The elephant that may yet do for the PM
IT’S the elephant in the room, isn’t it? The Government’s commitment to increasing foreign aid at a time when our economy is in such dire straits that the Bank of England says there will be no economic growth at home this year.
And yet David Cameron is standing by his pledge to increase the foreign aid budget by 37 per cent over the life of this parliament to around £12billion.
When questioned by a tearful cancer patient on a radio phone-in this week, a 68-year-old woman who has been refused drugs which would prolong her life, because they cost too much, the PM was uncomfortable but stuck to his guns.
He said it was a moral obligation to help the poorest people in the world.
But isn’t a government’s biggest moral obligation to the most vulnerable in its own country – those in poor health and the elderly, whose treatment in care homes and at the hands of the NHS is frighteningly inadequate? And that’s the elephant in the room.
Talk about reducing foreign aid and you risk being called nasty and ungenerous. Bob Geldolf will shout at you (from his position of great wealth) and tell you you are being selfish and disgusting. Because caring for your own people is not seen as being saintly. Caring for the poor of other nations most definitely is.
There’s a kind of high-handed snobbery to David Cameron’s position
There’s a kind of high-handed snobbery to David Cameron’s position.
It makes him and his Government feel good about themselves when they pledge to increase foreign aid even when our economy is a shambles and people are suffering here too. Saying you are giving away massive amounts in international aid is like spending the money on a self-serving advertising campaign.
“Look how nice we are,” the Conservatives are saying. “We’re no longer ‘the nasty party’ [as Theresa May once put it]. We are not the ‘toxic Tories’ you took us for. We’ve changed, we’re kind and caring.” Well tell that to “Anna”, the poor woman in tears as she told the PM that she couldn’t understand why he was giving away so much money abroad while she is dying of cancer because the NHS won’t pay for her drugs and her husband is in a care home because he is so ill and she can’t look after him.
And these are people who have paid their taxes all their lives.
It is typically arrogant of Cameron to say we have a moral obligation to the poorest countries. Yes of course we have but why raise the amount so enormously when the Government is busy cutting everything here at home?
And what about the £300million a year we give to India, a country which has its own space project and a defence budget that makes ours look puny?
I have a feeling Mr Cameron will soon find the elephant in the room, like the foreign aid budget, has grown so enormous that there won’t be enough room in Downing Street for them both.
