About the Foreign Aid Increase in the Spending Review.

The spending review this week was hardly surprising, depressing yes but not totally a unexpected result, massive public sector cuts, binning a few quangos, typical stuff a free market fan like Gideon Osbourne would do if he was chancellor. However one surprise was the pledge to increase the foreign aid budget to 0.7 % of the national income (7 to 11.5 bn) by 2014 to meet the target of the UN oversees development assistance, the UK being the first major industrialised nation to do so. This has gone down about as well as a man doing a massive diarrhea splodge in a jacuzzi with some of the Tory grassroots, with the Conservative Home website showing that 70 percent (1145 Tory members surveyed) thought it was the "wrong idea", and was the item on the review most opposed by them. It was always going to be a controversial measure, it is no surprise that the grassroots, and others were not exactly going to start jumping up and down the streets like mad people in sheer unvarnished joy about it. I'd well imagine that some of the thousand surveyed would recommend that the foreign aid budget should be somewhere between zero and nothing. The rhetorical question "why should we increase aid when we are in a bad state in the UK?" has been bandied about, along with the quintessential "charity begins at home" (should it end there?). These statements are more an attitude I think than an objective statement. You really either believe in it or you don't, when that lady in Nottingham asked just this, I doubt Camerons response changed her mind all that much. So why did they decide to increase it then? Why do something that was inevitably going to piss off the more grassroots elements?

In some ways freezing the aid budget, or even cutting it (at the least below inflation) would have been a simplistic way of winning a few votes. The Coalition has shown that it will throw in a gimmick or two to please the punters, Phillip Hammond axing the M4 bus lane anyone? I myself couldn't fathom why they increased it - though I support the decision to do so. Even not taking into account the basic human empathy side of it, it is ridiculous to think that we can just ignore the social consequences of global poverty in our globalised world, it just doesn't work like that. But then I sort of figured out one of the motivations why they have increased it, and it may be to do with the cuts to the military. Some of the more knowledgeable commentators of this kind of thing than me (aka every living human being) on the spending review have indicated that the Coalition is aiming to try a more "carrot" than "stick" approach to places like Afghanistan, using money to win over the populations, rather than costly (both financially and human) military force. Indeed some charities are worried that some of the more traditional recipients of UK aid will end up losing out as they aren't a combat theatre. There are also worries about the Department for International Development (Dfid), who deal with foreign aid, having its administrative costs halved. It could result in less transparency about where the cash ends up, and ironically even may cost the UK, if - say the World Bank bill the amount they had to pay their admin staff back to the UK tax payer.

Time will tell if this was a radical attempt to change tack on military and foreign policy, or just ends up hurting the people it was meant to help even more than before.