Big blunders by Boris on foreign aid cuts and education

This is the season of major tennis tournaments. So a phrase is likely to be in common use, and the Prime Minister should ponder its meaning: “unforced error”. There have been two of those in recent days. As a result, there has been a needless expenditure of political capital.

When it comes to foreign aid, a measure of scepticism is justified. A generation ago, Peter Bauer said that foreign aid was often a donation from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. There is a good reason why a lot of third-world countries have remained mired in poverty: misgovernment. Over the years, a lot of the aid sent to those countries has been embezzled by the mis-governors, much of it ending up in Switzerland, which does not need foreign aid. But this is not a reason to slash the budget. Instead, the donors should work to ensure that it is deployed effectively.

To some extent, that has happened. Andrew Mitchell MP was an extremely effective minister in his days at DiFD – the Department for International Development – one of the best ever. He was committed to aid. He was also insistent that the moral case for aid did not justify waste. But more needs to be done.

Gilbert Greenall, who has probably observed more disaster relief programmes than anyone else in the world, is pretty scathing about many of DiFD’s efforts. There was far too much sentimentality, virtue-signalling and downright inefficiency. Equally, some of the claims made for the consequences of cutting the aid budget stretch credulity. It would take more than a restoration of the £4 billion cut to solve the problems of Ethiopia, the Sudan and Yemen.

But there are short-term and long-term reasons to insist that this is no time to make cuts. Boris Johnson has said that he would like the whole world to be vaccinated by the end of next year. He would be in a stronger position to argue for that if he were not also defending a headline cut in British aid. A global vaccination programme is not just good morals. It is in Britain’s self-interest to stifle viruses which could otherwise come to plague us.

There are further grounds for citing self-interest in defence of the aid budget. When they dealt with terra incognita, early map-makers could indulge their powers of myth-making and invention. Whether it be savage beasts or Prester John’s kingdom, they could deliver over the interior of Africa to flights of fancy. “Flights”: these days, the Heart of Darkness is only a few hours’ flying time from Western capitals. Terra incognita no longer exists. Unless we help the world’s poor to escape from darkness, some of them will try to inflict darkness on us. 

Hard-heartedness is not the route to hard-headedness.

So aid cuts are bad morals, bad geo-politics – and bad politics. Boris had hoped to use the G7 meeting this week to enhance his prestige. That will now be a bit harder. Abroad and at home, the £4 billion reduction seems to have no defenders. The government will have to give way and will then look weak and silly. In part, this has arisen because Parliament is not sitting properly. It is much harder for the Whips’ Office to sniff the air over a zoom call. That is a good argument for restoring normal service as soon as possible.

It is also a good argument for the PM remembering that – as he told Sir James Dyson – he is the First Lord of the Treasury. In dealing with this cut, the Treasury acted in character. In its DNA is a firm conviction: that no other department of state can be trusted and nor can its ministers. Although they may claim to be in favour of curbing public expenditure, that hardly ever seems to apply to their own budgets. Left to themselves, they would spend the national income twice over in a trice. We should be thankful that the Treasury does think like that, otherwise the control of public expenditure would be even harder than it is currently proving. But the Treasury’s obduracy means that someone else needs to keep an eye on the politics.

That ought to be the Chancellor’s role. Although he will often have to remind hungry sheep about the price of grass, he has to remember the need for political perspectives. One can understand why Rishi Sunak neglected those on this occasion. Covid-related spending appeared to be out of control. We had a Prime Minister who was not a cost-cutter by temperament. He would have been much happier handing out free cake. The Treasury’s cup of troubles was running over, and it was not yet full. The Chancellor would have been looking for any cuts, and any excuse to make them. 

Yet he should have remembered the so-called omnishambles budget and George Osborne’s problems with Cornish pasties. Again, the Treasury mindset had come into play. The failure to tax Cornish pasties was anomalous: Treasury officials hate anomalies. Again, the Chancellor should have asked the crucial question. How much will this raise? As the answer was a very small number of millions, it was not worth the political angst. The anomaly should have been left to stand.

The money saved this time – £4 billion – is a much more sizeable sum. Even so, it was not worth the political pain. Boris Johnson is letting it be known that he was never happy with the aid cut, but felt that he could not overrule the Chancellor. It may be that he is not unhappy at any embarrassments falling his neighbours’ way. If so, that would be foolish of him, for the damage will fall on the government.

That brings us to education and the resignation of Sir Kevan Collins last week. Here, the PM is entirely to blame. He seems to have given Sir Kevan the impression that funds were unlimited. But how would that £15 billion demanded to help pupils catch up after the pandemic have been spent? It sounds as if someone thought of a figure, trebled it and then added a couple of noughts. The Treasury was absolutely right to intervene on behalf of common sense. Although new money will be necessary to repair educational damage, it would surely be sensible to work through schools and teachers. There are around half a million teachers in the British state system. One and a half billion would give them £3,000 a head. Is it really necessary to spend more than that? If so, why and how?

Sir Kevan thought that the PM had given him the keys to the cake stall. As for the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, if he were a pet animal, his owners would long since have been prosecuted for failing to put him out of his misery.

The government stands accused, and virtually convicted, of neglecting children in poorer areas, reneging on its promises to help educational standards to recover from lockdown, and failing to deliver on levelling up. This is entirely the PM’s fault. If he had thought everything through, found a tougher-minded official to take charge and also found himself a competent Education Secretary, this could all have been avoided. The government might even have been able to take credit for the measures it announced. As it is, it is almost certain that there will have to be more money, with no political credit. Is Boris trying to prove that Dominic Cummings’s assessment of him is correct?