Foreign Aid Expenditure
Debate between Stephen Doughty and Anne Main(8 years ago)
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Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), a fellow member of the International Development Committee, and I agree with many of her points. It is important for Members to understand the reason why we are here today, which is not only the petition but the fact that it was started by The Mail on Sunday, which said when talking about our aid budget:
“Rather than helping people who desperately need it, much of this money is wasted and…fuels corruption, funds despots and corrodes democracy in developing nations.”
Quite frankly, that is lazy and wrong, and it is irresponsible for anyone who cares about our national security and global security—
Stephen Doughty
I will give way in a moment, but let me make a few points. It is important to note that there is both a moral argument and a practical and national security argument for why we should spend 0.7% on aid. The moral argument should shame us all. As a Christian, I think it is appalling that 800 women die every day in childbirth and 20,000 children die every day from preventable diseases. We can list the statistics, which should shame us all. It is irresponsible for us to ignore those in a world where poverty, insecurity and instability have consequences for our streets and our cities.
Gross poverty has fuelled instability in Yemen. There are ungoverned spaces there where militants can train and extremism can flourish. The Mail on Sunday is quite happy to tell us about the immigrants flooding towards us—it was happy to put that on its front page instead of the massacre in Orlando—but what it does not tell us is that many of those people trying to find a better future are fleeing because of the very poverty and insecurity that our aid aims to tackle. Do we seriously think that diseases such as Ebola and other pandemics, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, resist borders? Of course they do not. Our aid plays a crucial role in tackling such diseases.