Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I move the motion in my name on the agenda. Of course, a lot of the foreign aid budget does a lot of good in the world, but only 16 per cent of the £13 billion, £14 billion, £15 billion that we spend on foreign aid goes on such projects. The overwhelming majority of it goes on what are called the Government’s other strategic long-term goals, whether that is on climate change policy or pacification or trying to ensure that corruption is rooted out. All these things, perhaps to a greater or lesser extent, may be good in themselves, but the capacity to monitor and to evaluate what they do is limited and sometimes non-existent, and so we’re effectively pouring money into a black hole, where it gets diverted to purposes of which we certainly would not approve.

I’m aided in the argument I’m going to put today by an article that was written by Grant Shapps just a short time ago. He was the Minister of State at the Department for International Development until about less than two years ago. He has had a Damascene conversion of the kind that our motion today adumbrates, because he described foreign aid spending as ‘out of control’. He’s called for the department over which he half presided to be abolished and has attacked its profoundly worrying tendency to shovel cash out of the door.

Now, if we’re talking about maybe £8 billion, which is the figure that our motion mentions, that we could spend on other things, whether it be the health service or anything else, this is something that we should certainly consider very seriously.

Grant Shapps described in his article how, in the Foreign Office, he would protest to African dictators about their denial of human rights and democratic values, but then, with his Department for International Development hat on, he says,

I would rifle through my red box (of ministerial papers) to find cheques for hundreds of millions of pounds payable to the same countries…. Unsurprisingly, they concluded that Britain did not really mind about these minor abuses of rights. Why else did all this British cash continue to pour in?’

So, foreign aid can often be counterproductive in what it does. It’s nearly half a century now since Professor Peter Bauer, the professor of international development and economics at the London School of Economics, said that foreign aid is something that is paid by poorer people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. We all know of the many abuses that have occurred over a great many years.

Now, £250-odd million a year is spent, for example, in Nigeria. A lot of that goes in support of the Nigerian Government’s attempts to wipe out Boko Haram, now one of the greatest dangers in the world of Islamist extremism. But, western officials who operate within Nigeria are very concerned that the Government of Nigeria’s recently elected leader, President Muhammadu Buhari, is misusing that aid to persecute his own political opponents. Since he came to power in May 2015, a number of prominent members of the former ruling People’s Democratic Party have been arrested and imprisoned without charge, and amongst those detained are the party’s official spokespersons.

These kinds of abuses should cause us to wake up. Nigeria also has, you may be surprised to learn, a space programme. They have a space agency that hopes to send rockets up into space by 2028. It’s alleged—[Interruption.]

I shall, when I finish the point.

[Continues.]—that that is absorbing hundreds of millions of pounds of Nigeria’s public expenditure, but they don’t publish the figures, so we don’t know. I give way to Rhianon.