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Priti Patel, the UK’s secretary of state for international development
Priti Patel, the UK’s secretary of state for international development. ‘The old regime embroiled Britain in scandal and left poor countries with dams and military hardware, no help for ordinary people. Ms Patel appears to hanker for that era.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
Priti Patel, the UK’s secretary of state for international development. ‘The old regime embroiled Britain in scandal and left poor countries with dams and military hardware, no help for ordinary people. Ms Patel appears to hanker for that era.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The Guardian view on development aid: do it better, but do it

This article is more than 7 years old
Priti Patel, DfID’s new secretary of state, appears ideologically opposed to the work of her department. She needs reminding of the millions of lives that aid has saved and improved

The statement that follows is highly unfashionable, yet is nonetheless true: one of the things modern Britons can be proudest of is their country’s achievements in international development. Thanks to British aid and development over the last few years, two million more girls are attending school in Pakistan. With the help of British funding, villagers in the Democratic Republic of Congo will be able to travel to a hospital, using stretches of 1,800km of roads that were previously almost impassable. UK aid has saved the lives of 50,000 women during pregnancy and 250,000 newborn babies.

Put simply, British development money has saved, changed and improved millions of lives in the past five years alone. Looking for a field in which the UK is a world-beater? Aid is certainly one. Britain is among a handful of countries to have hit the UN’s target of giving 0.7% of its national income to overseas development. And the creation in 1997 of the Department for International Development has given Britain a repository of expertise heeded around the world. To find some of his beloved “soft power”, Boris Johnson should trundle a short distance up Whitehall to the DfID offices.

It is worth spelling this out, partly because there has been a chorus of protest for months in parts of the media, complaining of “foreign aid madness”: a campaign complete with outlandish examples, some “simply incorrect” stories (according to DfID officials) – and convenient silence on the positive case for spending on aid. Incredibly, the new secretary of state for international development appears to sympathise. Before taking up the job, Priti Patel called for DfID to be shut down. Since moving into the post, she has talked about aid money being squandered. She has appointed as one of her aides a luminary of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, an organisation that can always be relied on to provide a cheap quote to a Sunday newspaper about some aid “scam” or other. And this week she threatened to cut funding to organisations such as the World Bank. If one of Britain’s proudest recent achievements is its leadership on development, Ms Patel stands on the verge of a massive act of national vandalism.

It matters all the more because talks are under way at the OECD in Paris directed at legitimising the diversion of development aid into the private sector. That is not inevitably a bad thing, except that the record of the private sector on schools and healthcare is at the least patchy, and there is not much of a private sector in the very poorest places.

Challenged last month by fellow MPs to quantify how much aid money is “stolen or wasted”, Ms Patel could not. She says she wants to spend aid money on the “world’s poorest people” while also delivering it “in our national interest”, promoting trading relationships. That implies her focus will be on middle-income countries such as India and China: giant economies with cash to buy British goods and services.

It was those countries that her predecessor, Justine Greening, deemed too rich to deserve British aid. In the late 1990s, the UK broke the old corrupt rules which stated that rich countries give poor governments money to buy things (notably arms) from rich countries. That old regime embroiled Britain in scandal and left poor countries with dams and military hardware, no help for ordinary people. Ms Patel appears to hanker for that era.

Theresa May is committed to maintain aid spending; Ms Patel is, at the moment, prevented by law from doing trade-for-aid deals. But the positive case for aid is not being made. Unmentioned go the obligations that Britain has to poorer countries, because of the damage it has caused through empire, climate change and pernicious supply chains. Perhaps hamstrung by the lobbying laws or the need to secure their own DfID funding, Oxfam, ActionAid and the like are mutely allowing the new minister and her supporters to trash the case for aid. How best to do development aid is always open to evaluation. That it needs doing should not be. The NGOs must get their act together, fast.

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