As The Guardian reported yesterday:
The UK's drastically diminished aid budget is the “new normal,” the development minister, Jenny Chapman, has said, as she claimed Labour's approach would help repair voters' faith in overseas aid.
Jenny Chapman - a failed Labour politician who is a Baroness, and who is rumoured to be close to Starmer - is talking total drivel. To contextualise this, the Guardian noted:
Lady Chapman took up her post in February, after Anneliese Dodds resigned in protest at Keir Starmer's decision to slash overseas aid spending to 0.3% of gross national income from 0.5%, to pay for increased defence spending.
In other words, although the UK has immense privilege, which it has and still does exploit to extract considerable value from what are called developing nations, and although it still runs a chain of tax havens which are used to loot many such places with varying forms of supposed legitimacy, we really do not think we can bear responsibility for the consequences any more, or are required to hand just a little back.
Compassion has gone.
Soft power has been abandoned.
Responsibility is so out-of-date now.
And as for meeting obligations created not long ago, including that to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid, all that has been forgotten.
Worse still, up to 30% of the aid budget is spent in the UK on managing migrants: this does not come out of domestic spending but is charged to the account of the rest of the world, who lose out as a result.
All of this is staggeringly shortsighted, not only for our status in the world, but also for our international relationships, the promotion of supposed Western values, and for the sake of our international businesses, who will now so often lose out to Chinese competition as a result. It also makes us seem an utterly unreliable partner. And when many of the programmes are crucial to development, it seems like we just do not care.
All of that happens so that Rachel can balance the books, and the Cult of Nigel can be appeased.
What is Starmer playing at? If he wanted to destroy the standing of the UK in the world, he is going about it in the right way.
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This seems like focus group influence gone mad.
We have learnt nothing from BREXIT even though many, many people are waking up from under its spell.
Kindness is no longer a consideration in the politics of the Labour Party. I think I was originally attracted to Labour as a young man because they seemed kinder than the alternatives.
That has now gone.
Say what you like about Jeremy Corbyn, but he has kindness running through him, and so did most of the people around him during his leadership.
That is now completely absent from Labour, although some of it can still be found languishing on the back benches in the form of people like Nadia Whittome and Zarah Sultana, who has been turfed out of the party of course.
How long before we “cannot afford” to keep the World Service?
And we are clearly well down the road of not being able to afford the NHS or a decent education service.
Starmer / Reeves appear to have zero ability to understand the implications of their small minded obsession with the Red Wall and a small balanced budget.
It is stupid to spend the aid budget on putting up people seeking asylum in hotels and hostels in the UK. That is dealing with a symptom not a cause. We need to address the upstream factors that push people to leave the place where they live. War, pestilence, famine. And poverty.
Why else are people fleeing Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Bangladesh, Syria, India, Vietnam, Sudan, Eritrea, Iraq.
Agreed
War, pestilence, famine, poverty – all the results of our post imperial meddling (along with other Western states) in countries we seek to influence and exploit for our own benefit, not theirs (though doubtless we see ourselves as missionaries for “enlightened” neoliberal economics, while pretending to “humanitarian concerns” for problems we often concoct and manipulate ourselves).
I expect to pay income tax as a percentage of my incomes (after the usual allowances). Why will our present ministers not accept that the UK should pay a percentage of GDP to the poorest, often desperate, countries? From 1968 on there has been a general acceptance among most developed countries of the target for overseas aid; now it seems the UK government has unilaterally chosen not to carry on like that. In the 60s and 70s we had some enlightened and forceful aid ministers, from both Conservatives and Labour (Judith Hart, Reg Prentice, several others). Now we have dimwitted place(wo)men with no moral principles. Ugh.
I have just listened to two hours of unremitting, demonstrably, provably failed Neoliberal economic Unionist tropes masquerading as BBC Radio Scotland news today, notably with extended interviews of Tom Farmer and Michael Gove. The tropes are banalities, trivial sound bites, bereft of substance.
