“… The Coalition's plans to increase the overseas aid budget have come in for considerable criticism. But there is a largely unremarked element to this issue. Ours is an economy chronically short of aggregate demand and overseas aid is spent abroad. My suggestion is that the aid budget is suspended and its resources diverted to domestic spending”- (Keynesian) Economist, Roger Bootle
THE PRIME MINISTER has promised £800 million to fund vaccines in the Third – whoops! sorry, I meant, Developing World. Mr Cameron made his announcement while speaking at the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi) in London this morning. Having promised not only to ring fence the Overseas Aid Budget (OAB), but to increase it from £8 billion to £12 billion per annum over the next four years; he sought, no doubt, to both impress Bill Gates as well as seek ownership of the bragging rights for being the prime minister who committed so much of his country’s tax payers income to such a project.
The trouble with politicians from all parties today, is that they forget where the money they are spending comes from. The Conservative Party never used to suffer from such a memory loss, as they were brought up to understand money and believe in its importance to people’s lives. Big government meant big taxes; this in turn meant taking from people an ever increasing portion of the money they worked all week to earn. Politicians, especially Tory ones, were careful therefore, about how much they would put into the Treasury coffers.
The Party prided itself on being the Party of low taxation who believed that the people should decide for themselves where and how to spend their own money. It was arrogant, therefore, that Mr Cameron should announce so blithely his intention of sprinkling like confetti the people’s taxes from a department of state the people believe must shut down for the duration of our current economic crises,
Overseas aid must not be allowed to assume such a degree of importance that it is allowed to be spent without limit, while other departments of state closer to the people’s hearts, like Defence and Education, are told to make serious cutbacks in their revenues.
Like all families who give privately to charities, they give what they can afford when they are in a financial position to do so. If we froze the OAB budget and used its income as a means of decreasing our multi-billion pound debt, then the sooner this country will be able to afford both the increases in the OAB, as well as all the other spending departments within government, that the people support.
THE OAB is being used by the prime minister to dispel the people’s image of his party as the “Nasty Party”. In other words, the OAB has become a device for deconstructing past impressions of British Conservatism, by turning the Party into a friendly-fuzzy concoction, whose architects are PR gurus, pollsters and media savvy types, who probably impressed upon David Cameron when he came to power, the need to ‘modernise’ the Party’s philosophy as well as its image.
The problem is, is that the British people are living through such restrictive times that they would prefer the old model to the new. After all, the new model never secured an overhaul majority and had to go into coalition last year.
Cameron’s announcement today will no doubt please the ears of Bill Gates as well as liberals everywhere – in the metropolis that is. But the British people believe that charity should begin at home. If, instead of promising £800 million to a programme of vaccinations, he had instead sought to encourage people to dig into their own pockets freely, and to do so generously, then the amount taken from the public purse may not have been equalled, but at least the people would have had a say in its giving.
It is said that Gavi are after some £3 billion pounds in order to secure the protection of millions of children against fatal childhood diseases.
It is appalling that so many children are sent prematurely to their maker. But – and yes, there is always a But – such tragedy cannot be compensated for from the public purse. As with all such needs, private donors and rich philanthropists must be the main source of funding in difficult economic times. This is why, rightly, other countries have had to consider their own people and their diminished circumstances, and put those before any other country. This does not mean that they do not care, but it does mean that the ball has been put in the court of the people themselves to give what they can.
An example of the success of such an approach has been the £100 million collected on behalf of Help For Heroes since it began some 3 years ago. The charity, which sees that our young servicemen and women injured in Afghanistan or any other conflict the politicians see fit to send them, are adequately looked after once they return home.
In difficult times, the state must take a back seat when giving away tax payer’s money, and allow the traditional sources of giving to take the helm until the finances of this country, in particular, have been sorted out.
After all, to be cynical, our prime minister, like all of those who came before and will come after him, have and will continue to oversee 250,000 abortions carried out each year with little of the razzmatazz given to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, on show today in London.
This irony will no doubt be lost on the attendees at Gavi; but then abortion is purely a feminist issue that no male politician dare challenge.
WE, AS A NATION, have little to reproach ourselves for regarding what our government gives and has given, so generously, to the Developing World on our behalf. But this generosity is being questioned by the people of this country who see our defences being undermined while the OAB is being increased.
We are being told, for instance, that we will have to share a French carrier, as our one and only new carrier will take another decade to enter service; while at the same time we have put our two existing carriers up for sale; on E-bay? We have also dismissed our harrier force and would have done the same with our Tornado bombers, had not the Libyan crisis intervened to save them.
The first duty of any government in the modern world, is the protection and defence of its people. But this ‘Conservative’? led Coalition has reneged upon this ‘social contract’ and seen fit to uphold and increase, rather than decrease spending on overseas aid - that one department of state that exists to help none-British citizens.
David Cameron has, I suggest, allowed the runes that were offered up to him by the various media folk he was greeted with upon his election to the leadership of a once great party, to dominate his and the party’s itinerary.
I believe that, rather than the Labour Party, the Conservative Party faces the greatest challenge to its survival because of the direction David Cameron has taken it. In the short term he will be courted by various liberal celebrities – that modern phenomenon that began with Harold Wilson - but such a constituency means very little to the voter nowadays.
If we are to put our economic house in order then difficult decisions have to be made. But if a difficult decision needs to be avoided – like the one on defence, then, in the interests of the British people, surely the one spending department that can have its assets frozen, is the one department that seeks to proffer no help the British people.
OVERSEAS AID is important. But not to the extent of sacrificing the budgets of British departments of state. David Cameron will be remembered, not for his generosity toward other nations, but for his energetic, and some will say, ruthless attack upon the budgets of his various ministers whose provinces are the various departments of state that encompass the governance and defence, and only the governance and defence, of the United Kingdom.
David Cameron’s background should have ill-equipped him for the leadership of a traditional Conservative party. But his party were silenced by the achievements of Tony Blair and his leadership of the Labour Party. The Conservatives looked at Cameron and decided that he best represented their party’s best interest and opportunity to govern once more.
How wrong they were. The Conservative Party today have become a kind of liberalista that treats its right-wing as a fungal infection that cannot be curtailed by antibiotics.
The modern ‘Conservative Party’ is no such thing, and the sooner its traditional elements realises it, then the sooner it can claim back those members who have, in ever greater number, voted for UKIP.
Conservatism is just what it says on the label. It believes in tradition, as well as our nation and its history. But the modern variant dismisses all such components, and chooses to lead the country away from nationhood into a European Federal structure where nationhood finds only its graveyard.
For centuries, our heroes, as Churchill was want to describe them, kept these isles afloat as a nation. Nationhood exemplified the character and culture of its citizens. It mattered little which nation and which citizens…all nationhood and its citizens shared the same legitimacy.
OUR FIRST CONSIDERATION is to ourselves and to no other. Our politicians first duty is to their country and its people. They cannot use the taxes they collect in a way that suggest that they are dispersing taxes as if they were part of their own private wealth; as seems to be the case with Cameron’s £800 million ‘gift’ to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation.
It is Cameron’s duty to stay loyal to the people and country he was elected to serve. If he finds himself in conflict with such a centuries old traditional arrangement because of his commitment, not only to his ring-fencing of oversees aid, but actually to increasing it in opposition to the wishes of the vast majority of the electorate in such difficult times, then he must take the consequences.
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