There are only five countries in the world that spend more than we do on foreign aid, and 0.7 as a percentage of GDP is a purely arbitrary figure plucked out of the air and has no more significance than 0.5 or 1 per cent. Taking the Member’s point in a more general sense, why should we not increase the foreign aid budget by four or five times on that basis? All these things are worth doing in the world. There are lots of problems that other countries have that are very severe, but we can’t go on simply taking on these burdens ourselves when we’ve got so many problems to solve in our own country. Until we get the systems in place whereby we can evaluate value for money properly, then this is just an exercise in, as Grant Shapps described, ‘shovelling money out the door.’ Mr Andrew Dickens, who was an official in the overseas aid department in the National Audit Office said that, when he was auditing overseas development, the only audit possible of multilateral aid was to check that the sums paid to international organisations matched the amounts pledged. Any real audit of the projects supported had to be done by the organisation’s own auditors. Well, self-auditing audits are not worth the paper they’re printed on.

There are lots of egregious abuses, which I won’t weary the Assembly by repeating today, which would be found in the archives of the ‘Daily Mail’ and easy consulted, but the kinds of projects that I mentioned in relation to Nigeria absorb very, very significant sums indeed, which, in our view, would be better spent at home on areas such as the health service. The Labour Party’s manifesto in the Westminster election that is currently going on says that they’re going to spend another £37 billion on the national health service—a figure plucked out of the air. It’s as good as any other figure, I suppose, but you could always add a few noughts to it, no doubt, on this principle that money grows on trees. The Labour Party today seems to think that the economic model we should be following is that of Venezuela, which should be one of the richest countries in the world, but which has been reduced to poverty, destitution and economic ruin by the policies of Hugo Chávez, who’s such a great hero of Jeremy Corbyn.

We could spend £40 billion extra on the health service if we wanted to over the course of the next parliament by taking £8 billion a year out of the foreign aid budget. Then we would know that it’s being spent on something worth while. So, it’s a choice that we have to make. It’s a binary choice. We can choose to spend money on people in our own country who deserve help, or we can spend the money on people abroad who may not necessarily need the help because the people to whom the foreign aid is going are not the recipients which we intend. So, there is no moral value, actually, in simply giving away other people’s money. The only moral value consists in giving away your own. Therefore, to take on a high moral tone about foreign aid spending, I think, is inappropriate in respect of the use of taxpayers’ money. Yes, you can make a case for foreign aid projects of the humanitarian kind, obviously, to help with crises such as the effects of earthquakes or typhoons or whatever. Nobody would deny the necessity of playing our part in the international community in helping desperate people in desperate situations. But, where we have political decisions taken, climate change policies, for example, which are controversial, and the recipients or the countries who receive these payments are actually going to be doubling, or trebling in the case of India and China, their carbon emissions in the course of the next 30 years, despite the Paris climate accords—they’re given, effectively, an exemption because they’re growing and developing economies—then we’re not even achieving the policy objectives that we think are desirable in the world generally if you believe in man-made climate change. So, there’s a conflict there of policy which cannot be resolved. So, I’m afraid that what my party says is that, in this respect at any rate, charity begins at home, and that’s what we should be fighting this election upon.