Douglas Murray :Will Britain follow America’s lead on aid? Am I so immune to the obvious advantages of the British taxpayer giving $140,000 to a theater company in Bolivia?
http://Douglas Murrayhttps://thespectator.com/topic/will-britain-follow-americas-lead-on-aid/
The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: “That’s not fair — it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in power.”
The American left are in a particular funk about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — as though railing against the proposed reduction of federal spending and reduction of the American deficit is a natural vote-winner. But good news does just keep on coming. On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to shutter USAID — the US government money spigot that sprays money around the world, much of it to people who hate America.
Like Britain’s Department for International Development, the British Council and others, it is one of those entities which might just justify itself if it actually promoted the values of the donor country. But all these organizations were long ago taken over by insane people who hate the taxpayers that give them their money and think the best way for a nation to act in the twenty-first century is as a sort of large NGO.
This week, various White House spokesmen had fun pointing out some recent projects which might not have been the best use of US taxpayer dollars: $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities;” $47,000 to fund a “transgender opera” in Colombia; $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala. And hundreds of millions of dollars to provide better irrigation systems for Afghan poppy-growing projects as well as hundreds of thousands of meals for al Qaeda-related terrorists in Syria. It is one thing to actually feed your enemies, or fund their illegal drugs trade, but it might be even worse to go around the world paying people to display the worst woke excesses which took over America and most of the rest of the West in the past decade.
It reminds me of that classic from some years ago, when American “educators” were paid to introduce Afghan women to conceptual art, including Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal. The Afghan women in the class (caught on video) giggled as this poor western chump tried to get them up to speed on the twentieth century. You could see on their faces what they were thinking: if this is the crap the West is going to push on us, maybe our husbands were right about the western infidel after all. It was, as many a wag said at the time, literally money down the toilet.
Of course, it is fast becoming a point of pride among the British left that we aren’t as idiotic as our American cousins. Yet if there is a serious person left in the British government, maybe they could consider learning from the American administration rather than scorning them.
After all, DfiD (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) is a department which has been flattered and funded by Conservative and Labour politicians alike. As Jonathan Foreman and others have exposed in these pages before, its budget was ring-fenced by recent Conservative governments because the wets believed that if they were seen to be splurging money abroad — a set amount of money, remember (something everyone knows never leads to waste) — then the left would love them. As would people abroad. How well that all worked out.
These organizations are run by people who think the best way for a nation to act is as a sort of large NGO
Still, if there is an adult around in Whitehall, perhaps they could ask whether the British taxpayer is currently in such a fine financial place that we should be engaging in projects akin to those highlighted by the White House this week. The UK currently doles out $16.5 billion a year in foreign aid. Among the projects that the British taxpayer has spent money on in recent years is a $74 million “prosperity fund” in Mexico whose endeavors include creating a bicycle lane in Mexico City and “writing a business case for gender parity in the public transportation workforce.” There has also been a $250,000 grant to “engage new urban audiences” with all-female traditional Chinese opera in Shanghai, and $200,000 for a “space’” for people in Shenzhen to be more involved in their “traditional crafts.”
If UK taxpayers were funding projects that sought to get British people into opera then I would say an argument could be made for that. Hell, if the British taxpayer is so full of generosity and innocence that they want to fund a traditional British arts and culture fair in south-eastern China, with plenty of Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare, I might even say “go for it.” But why should British taxpayers be paying for other countries to learn their traditional crafts, or their traditional crafts plus a bit of western gender woo-woo sprinkled on top?
I can hear the Andrew Mitchells of the world reaching for their letterheads. Does a know-nothing dolt like me not realize the inestimable advantages to Britain of funding a $40 million research program on the use of electric cookers versus traditional fires for people in Laos and Uganda? Am I so immune to the obvious advantages of the British taxpayer giving $140,000 to a theater company in Bolivia to mount an artistic response to the wildfires there, or to the $590,000 we recently gave for a study into the role that the arts can play in “challenging racism in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina?”
Alas, I suppose I must confess to being just such a barbarian. The idea behind the DOGE saving on USAID isn’t that USAID isn’t spending its money in America — the problem is that it is spending its money against America. By contrast, I suspect that the British government has no problem splashing our cash down the urinal. And all over the floor, too.
Comments are closed.
