what the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath said in his speech.

At some point, when you allow, Madam Deputy Speaker, Members on the Government Benches will no doubt be invited to support the closure of this debate. I want them to know exactly what they will be doing. Ultimately, they will be answerable to voters in their constituencies in the not-too-distant future. By allowing this Bill to go into Committee and to make progress, Members are basically signalling the death knell of the EU (Referendum) Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill). At some point, all my hon. Friends will have to explain to their electorate, and to other candidates in that election, why they feel that this Bill is more important than that Bill. I do not believe it is, particularly given that the spending on aid is being achieved at the moment anyway. They will have to explain that, and I hope they feel relaxed about doing so. Many of my hon. Friends present—virtually all of them—are in safe seats, which seems to me probably no coincidence. However, I hope they will explain their actions to colleagues in less favourable circumstances, and I hope they know that that is what they will be doing when they go into the Lobby later today.

I am not surprised that the Liberal Democrats or the Labour party support the Bill. They are perfectly entitled to do so as it matches their philosophy. In a socialist philosophy, which Labour and the Liberal Democrats share, what is important is not outputs, but inputs.

[Pamela Nash (Airdrie and Shotts) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

I will not give way. We have heard so much drivel from people with a different opinion from me. I am trying to get some balance into the debate.

When Labour Members argue that we should be judged only on how much money we spend, it does not come as a great surprise, because that is what Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians have always argued for. I remember in the last Parliament asking why truancy under the then Labour Government was so terrible, and the Minister’s answer was: “We’ve spent £1 billion extra tackling truancy”, as if that was fine. Truancy had got worse, but that did not matter because they had spent £1 billion extra on tackling it. It struck me then as even more criminal than ever. They had spent £1 billion and truancy had still got worse. If they had said, “We’ve saved a bit of money and it’s got a bit worse”, that might have been some justification, but for it to get worse and to proudly boast, “That’s all right because we spent £1 billion extra”, is complete nonsense. So of course Labour and the Liberal Democrats believe in the Bill.

What I cannot understand in my heart is how any self-respecting person who wants to call themselves a Conservative can possibly subscribe to the view that we should be judged simply on a piece of legislation that sets out only how much we are to spend, and that it is irrelevant what we do with the money or whether we can afford it. Those should be the things a Conservative thinks about, but many of my colleagues seem to want to abandon their Conservative principles. I should perhaps be reassured that had the Government taken my view, most of my hon. Friends would be arguing the opposite of what they have been arguing today. They might be supporting this policy not through sincere belief but because of their desire for advancement. I do not know whether they believe in the Bill. In many respects, I hope they support it because they think it will help their advancement, because if they genuinely believe in it, I do not see how they can call themselves Conservatives in any shape or form.

There seems to be a view—a politically correct attack to close down debate—that runs simply: either a person is for international aid and therefore in favour of the Bill, or they are against international aid and therefore oppose the Bill. It is an all-or-nothing argument. If someone criticises Britain’s huge, often mismanaged aid budget, they are accused of not wanting to help the neediest in the world. It is designed to cover up mistakes in the overseas aid budget and ignore shortfalls. This politically correct campaign has allowed international aid to linger as such an inefficient part of Government spending, without sufficient checks or proper rigour.

I believe that humanitarian aid is very important. It provides relief for people who suffer from acute distress following conflict, famine, natural disasters and other emergencies. That work is vital. This country has always stepped up to its responsibilities, and I have no doubt it will always do so, when it sees images around the world of tragedies taking place. However, I am sceptical about the aid that dominates more than nine tenths of official aid spending—development aid. It is the predominance of this aid spending that we are mainly focusing on here. This aid offers continuous support to recipient countries in the areas of education, health, water and sanitation, government and civil society, economic infrastructure, economic production, debt relief and other things across many different Departments.

We have to consider the country’s financial position. Thanks to considerable overspends over many years by the Labour party, we have a huge debt mountain, and scandalously our debt payments are still as big as the budget of one of the biggest Departments. I hope that the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill will allow me to say that, because of the disastrous way in which the former Chancellor and previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, ran this country, it seems that he was determined to make us a recipient of international aid rather than a contributor to it.

At a time of national austerity, it seems to me sensible that we would want to reduce the aid spending given to other countries. It would not have been a bad thing even to have frozen aid spending to other countries, but to increase it massively, as we have done, at the same time as we are making the case that we have no money and have to cut spending everywhere and cut our cloth accordingly, is completely and utterly ridiculous.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I personally think that if my constituents were asked for what area it was more important to guarantee a certain level of expenditure—the NHS or overseas aid; the defence budget or overseas aid; the police budget or overseas aid; the education budget or overseas aid?—the overseas aid budget would come off second best in any head-to-head contest. Lord only knows why on earth people in this place think that the public believe uniquely that this particular Government Department should have its funding increased massively and then protected at that level. To be perfectly honest, I think they all need to get out more.

