Delingpole: Britain Has Cut Its Foreign Aid Budget. Good!

A government minister you’ve never ever heard of – Baroness Sugg, anyone? – has resigned in protest because the UK has reduced its foreign aid budget by £5 billion.

Sugg isn’t the only one who is upset.

Also weeping buckets is the dripping wet ‘Conservative’ commentator Tim Montgomerie.

And we can only imagine the upset it has caused the five former Prime Ministers who lined up beforehand to say what a disaster this would be for Britain’s international reputation.

What planet do these people live on?

Out here in the real world, no one gives a stuff that Britain’s aid budget has been reduced from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 per cent GDP.

Given the chance, we’d probably prefer it were reduced to zero percent of GDP. And for a number of perfectly good reasons.

First, we know that the UK’s foreign aid budget invariably gets squandered on green gesture politics, corruption and other wasteful endeavours, such as the £500,000 wasted on a Chinese-language version of Shaun the Sheep.

Second, Britain’s economy is tanking after suffering a 10 per cent collapse – its worst in 300 years. There’s no money left in the kitty to waste on foreigners.

Third, as Dambisa Moyo and others have persuasively argued, foreign aid often does more harm than good – creating dependency, hoovering up the best local talent, stifling entrepreneurship and so on.

Here’s the thing though: Britain could still very easily have afforded to keep that foreign aid budget intact — indeed it could have doubled it — if it weren’t so busy squandering billions on Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s crazed coronavirus schemes.

But Britain didn’t and is now paying a hefty economic price which we will be ruing for generations. And still those in the Westminster bubble — both politicos and squishy commentators alike — are bleating about how wrong it is that Britain is no longer spending money it doesn’t have on foreigners that don’t need it.

Is it any wonder, with this mismatch in thinking between the political/media class and the general populace, we are so doomed?