Private capital has had nearly fifty years to invest in Britain, and hasn’t done so. If Gove and Farmer wish to see what proven failure looks like, they need to inspect more closely the ropy propositions they pass off as solutions. When Farmer talks about Red Tape, start with the tens of thousands tied by a mortgage to live in a fire hazard. Grenfell is what happens when Red Tape becomes a casualty to the indulgence of unregulated business. Britain has been failed by it’s own business leadership. Gove and Farmer are like the drunk who insists on looking for his car keys one night, under the nearest lamp standard; because that it the only place he has any light.
Well, I take the point about the incoherence of slashing ‘red tape’ (i.e. replacing it with more profitable red tape), and Gove certainly is a repellent character but Farmer – who died a couple of weeks ago – seems to have been a pretty decent sort, much admired across the community.
Apologies are due. It was Tom Hunter. No idea why I wrote ‘Farmer’, or even how I managed to write it; perhaps the recent news of Tom Farmer’s passing had somehow stuck in my mind. I wrote my comment quickly on my phone, and I loathe the silly little keyboard, the sillier little screen, yet all for an inconvenient, oversized lump of equipment that fits no known clothing well; and all the swiping, and everything else about this egregious technology. Well that is my inadequate excuse for an unfortunate, and incorrect reference to the wrong person.
I find it exceptionally difficult to write on my phone.
An iPad travels with me all the time.
I watched Tom Hunter being given a platform to talk nonsense on the Sunday Show yesterday. What a clueless idiot! “ Scotland should learn from Ireland And Singapore”! He repeated this mantra a number of times. Martin Geisler, interviewing, failed to point out that both are independent states who can set their own taxes, interest rates etc. I have heard Hunter on this theme before. Clueless is the only word for him.
Singapore is also, in effect, a dictatorship where there is massive state ownership of housing, infrastructure and business. This is usually ignored.
Way back in the early 1980s I read Ron Sider’s “Rich Christians in an age of Hunger” (1978),
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL667544M/Rich_Christians_in_an_age_of_hunger
in which he discussed ideas such as a graduated tithe (the more you earned the higher % you gave away), the idea that your rate of giving should dictate your lifestyle, not your income, and of course, there was also that UN target of 0.7% for overseas aid.
That seemed like a pipe-dream for years, then got a boost with the Jubilee Debt Campaign 2000 and unbelievably, it arrived, in 2013, under the Tory PM Cameron and became statutory in 2015.
To see the whole concept of UK overseas aid disappear under a LINO government at a time of accelerating global crisis, is even more unbelievable. I can’t begin to express how angry, sick and disgusted I am with Starmer and his team, and how ashamed I feel as a UK citizen. It’s as if Starmer took my youthful idealism and crapped all over it.
I hold every single member of the LINO government in utter contempt, and expect nothing less from back-benchers than rebellion in the lobbies.
Much to agree with
I wonder if all of this is not just part of the fact that, here in the west, the neoliberal order and its capitalist basis is crumbling in the face of global resource depletion, inequity and, increasingly, climate change and the change in mindset of the regions of the planet we have traditionally plundered to sustain our corporations.,
The owners of the bulk of the remaining resources, particularly in Asia and Africa, (the second largest continent on the planet by population and area) , are realising there are alternatives to persistently succumbing to exploitation of their resources and people, the effect of which has to be to accelerate the collapse of the neoliberal economic order. (not before time, I feel).
But I suppose it is easier to keep on pretending that we can somehow tinker with our flawed system to make it all better than to recognise, politically, ideologically and economically, that it is reaching a point where it is simply no longer operable and must collapse and therefore to stop and take on the hard work of devising and moving to a functional, sustainable alternative.
The argument might be that it would not be feasible to take the public on that journey, because it would resist. But I think the argument would be no more than a sophistry – my riposte would be that, if the media could be used so successfully to drag the public into the unsustainable neoliberal misery of feudal economic slavery and consumption that currently passes for society and life in the west, well then, it could also be used to propel the public into a more meaningful and sustainable future that didn’t depend on economic enslavement of the workforce and plunder of the planet.