[Pamela Nash]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

I am not giving way to the hon. Lady.

We are not even spending taxpayers’ money. We keep on talking about how important it is to spend taxpayers’ money wisely, but we are not spending that money. We do not have any money. When will people understand that even now we are borrowing? Even after the Chancellor’s welcome measures, we are still borrowing £100 billion a year. We are not in a position to spend 0.7% of our GNI on overseas aid, because it is actually much more than that. What we are doing is borrowing money from other countries, paying interest on it to then hand it over to other countries. At the start of this Parliament, we were in the ludicrous situation of borrowing huge sums of money from China in order to give China overseas aid to help that country to get along. It could hardly be made up. No wonder most of my constituents think that the people here are round the bend.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

Are we going to take into account the debt interest that we will have to incur on the money we are spending on overseas aid? Is that going to be taken into account as part of the 0.7%, or is that on top of the 0.7% that we are actually handing over? As I made clear in my intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), the idea that we even know what we are spending is a complete nonsense as well, because the goalposts are always moving. It was first supposed to be 0.7% of GDP; now we are told it is 0.7% of GNI; and in the autumn of this year, apparently, how GNI is calculated is going to be changed, which will mean an upward revision to GNI, making our aid as a proportion of GNI lower so that we will have to spend even more on overseas aid to hit our 0.7% target.

[Pamela Nash]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

No, I will not.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden provided some of the history. I recommend the 6th report of the Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs for the Session 2010 to 2012, which was a marvellous report on the effectiveness of overseas aid. This all dates back to the UN General Assembly of 1970. The idea that this target is somehow well thought through and relevant to today’s needs and environment is complete and utter nonsense. The target was first plucked out of the air 44 years ago. The idea that it is likely to be the right one to use now is for the birds. It is completely nonsensical to think that the right target in 1970 automatically must be the right target in 2014, when the world is so different.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

No, I am not giving way again. The last intervention was so poor that I do not think it justifies another one.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden mentioned opinion polls and public support for these things. A YouGov-Cambridge poll in 2011 made clear the public’s opinion. The following question was asked:

“Along with spending on the NHS, the international aid budget is the only area of government spending that is not facing cuts. The government has promised to increase this budget by one third to 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) in line with international agreements signed previously. Generally speaking, how favourable or unfavourable are you towards this policy?”

Some 56% of those asked were unfavourable, and only 9% considered themselves to be very favourable to it.

When asked if they would support or oppose a freeze on spending on international development—at the level as it was then in 2011—69% of people said they supported a freeze. Also, 69% of respondents said international aid fails to reach ordinary people in the developing world and is wasted by corrupt Governments; 49% believed international aid enhances the power of bad Governments in developing countries; and 55% thought it discourages Governments in developing countries from spending money on their own people.

Those statistics mirror the feedback that I get from my constituents when we talk about spending on overseas aid. They understand the fact that this country has no money, that we are borrowing and spending way beyond our means and that we have to tighten our belts. They therefore find it extraordinary that we are spending about £4 billion a year more on overseas aid than we were in 2010. That is completely nonsensical and unjustifiable.

The Bill proves that overseas aid does not work. I remember going to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) to discuss these issues a few years ago. I told him that I would have more sympathy for overseas aid if he adopted a policy in which we considered the situation in every country individually and decided how we could help it to better itself by establishing a programme that would last for a certain number of years, after which we would expect it to have sorted out its governance and corruption. After that point, our assistance would eventually tail off and the country would stand on its own two feet and head off into the future.

If that were the Government’s policy on overseas aid, I would have some sympathy for it. I would want to scrutinise it, of course, but it seems pretty reasonable. However, the Bill does not propose that we do that; it proposes the exact opposite. It says that we are going to spend the same amount of money every single year in perpetuity. That is basically an acceptance that our assistance will fail, that it will not turn around a country’s fortunes or deal with the causes of poverty, and that it will just be a hand-out to make a few middle-class, Guardian-reading, sandal-wearing, lentil-eating do-gooders with a misguided guilt complex feel better about themselves. It will do nothing to alleviate the real causes of poverty in those countries.

We know that the current system does not work. We have been pouring tens of billions of pounds a year into Africa, year in, year out. How much further forward is Africa today, compared with when we started pouring in those tens of billions of pounds? It is barely any further forward at all—

[Pamela Nash]

Rubbish!

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Lady will not shout across the Chamber, no matter how much noise the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) is making.