More shock and horror: support for a Coalition policy

A recent report from The One Campaign shows that many European countries are reneging on their aid commitments to the world’s poorest countries. Britain is a noble exception - hooray! International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has just recommitted the government to put its target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid into law. Posh Dave's Boys deserve credit for this: protecting the aid budget despite wider cuts, but they will need to persuade a sceptical public that it's the right thing to be doing in these financially striken times. There remains significant support for cutting aid in the short term and, amongst some, a wish to cut aid completely.

It is clear from opinion polls that large numbers of the public are not aware of the progress being made in many developing countries, and a belief that resources there are wasted or used inefficiently. Corruption is also seen as a problem, although not to the same extent. Furthermore, fundraising appeals that ostensibly tug on people’s heart strings may in fact be counterproductive, reinforcing the idea that nothing has changed.

One person in Evesham said:

“I was around when Live Aid shocked everybody and still the problem hasn’t been sorted, we’re giving to charities, doing our stuff and it’s still happening.”

Another person, from Newcastle, said:

“They never show you the success stories, they never say ‘look at this hospital we’ve built, look at the wells we’ve made with the money that’s come in’, it’s always like you say the sob story kind of thing and a lot of it that goes in there is good and a lot of good things but you never see the success, they never do an advert saying ‘with your money we built this or we provided three donkeys’, you never see that kind of stuff, I never see it.”

As Britain stays on course with its own target, the aid budget will increase from around £7 billion this year to around £9 billion next year. This will not go unnoticed by the opponents of aid and it will be interesting to see how the government frames the message. The way they do this will be critical to increasing public support. I wish them every success. For once, they have my full support for one of their policies.