There is one potential growth industry

Tweet

 

In order to maintain the fiction that government must always abide by the arbitrary fiscal rules that it itself writes, any additional expenditure in one area must be balanced either by cutting expenditure in another area, or else by increasing revenue. Or so says Sir Starmer. It’s dangerous nonsense, not least because it legitimises the arguments of all those arguing that ‘we should look after our own first’ by validating the idea that spending on refugees and asylum-seekers always and necessarily reduces the money available for homeless people (to choose one example), and especially homeless armed service veterans, a group considered by right-wingers as being particularly deserving. It would still be nonsense, even if it didn’t completely ignore the fact that the reasons for there being so many homeless people in that category are far more complex than a simple lack of cash or housing.

So when it comes to a demand from the military for more soldiers and more equipment, the first things in the government’s sights are, as ever, the old favourites: overseas aid, immigrants, welfare and the pensions triple lock. It is, apparently, entirely ‘obvious’ that those best-placed to bear the burden of paying for additional weaponry and military manpower are the poorest and weakest in society, both at home and abroad. Starmer’s announcement yesterday to divert money from the aid budget and increase the proportion of GDP devoted to preparing for war is hardly a surprise in that context.

The idea that defence preparedness should be measured by the proportion of GDP spent on armaments is, and always has been, a spectacularly stupid one, because there can never be any guarantee that spending more leads to a more effective fighting force. It could be achieved, for instance, by simply doubling the salary of every member of the armed forces. In itself, that might not be a bad thing to do anyway; the pay of junior ranks is not exactly over-generous, so maintaining the numbers involves targeting recruitment at young people living in the most deprived areas. (Recruitment isn’t currently terribly effective either, and whilst outsourcing recruitment might have generated private profit, it hasn’t done much for the numbers.) But increasing salaries wouldn’t make the forces any more useful for war-fighting. Alternatively, they could simply pay more for the equipment that they buy. That might sound like a silly idea, but given the MoD’s history in procurement, it’s one of the likeliest outcomes of an increase in budget. And while paying more for the same equipment (let alone buying equipment which either doesn’t work or is not needed) might help meet the arbitrary target of a percentage of GDP, it doesn’t improve the capability of the UK’s armed forces.

What Sir Starmer did yesterday is what he has been saying for months that he would not do, which is to pre-empt the conclusion of the Strategic Defence Review. Worse still, the reason he’s done it is more about appeasing the madman in the White House than about defending the UK. The working assumption of the military mind – and, it would appear, the Sir Starmer mind – is that the supposed enemy is just waiting for us to drop our guard before launching an all-out invasion to seize land and oppress the population. How likely is that in practice? Assuming for a moment that the enemy really wants to control the UK, invasion is about the least cost-effective way of doing it. Far better and a great deal cheaper in terms of lives as well as money to take over the country from within and install a puppet government, as committed to rule by oligarch as Putin himself is. It increasingly looks like a strategy which has worked beyond his wildest dreams in the US, and brings a bonus in that the puppet government can help him to repeat the trick elsewhere.

On the receiving end of Sir Starmer’s pusillanimity are some of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world, already hit by the body blow of the Trumpian destruction of USAID.  Still, it is, as they say, ‘an ill wind…’, and for a government obsessed with growth there is one group of ‘entrepreneurs’ likely to see an increase in demand for their services – people smugglers. One of the likeliest consequences of aid cuts will be an increase in the number of people seeking to migrate from where they currently live to the richest countries of the world – including the UK – in search of a better life. Whether Sir Starmer’s attack on living standards of the poorest in the UK acts as a sufficient counter-deterrent remains to be seen.

What 'prizes' does he have in mind?

Tweet

 

One thing of which we can all often be guilty is a failure to understand a different point of view. It’s easy enough to understand why – but things which are ‘obvious’ to one person are not so to everyone else. But however normal it might be, it’s something which politicians in particular need to be careful about. The current Prime Minister is not only not careful about it, he doesn’t even seem to understand that it can be a problem.

