The conservative case for international aid

Yes, I'm doing a 'conservative case for'

The first record I ever bought was ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, the 1985 re-release of the Bob Geldof/Midge Ure charity single, written and performed to raise money for the Ethiopian famine. (A ‘single’, to all you Zoomers, was a song recorded on vinyl, in this case 7-inches, which you put on a record player in your house. Now, a ‘house’ was something…)

As a child I remember feeling great hope and optimism about this, only slightly marred by later reports that some of the money may have gone to Ethiopia’s horrendous regime with the comically evil name, the DERG.

That feeling of being part of something, the joy in helping others, is a necessary ingredient for happiness to our hyper-social species. Oxytocin is one hell of a hormone — that’s why it feels good to give.

Not to anyone, however. Humans being the parochial creatures we are, we’re more likely to feel empathy towards people similar to us, and indeed oxytocin makes us more concerned with our in-group.

That might explain why foreign aid has never been a particularly popular policy, and the Tory government’s 0.7% pledge has been seen as a quintessentially Cameronian idea: unpopular with actual Conservative voters and making no difference to how socialists, progressives and liberals feel about a party they despise.

And now it looks like Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is planning to cut £5bn from the international development budget in order to balance the books. This is the easiest cut to make, and the most popular with backbenchers. It may be popular with voters. But it’s also wrong.

I don’t just think that because I’m a highly sensitive, clever and moral person, I live in north London and am just better than the rest of you. There are other reasons, too.

The main one is that we tend to have an outdated idea of what aid entails, something which may once have been true but isn’t any more.

When developmental aid was first used on a large scale it often had disastrous outcomes, falling prey to one of the main conservative principles of life: unintended consequences. Peter Bauer, a development economist, observed back in the 1960s that well-meaning intervention often caused a deterioration in the quality of government, and of social norms more generally.

‘The flow of sustained indefinite aid implies an obvious and yet widely ignored danger — the pau­perization of the recipients. A pauper is one who relies on un­earned public assistance, and “pau­perization” accordingly denotes the promotion and acceptance of the idea that unearned doles are a main ingredient in the livelihood of nations. This danger of foreign aid is reinforced by the practice of linking it to the balance-of-pay­ments difficulties of the recipients. Foreign aid and its relation to these payments crises clearly un­dermine the status and prestige of the self-reliance required for ma­terial progress.’

Summarising recent India history as ‘pro­gression from poverty to pauper­ism’, Bauer observed that foreign aid ‘promotes and in­tensifies the control of recipient governments over the economic and social life of their countries.’

Many programmes at the time incentivised corruption, leading to the stereotype of the aid-receiving despot using his private jet to weekend in his apartment on the Avenue Foch. But the idea of aid being ‘poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries’ is now outdated, in part because Bauer’s criticisms were acted upon.

According to Sam Bowman, editor of Works in Progress and formerly of the economically liberal think tank the Adam Smith Institute: ‘Unlike most of the aid of the 20th Century, UK aid is mostly government-to-government, and is not aimed at economic growth. Both of these can be *barriers* to helping the developing world,’ but ‘DfID focuses on humanitarian aid, health interventions like vaccines, and poverty reduction.’

Rather than doing the jobs governments should be doing, aid spending now goes ‘on polio eradication, vaccinations for children, food aid, clean water, and other humanitarian programmes. In 2015-17 we immunised 56.4 million children, saving 990,000 lives.’

Not only that, but British aid spending is very transparent. You can see everything we spend online, and the projects are reviewed independently. Of these, ‘79% of reviewed spending was judged to be making a positive contribution, the remaining fifth to need improvements.’ 

Many of the problems of government, in my view at least, come down to accountability and transparency. A violent criminal gets released early and goes on to murder an innocent stranger, despite this obviously being foreseeable and likely: no one loses their job, and the public is never told why, who signed it off, or how it can be prevented from happening again. But giving money to foreigners is perhaps such an intrinsically unpopular cause, and one that endures close surveillance from the tabloid media, that it has to be transparent and efficient. Perhaps just like airline safety is so meticulously improved precisely because many people are terrified of flying, there are greater incentives towards efficiency with aid.

The sheer numbers are quite eye-opening. Substack author Mugwump has pointed out that: ‘UK aid meant that between 2012 and 2016, 24.9m food rations, 9.5m relief packages, clean water for 3.9m’ were provided for the desperate, as well as millions given cash or voucher support from war zones like Syria. He cites our work in Nepal and the fact that Britain’s role in the Global Fund there saved a life every three minute for three years.

The greatest evil is for a parent to outlive their child, and British aid spending has played a significant part in the greatest triumph of the early 21st century, the dramatic fall in infant mortality.

Back in 2014 Jeffrey Sachs wrote that: ‘WHO’s latest report finds a stunning 51 percent drop in malaria deaths of African children under the age of five between the years 2000 and 2012. These results are historic. Roughly a half-million children, if not more, are being saved each year that otherwise would have succumbed to malaria. Even more success is possible, but only if development aid continues to back the effective control of malaria.

‘Across the board, the post-2000 improvements in public health in sub-Saharan Africa have been dramatic, strongly supported by scaled-up aid. Up to 10 million HIV-infected individuals are now receiving life-saving, anti-retroviral medicines thanks at least in part to aid programs. Tuberculosis (TB) patients are being treated and cured, with a global TB mortality rate drop of 45 percent since 1990, and an estimated 22 million people alive due to TB care and control from 1995-2012, thanks to Global Fund support, which provides the lion’s share of donor financing to fight TB.’

This has led to declining maternal mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, from 850 per 100,000 in 1990 to 500 in 2010. Deaths of children under five halved between 1990 and 2012.

‘These successes demonstrate a key lesson,’ Sachs wrote: ‘that well-designed aid programs with sound operating principles, including clear goals, metrics, milestones, deliverables, and financing streams, can make an enormous difference, and that such programs should be devised and applied on a large scale in order to benefit as many people as possible.’

Or as Johan Norberg once put it: ‘Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013. After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.’ If this continues, the average Kenyan will live forever!

That all seems like money well spent to me, but it remains not hugely popular. Some on the Left believe that people who say ‘charity should begin at home’ don’t actually believe in charity at home, either — it’s just giving and sharing that upsets them. There is definitely a type of person like that, but I don’t know how common it is; someone would need to look at data comparing support for foreign aid with support for a larger welfare state in the UK, or with individual charitable giving.

Personally, I believe that a government’s first priority is to care for the interests of its people, because I’m just one man with my own circle of loyalties, not some all-loving God who values all humanity equally. Besides which, other governments will serve the interests of their people above us.

But that doesn’t exclude overseas giving on principle. While foreign aid once fell to one conservative rule of life, prioritising domestic aid also falls to another: the law of diminishing returns. A hundred pounds spent in a famine zone goes way further than the same amount spent at home, because it’s relatively easy in a very impoverished country to drastically alleviate the most extreme misery. Poverty in rich countries is harder to treat because its causes are often bound up with individual decision-making, decisions which the state can do little to influence (and can make worse). It’s why ‘war on poverty’ campaigns since the 1960s have had only limited success.

The sort of politically-minded people who consider themselves compassionate are never going to credit the Tory Party for doing the right thing, so there isn’t much political advantage to foreign aid spending — but then, who cares what those people think? The only person you have to look in the eye before you go to bed each night is yourself.