Phillip Isakpa
In the Portobello Road I recently found a badge saying “Hated by The Daily Mail,” a sort of emblem of honour, showing the position of this newspaper in the British psyche. It is the voice of that elusive and sometimes vicious phenomenon – ‘Middle England’. If it is usually seen as white and middle class, that is to under-estimate it power and its range. It is more an attitude, characterised by hysterical bigotry and hand-wringing spleen, with overtones of the slightly extra-terrestrial US ‘tea party’ movement. One of the paper’s veteran journalists called Ann Leslie once said that it was “never knowingly fair to anyone”.
If I introduce my column this way, it is because the Mail began last week with a couple of front page stories allegedly unmasking all manner of abuses in the Commonwealth Development Corporation – the usual issue of high salaries and fat bonuses, not unknown in the private sector, and apparently excessive expenses. The main grievance was that the CDC is meant to help the poor of the third world, although this is misses the point of the CDC. Although, as the Mail says, wholly owned by the Department for International Development (DFID), CDC is a profit-making investment business, not an aid organisation as such: one of its main objectives is to assist the private sector.
There are, one recognises, ambiguities surrounding the CDC. The satirical fortnightly Private Eye has been targeting them regularly, but the Mail true aim is an indirect hit on the aid budget, made clear in an editorial calling for the cuts the Cameron-Clegg to apply to the budget of DFID, so far ‘ring-fenced’. The Mail, sardonically, comments: “In his effort to cultivate a touchy-feely image, David Cameron promised to spare DFID from cuts. But with every revelation about how our foreign aid budget is squandered, that pledge becomes ever harder to justify”. These arguments, however tendentious, are supported by opinion polls suggesting public opinion believes that the cuts to reduce the deficit should first come from aid.
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Pondering this brouhaha, I went to the House of Commons to hear Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for DFID, give an account of the ruling Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition’s position, on the eve of his departure to the UN for the summit on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The buoyancy of his defence of the ‘ring-fencing’ of development aid, was balanced by customary caveats about efficiency, accountability and transparency.
The Chair of the All-Party Group on Overseas Development (APGOOD) turned out to be David Laws, his career now recovered after having resigned as Lib-Dem Treasury Minister three weeks into the Coalition with no lasting damage to his political career. “A very bright chap” commented my neighbour, and he clearly is plunging into his chairmanship role with enthusiasm, and stressed that not only was the ring-fencing going to be maintained, but that Mitchell’s pledge to stick to the 0.7 per cent of GDP target for development aid would mean that it was going to be increased. Increased! This was quite something in this season of ‘slash and burn’. What would the Daily Mail say? Well, a couple of days later the paper returned to the attack, with a frontal assault on the ‘Great Aid Scandal’ asking “how can a nation ring-fence foreign aid and slash defence?” Their investigation claimed to show how money was misspent, “and even makes poverty worse.” Methinks we can expect much more in this vein. They have hardly begun yet.
Mitchell’s words were not in fact as revealing as a speech he made later in the week to the College of Defence Studies in which he made it clear that within the allocated amounts (a “staggering” £9.1billion this year, shrieked the Daily Mail), there was going to be a re-ordering of priorities, with more going to ‘failing’ states and less to the poor in the big countries. Indeed, there is going to be a popular move to cut back on aid programmes in the ‘nouveau riche of the planet, India and China.
The speakers were sitting under a huge oil painting of ‘King Alfred the Great Exhorting the Saxons to resist the Danes’, although any symbolism was unintended. But it lent some piquancy to the observations of his fellow speaker – none other than Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, now Managing Director of the World Bank, hot-footing it over from Washington to utter her own imprecations about transparency when dealing with tax-payers money. And was it not the tax called Danegeld, back in the ‘Dark Ages’, that the Saxons were eventually obliged forcibly to pay up? Ngozi told me that the publishing of details of all public expenditure in Nigeria (federal, state and local government) which had been instituted when she was Finance Minister, had been started up again, having faded out of the picture for a time. Her contribution demonstrated once more that she has lost none of her bouncy panache.