There is no doubt that the boost to ‘defence’ spending announced yesterday will be popular amongst Anglo-British nationalists, and there is also no doubt that there are significant numbers of people in Wales (although perhaps rather less so in Scotland) who fit into that category and will be delighted. But in presenting it as an example of the strength and power of ‘the union’, Johnson seems to have completely missed the point that not everyone thinks that way. Worse, his claim that “If there is one policy that strengthens the UK in every possible sense, it is building more ships for the Royal Navy” is based on an assumption about attitudes to the UK’s grandiose notions which rather overlooks the fact that his target audience isn’t those who are already convinced about the union, but those who are not. And in his usual inept and bumbling fashion, he fails to understand that for those opposed to UK military aggrandisement and adventurism, his announcement will weaken rather than strengthen his case - independence offers a way out of excessive and outdated militarism.

Still, shooting himself in the foot by not understanding that not everyone is going to swell with pride at the announcement of further investment in technology to kill and maim is at one with his cloth-eared approach to most other issues.

There was one phrase in his speech which was worrying to say the least. In talking about modernising the armed forces and giving them new weaponry, skills, and techniques, he said that in the future “…the prizes will go to the swiftest and most agile nations, not necessarily the biggest”. I struggle to assign any meaning to that, and particularly the use of the word ‘prizes’, which does not imply that he sees military power as being a route to extracting something from less powerful or less well-armed states in the world by use, or by threat of use, of force. I suppose we were warned from the outset that the Brexiteers wanted to see Britain as a ‘buccaneering’ (i.e. pirate) state, although many of us assumed that they just meant that they wanted the UK to be a state which declined to follow the rules by which others live.

It’s not mere coincidence that the amount of extra military expenditure bears a similarity to the amount which they have been briefing that they intend to cut from overseas aid. That’s another indication of an intention to switch directly from the use of ‘soft’ power to the use of ‘hard’ power; the commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid put the UK among the leading aid givers in the world, and it was in 2015 (under a Conservative-led government, curiously enough) that the UK became the first G7 country to enshrine that commitment in law. The Brexit project has always been about an attempt to turn back the clock, to return to an imagined golden age in which Britannia both ruled the waves and waived the rules. This latest announcement looks like another step along that path, but the assumption that the rest of the world will allow, or can be coerced into allowing, the UK to do what it wants – which was more or less the case in the days of empire - is yet another example of failure to understand that not everyone else shares their view of the world - and in this case spectacularly so.

Inconsistent and incoherent are inadequate words to describe announcing a hopelessly overhyped and underfunded ‘green revolution’ one day and a commitment to an increase in spending on armaments the next. If the government was run using logic and reason, that much would be obvious, but then a government guided by logic and reason wouldn’t have put the UK where it is today.

Overseas aid isn't the problem

Tweet

The UK has a relatively large budget for foreign aid compared to other countries (although still not large enough), and it should surprise no-one that not all of it is particularly well-spent.  Last week’s story about an Ethiopian girl band allegedly receiving a sum of £5.2 million for their “branded media platform” was a case in point.  I’m not sure that we’ve been given all the details here, but even taking the story at face value, it does little more than underline the fact that any detailed analysis of how money is spent would throw up apparently unjustifiable examples. 

Part of the problem with the aid budget is that those running aid programmes have a strange desire to receive proper credit for the aid given – they prefer to give the money to something on which they can then stick a Union Jack so that people know where the money has come from.  And if there’s a photo-op for a politician as well, then all the better.  A girl band ticks the right boxes.  It’s not dissimilar to the Welsh Government’s approach to projects which it funds – they have the same preference for projects which can be badged and used for ministerial PR.  The result, in both cases, can be that the visibility of the expenditure is more important to the politicians than ensuring that the money goes where it’s most needed.

