From Mongolian camels to Tibetan verbs: the absurdity Ed Miliband’s aid spending plans
Ed Miliband want to increase aid spending to 0.7 per cent of GDP, but the history of aid spending is one of waste, corruption and cost to taxpayers, says James Price
Last year, a 23-year-old in Ulaanbaatar proposed to his girlfriend. There was a helicopter ride, an expensive ring, and designer handbags, all lovingly documented on social media. Unfortunately, the man’s father was the Prime Minister of Mongolia, a man who had campaigned on his humble rural roots and once declared an official ‘Year to Combat Corruption’.
Within weeks, furious young Mongolians had filled the capital’s central square, demanding to know where the money came from. Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene lost a subsequent confidence vote in Mongolia’s wonderfully named Parliament, the State Great Khural, and is gone, toppled by his son’s social media feed.
I mention all this because, in proof either that we live in a simulation or that God has a deeply disturbed sense of humour, Ed Miliband is now our Foreign Secretary. He has been told to reorganise the department around his climate priorities and, reportedly, a ‘roadmap’ back to spending 0.7 per cent of national income through the aid budget. The man who gave Britain the highest energy prices in the developed world will now apply that expertise on the world stage.
And I start with Mongolia because we send huge amounts of aid there, even though it is, rather embarrassingly to our ancestors, one of the handful of countries never invaded by Britain, nor ever part of the Empire. Despite no real connection, Brits have forked out millions to a country known to be a den of money laundering and corruption.
Despite Transparency International ranking it 121st out of 180 countries British taxpayers have funded plenty there over the years: DEFRA grants for ‘Mongolia’s New Ecological Police’ and for protecting wild camels in the Gobi Desert (the camels, at least, have never been accused of money laundering). And multilateral climate funds (again partly funded by British taxpayers) have approved nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of projects, including insulating apartment blocks in Ulaanbaatar.
More broadly, the sums involved in a return to the 0.7 per cent aid target are huge. Aid falls to 0.3 per cent of GNI next year, roughly £9.2bn. So restoring 0.7 means finding around £12bn extra, every year, from a state nearly £3 trillion in debt and paying £110bn a year in interest alone.
Miliband loves spending other people’s money
We know by now how much Miliband loves to spend others’ money to feel virtuous. He boasts of having ‘maintained’ £11.6bn of climate finance ‘despite the difficult fiscal circumstances’, and his COP30 delegation cost taxpayers more than £800,000, including £600,000 on private accommodation for a summit neither the Americans, Chinese, nor the Indians attended.
And Mongolia is hardly the strangest entry in the development archives. The aid budget has been charged £792,000 for a SOAS study of the Tibetan verb; it bankrolled a £50m Prosperity Fund programme to ‘work with China to address big global challenges’ (we still send Beijing around £8m a year as they sanction Parliamentarians and try to hack key national infrastructure).
The aid lobby insists this buys ‘global leadership’. No one sensible is buying that anymore. Western aid fell by a record 23 per cent last year. Only Britain proposes to borrow its way back to moral grandeur, sluicing money into countries whose citizens riot against their rulers’ unexplained wealth.
The great free marketeer Milton Friedman imagined ‘helicopter money’ as a thought experiment: cash dropped from the sky, no questions asked. Well in Mongolia, the Prime Minister’s son took this literally as a wedding proposal idea. The protesters certainly thought there was corruption involved. And under Foreign Secretary Miliband it becomes British policy to ramp up the sort spending that is open to such abuse.