Britain’s apparent determination not only to commit national
suicide but to drag as much as possible of the developing world
down with it, gathers pace with the latest largesse to be showered
on various Third World regimes.
These recipients of Britain’s generosity are not simply
corrupt — Indonesia has been notoriously corrupt, but though the
local generals have pocketed a percentage of the aid money which
they have received, projects have been built, and living standards
have risen. The recipients of British aid, however, include not
just corrupt dictatorships, but blood-soaked tyrannies whose rulers
not only make no serious effort at development, but probably have
no concept of it.
That it will buy Britain any good will is a pipe dream,
and that it will result on any positive improvement in the
recipient countries’ living conditions or democratic institutions
is probably even less likely.
The planned jump in aid has been damned by the
Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, charged with overseeing
Government spending, which added that the Department of
International Development had a “poor understanding” of the scale
and likelihood of aid being lost to fraud. The chairman of the PAC,
Labour MP and former minister Margaret Hodge, has
said:
“The department is going to be spending more in fragile
and conflict-affected countries and the danger to the taxpayer is
that there could be an increase in fraud and corruption.
“However, the department could not even give us
information as to the expected levels of fraud and corruption and
the action they were taking to mitigate it.”
Prime Minister David Cameron — apparently motivated by a
confused desperation to have the Conservative Party shed a “nasty”
image — has pledged that foreign aid will rise by about 34 percent
from 8.4 billion pounds this year to 12.6 billion pounds in 2015,
equal to 479 pounds — or about $1,000 — for every household in
Britain. For a country is a deep economic crisis this is looks like
not only madness, but a direct betrayal of its own
people.
The countries concerned include the following, as listed
in the Daily Mail:
• Burma, with one of the worst human rights records in the
world, comparable to communist countries in the days of Stalinism,
including genocide, will receive an increase of 82 percent to 185
million pounds. Its government is a peculiarly toxic cocktail of
militarism and socialism, there is no political liberty and
development remains mired in hopeless stagnation. There is a story
from a few years ago that one Burmese signatory was allowed to
travel to Singapore for medical treatment and broke down weeping
when he saw what capitalism had achieved.
• Somalia, a hopeless failed state and pirate
headquarters, will receive an increase of 205 percent, to 250
million pounds by 2015. It is reckoned to be not just corrupt, but
to be the most corrupt nation on Earth.
• Yemen will have its aid approximately
doubled from 46.7 million pounds to 90 million pounds a year,
despite being a breeding ground for Al Qaeda terrorists.
• Zimbabwe, under the demented tyrant Robert Mugabe, does
best of all, with an increase in aid of 70 million pounds to 350
million pounds. A genocidal war was carried out by Mugabe against
the Northern Ndebele (Matabele) tribe, using North Korean-trained
troops. Torture in police cells is taken for granted. Once among
the most prosperous food-growing countries in Africa, it has been
reduced to destitution by Mugabe’s policy of confiscating mostly
white-owned farms to redistribute among his cronies.
James Delingpole has written in the highly respected
Daily Telegraph:
The biggest recipient of our foreign aid largesse is
currently Pakistan, to which over the next four
years, we will be sending a total of £1.4
billion. This is roughly the same amount that Pakistan has
earmarked to spend on a new fleet of
Chinese-made submarines; these will
go nicely with the two squadrons of Chinese J-10
fighters which Pakistan has also bought at a
cost of $1.4 billion. So, in effect, our foreign aid donations are
helping to underwrite the military expansion of the country which
until recently was shielding the world’s number one Islamist
terrorist, organised the massacre in Bombay and is doing so much to
fund the Taliban insurgency killing and maiming our forces in
Afghanistan.
Still, at least [Britain] is winning hearts and minds in
Afghanistan, with spectacular projects like the
amusement park and ferris wheel in Lashkar Gar
(pop: 100,000) which you, dear taxpayer, cheerfully funded with a
mere £420,000 of your hard earned dosh. One day a week, it’s Women
Only day. That’ll certainly put paid to any funny ideas the Taliban
may have of taking over the country as soon as we’ve made our
ignominious departure: “You have the watches; we have the time;
but, aieeee, nooo, we cannot compete with your secret propaganda
weapon: impressive views of the green zone from a precariously
swinging chair while struggling to eat candy floss through a
burka.”
I said Britain seemed determined to drag the developing
world down with it, and while I admit this is somewhat hyperbolic,
it is not entirely so. This aid tends to be not merely useless, it
is actively destructive. At best, the aid removes incentives for
the local rulers to develop their own economies and tax-bases, at
worse it will help finance, or make other monies available to
finance, armies, secret police and torture chambers. All this is
also, of course, in addition to the aid contributed by
non-Governmental organizations, whose quality is extremely
variable.
Also, this is despite desperate economic problems at home.
Although the exact numbers are hard to know, there are repeated
reports of old-age pensioners freezing to death because of the cost
of fuel bills, which are set to soar again.
The care of inmates of aged-care homes has been the cause
of one scandal after another and I would guess that a push for
euthanasia to save public money in the near future is all but
inevitable. I will try not to again so soon mount my hobby horse of
Britain’s gutted defense forces, except to mention that a few years
ago it had more men in Germany, in the Army of the Rhine, than it
has in all three services combined today. I have also been informed
that the four aircraft defending the Falkland Islands are for
ground-support, not air-defense — in other words the Falklands
defenses are even weaker than I realized.
Many other thing adds up to an appalling loss of national
self-respect, symbolized by the loss of even the Royal Yacht,
Britannia, hulked in Scotland as a relic, and perched as
it were, on top of the rubble of cultural ruin. Refitting it to
modern standards would have cost, according to one estimate, about
11 million pounds, a small fraction of the amount which has been
squandered on the useless Millennium Dome or will be squandered on
the Olympic Games (the best British Olympics, the “austerity games”
held directly after the war, were run on a shoe string).
I am prepared for a chorus of voices claiming this is not
the time — if there is ever a time — to be spending money on as
Royal Yacht (unlike Pakistani submarines), but nations live in part
by symbols that reinforce national pride and self-respect, and
Britannia, before it became a symbol of defeat, despair
and decline, did this beautifully (the left hated it). As a bit of
swank it was usually commanded by an Admiral rather than a mere
Captain.
It has also had a record of practical use as a floating
trade exhibition, and conference venue — the Royal Family actually
used it only for a small part of the time — and refurbishing it
would have given a little valuable work to Britain’s moribund
shipyards, with their miles of empty and derelict docks and
slipways.
