International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Philip Davies Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Moore]

I hope that hon. Members will acknowledge that I have given way fairly generously over the past 10 minutes, which has meant that I have not yet advanced most of my arguments. Even if I slightly despair of persuading the hon. Gentleman in the course of my arguments, I hope he will allow me to make them.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman said that overseas aid works. If it works so well, surely we should be aiming to reduce the amount we spend. We will spend a certain amount of money, and it will work so well that we will no longer need to spend that amount. If the aid has worked, those countries will have been able to sort themselves out and therefore we will be spending less. Why do we need to fix a high amount of money for aid in perpetuity? That in itself proves that such measures do not work.

[Michael Moore]

Simple and appealing as the hon. Gentleman’s logic may be to others, I am not sure that many people will be persuaded by it.

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[Mr Brown]

The hon. Gentleman puts absolutely the right argument, which I will now come to. By legislating in this House, we could be a catalyst for other countries to do more. We would be in a position for the long term to say to countries and Governments who are not spending enough domestically on education, health and anti-poverty programmes that we will match whatever extra money they give over a longer period of time. We would be giving certainty to our aid budget for many years ahead. It seems to me that those who are protesting today also ignore the fact that on average we spend only about £1.50 per child—all aid agencies put together—on the vaccination programme in Africa.

[Philip Davies]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Brown]

It is so tempting to be back in this House and to deal with some of my former—okay; I will give way.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful; it is good to hear the right hon. Gentleman being so shameless about promises when he broke one on the Lisbon treaty.

On the point that if we spent 0.7% of our GNI on aid, every other country would follow us, how is it that as we have increased our aid budget, other countries have reduced the proportion they spend on aid? Is it not the case that they are using our increased spending as an excuse to reduce theirs? The right hon. Gentleman is giving the CND argument of the 1980s that if we were to get rid of our nuclear weapons, every other country would follow.

[Mr Brown]

We know we are on a filibuster when a Conservative Member starts mentioning the Lisbon treaty and then mentions CND in the 1980s.

Why does the hon. Gentleman not get to the heart of the issue? Let us take one country—Sierra Leone: one health worker for every 5,000 people; the UK: one to 77. Sierra Leone has 100 doctors for a population that is bigger than Scotland’s, and 200 nurses and 100 midwives. Do we say as a result of that that the small amount of aid we give—the $12 per person for education and the $50 per person for health in sub-Saharan Africa—is too much? Do we say that it is too generous or too wasteful?

Let us project into the future. We know that this has been a summer of conflict—six wars around the world—and a summer of carnage for children. When we have 1.5 million child refugees displaced from Syria, with refugees in Iraq, Gaza, the Central African Republic and also South Sudan, how can we possibly justify not making a law that suggests that the small amounts of money that are given by the international community, which can make an absolutely huge difference, should continue? My claim is based not just on the success of what we have done and the enormity of what we still have to do, but on the cost-effectiveness of most of the aid that I see delivered by DFID and many other aid Departments round the world.

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[Mr Swayne]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, and I believe he is absolutely on the money.

In respect of the growth of international terrorism, we have rightly become concerned in recent weeks over that strange phenomenon of the foreign fighter—the person with prospects, from a good home and with qualifications, who suddenly decides to go abroad and fight for the most extraordinary cause in the most bloodcurdling and violent and disordered way. They follow a long tradition of middle-class terrorists, be it the Baader-Meinhof or the Manson gang or the Red Brigades or the Sendero Luminoso. No doubt they will be the source of many academic treatises and doctoral theses, but undoubtedly the main recruiting ground—the overwhelming recruiting ground for terrorism—is the desperation of poverty, injustice and misgovernance, where young people have no prospect whatsoever but to take up arms and embrace the most desperate ideologies.

[Philip Davies]

The Minister says that if we spend all of this money we will be safer, but as we have spent more on overseas aid our security threat level has actually gone up, not down, so that clearly is not working. We are being painted a picture suggesting that if we spend all of this money,people will stop coming in from Calais and poverty will be alleviated around the world, but we are spending the money, so this clearly is not working. Why is it that we are opposed to welfare dependency at home but we are entrenching it abroad?

[Mr Swayne]

We have only just reached the target. This is a sustained process, and we are just at the beginning of it. That is why we have the Bill. It is our hope that, as the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath said, by taking a lead on this, we will encourage others to follow. This is not a crusade. This is a matter of public policy in which we hope the rest of the world will follow us.