Published: May 17th 2011 - at 10:45 amWill the Foreign Aid commitment be another Cameron u-turn?
contribution by Owen Tudor
I’ve expressed scepticism before about the Government’s commitment to meet the UN target for overseas aid by 2013.
With the news that Defence Secretary Liam Fox has raised concerns about the pledge suggests that we are seeing the beginning of the end for that commitment.
Although Fox has said he is only concerned about tying the Government’s hands, that is the whole point of enshrining the commitment in law.
And it’s worth remembering that the pledge was in both the Labour and Conservative manifestoes, and was part of the coalition agreement.
The Prime Minister’s pledge that the commitment will be met rings slightly hollow – especially as time is running out for the Government to legislate in this Parliamentary session.
Is this going to be yet another broken promise to add to the list?
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Reader comments
I don’t know. I think the 0.7% commitment is such a key part of Hilton’s detoxification programme, and has been restated so many times, that they would find it hard to row back on it. As I understand it, the big real terms increase isn’t scheduled to happen until the last year of the Coalition, by which time they’re obviously hoping that the departmental budgets will be a bit slacker.
I tend to think of this as Fox doing his usual Thatcherite attention-grabbing act for the benefit of disgruntled Tory backbenchers.
It’s notable that this wavering on foreign aid comes at the same time as a disgusting proposal to give preferential treatment to ex-soldiers and their families – allocating health and housing on the basis of job instead of on the basis of need. Soldiers will apparently get preferential access to IVF if they have sustained genital injuries. Why they should be preferred among other people who may equally well have sustained genital injuries in the course of work, leisure or an assault hasn’t been explained. And why schools with significant numbers of soldiers’ children should get extra funding – again, instead of the progressive principle of allocating on the basis of need – hasn’t been explained either. Unless the left stands up against this kind of reactionary nonsense, there isn’t a lot of hope.
I suspect you won’t see a retreat from the headline policy but rather a continuation of the current rather sneaky practice of transferring line items from the FCO to DFID.
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- Liberal Conspiracy
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Most British ppl resent AID abroad. Trade better
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- Demands for Ken Clarke’s head over rape comments, Cameron pushes NHS reforms and an elected chamber for the Lords?: round up of political blogs for 14 May – 20 May | British Politics and Policy at LSE
[...] ponders the political consequences of the spat and Liberal Conspiracy wonders whether this will prompt another U-turn from the PM. David Taylor at Left Foot Forward writes an open letter to David Cameron to remind [...]
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