But accepting that the aid is not always being spent in the best or most effective way is an argument for better control and targeting, not for a reduction in the amount being spent.  The fact that a girl band may not need £5.2 million doesn’t mean that people in Ethiopia don’t need that £5.2 million.  And it certainly isn’t any sort of excuse for the argument being put forward by some of those drawing attention to this sort of spending that we need the money more in the UK.

In this specific case, we had some Tory MPs arguing that the money should instead be spent on “funding adult social care in the UK”.  It’s an utterly false choice.  It isn’t just Tory MPs, of course – how often have we all heard the line about ‘charity starts at home’, or ‘why are we sending money abroad when there’s so much poverty at home?’.  Just scan the letters columns of any daily newspaper over a period.  But is inadequate funding for adult social care really the direct result of the way the UK spends its foreign aid budget?

At its basest, this attitude is based on an assumption that we can’t tackle poverty in the UK (or fund mental health or social care - insert here any pet project of your choice) because we’re spending our money on foreign aid instead.  And the ‘conclusion’ which is drawn from that is that the way to help the poor is by taking aid away from the even poorer.  There is a massive level of inequality in the UK but, according to this view of the world, what keeps people in their current state isn’t that the richest in our society are accumulating an ever greater share of total wealth, it is that a tiny proportion (0.7%) of UK GDP is spent on overseas aid, and an even tinier proportion of that might be being misspent.  And of course it has nothing to do with decisions to spend money on other things within the UK (such as a new laser weapon system, with a price tag of £30 million – it makes that £5.2 million look like a very wise investment).  One has only to put it in those terms to see the complete fallacy of the argument.

So how do they get away with it?  Why is it that people are so ready to believe that the problem isn’t with the richest siphoning off the country’s wealth, but with the attempt to provide a minimum of assistance to the world’s poorest?  Perhaps we should start by asking ourselves who controls the content and direction of public debate - and whose interests are served by convincing the poor that the problem is the even poorer.

Stepping backwards

Tweet One of Cameron’s better decisions as Prime Minister was to protect the budget for overseas aid, and to aim at donating 0.7% of national income.  It wasn’t the most popular of his decisions with many of his party’s core supporters, but it was the right decision.

That doesn’t mean that there are no problems with the way some of the money is used.  It doesn’t always have the effect it should, it sometimes ends up in the wrong hands, it can enable some regimes to divert their ‘own’ resources to armaments, and when it’s used to support the purchase of goods and services from the UK it can look more like a subsidy to UK capitalists than aid to developing nations.

Those things, important though they are, and as much as they need to be acted on, are detail; the headline is that the UK is standing by its promise to aid those underdeveloped countries.  In that context, his announcement this week that money from the aid budget could possibly be used to pay for some of the UK’s military activities overseas was astonishing, and a significant step backwards.

He has a point, of course, when he says that economic development is difficult in strife-torn countries and regions (although those are often the places most in need of aid).  Peace and stability are important determinants of economic success.  But paying for troops and military hardware for use by UK forces doesn’t look a lot like economic aid to me.  And if those forces ever get into killing people, it’s hard to see how that would look a lot like ‘aid’ to those on the wrong end of any military action.

It’s true, of course, that ‘peace-keeping’ doesn’t necessarily lead to actual military action, but if that was never even a remote possibility of the role, it wouldn’t need military personnel to undertake it.  If using military personnel to enforce the peace doesn’t at least include the threat of lethal force, why are they needed?

There isn’t a simple black and white cut-off point between peace-keeping and intervention, however different the words sound.  After all, wasn’t the intervention in Afghanistan supposed to be about bringing peace and stability to that country?  I hardly think that particular intervention could ever be classed as ‘overseas aid for development’, though.

Paying for any part of the UK’s military out of overseas aid would be a travesty; it would make a complete nonsense of what was, at the time it was made, an honorouble and brave decision to maintain the economic aid programme at a time of domestic financial hardship.