Only last week Dave claimed that his subversive campaign for homomarriage was his proudest achievement.
Now he has confused his supporters by shifting his object of pride on to foreign aid. Or rather on having kept his promise (and the UN target) to blow 0.7 percent of our GDP on fattening the Swiss bank accounts of assorted tyrants.
By contrast, the United States spends 0.19 percent of its GDP on foreign aid, France 0.45 per cent and Italy just 0.13 per cent.
But Dave promised he would hit 0.7 percent, and who says he doesn’t keep his promises?
“I am proud,” he declared, “of the fact that we have taken 0.7 of this year’s GDP and given it to the poorest countries in the world.” Or, to be exact, to the richest people in the poorest countries. But hey, let’s not get hung up on details.
For once Dave is being too modest. For not only did he hit the desired target but he actually overshot it by £320 million. Altogether he spent £11.4 billion of our money – a massive increase of 30.5 percent on the year before.
That’s more than a third the size of our defence budget, which has been cut not just to the bone but to the bone marrow. But do let’s keep things in perspective.
We need to spend money on the armed forces in order to protect the realm. Dave needs to spend money on foreign aid in order to protect his job. In his mind there’s only one choice. Yet the choice is wrong even on its own puny terms.
But then we already know that Dave isn’t very good even at his chosen vocation: getting votes by hook or, in his case, by crook.
Not only did he fail to secure an outright victory against comfortably the worst government in British history, but he has since demonstrated an unrivalled ability to repel the core Tory support even further.
His previous object of pride, homomarriage, was a brilliant demonstration of that ability, with Dave effectively doing the job of Nigel Farage’s campaign manager by shifting a quarter of potential Tory voters UKIP’s way.
This current squandering of public finances will run the other abomination pretty close, and Nigel must be rubbing his hands with glee. Here’s Dave, shooting himself in the other foot, the shot many traditional Tories will take for the starter pistol in their race towards UKIP.
But forget electoral politics. This side of the Notting Hill set, the main problem with foreign aid is neither economic nor political. It’s moral.
Foreign aid is external welfare, and it has the same corrupting effect as the internal kind. In both instances, I’m not talking about helping those who genuinely can’t help themselves.
Internally this category includes the old and the sick for whom welfare is the only way to keep body and soul together. Externally the category comprises countries victimised by some sort of catastrophic force majeure: famine, earthquake, tsunami, drought.
Developed countries don’t need outside help to handle such disasters. Others often do, and refusing help may lead to starvation and deadly epidemics. Even worse, such heartlessness would betoken a deficit of charity – the ultimate slap in God’s face.
When such help is offered, it should arrive in the form of food, clothes and medicines whose distribution must remain in the donor’s hands. Otherwise, the only people helped will be the tyrants running those countries.
For example, when a massive famine broke out in Russia’s Volga region in 1921 (that sort of thing always happens immediately after all revolutions aimed at universal brotherhood), Western countries rushed in to offer help. The most prominent was Hoover’s American Relief Administration, which did manage to feed 10 million people by insisting on controlling distribution.
Other donors weren’t as streetwise, and the Bolsheviks recycled much of the aid back to the West, only for it to return in the shape of hard currency. As a result, six million died, showing the way for future tyrants: guns aren’t the only weapons they can use for crowd control.
An infinitesimal portion of our £11.4 billion was spent to relieve natural disasters. The rest was squandered by our spivocrats to present an image of compassion to their fellow spivs (or their intellectually challenged victims), both at home and abroad. Some of the money went to countries rich enough to produce nuclear weapons and launch space satellites.
It’s characteristic that, while preaching and even occasionally practising austerity, our mock-Tory government has actually increased the budgets of two giant socialist projects, foreign aid and the NHS.
The former is occasionally criticised; the latter is off limits, enjoying the kind of immunity these days not even afforded to God. Both have little to do with their ostensible purpose, other than jeopardising it.
Our nation’s physical health would be better served by a mainly private system augmented by charitable funds. Other nations’ economic health would be more robust if we removed any barriers to free trade.
But that’s not the point, is it? The point is for Dave to come across as sharing and caring. Never mind the statesmanship, feel the image.