British Aid Making a Difference

Image Credit: DFID via Flickr cc

     Great Britain is great for many reasons. One may think of its history, culture, people, economic and political clout, among other things. However, there is one thing that tends to get overlooked, and that is Britain’s contributions in the realm of foreign aid.

     Foreign aid is of course controversial in Britain as it is in America, with opponents claiming it to be a waste of taxpayers’ money, a boon for dictatorships, and a cycle of dependency which prevents developing nations from getting on their own two feet. At times, the debate gets boiled down to bean-counting and the critics believing that the money spent overseas should be better spent at home, especially during economically austere times.

     This, I believe, is a zero-sum game which does not take into account the benefits – both short and long-term – of what foreign aid can do when properly and efficiently administered to help people in need across the world in a variety of ways, so that they may have better life outcomes and go on to attain many of the things many of us take for granted – the basic necessities of food, clean drinking water, shelter, clothing, and life-saving medication. However, this is not just about giving things to people; it’s also about economic development through means such as education, aiding the creation of a civil and open society, respecting human rights, and opening people up to the world around them, so that they may become better-informed, well-rounded, and more able to make wise decisions for themselves, their families, and communities.

     Developed countries such as the United Kingdom are well-positioned to lead the effort to assist developing countries and their citizens with humanitarian aid and economic development, and to this end, the UK Government has committed itself to spending 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) per year in this area.

     Again, this is controversial for some people, and several newspapers ran luridly negative articles about UK Aid being wasted and simply given away (as if dumped from a helicopter) to dubious individuals and causes. In response, the Department for International Development (DFID) released a document to rebut such claims and to show how the money is being used effectively where needed on the behalf of the British taxpayer who underwrites it. This report, along with other research I’ve done, ought to be an example of how the UK is a generous country and that the efforts by the government ought to make everyone justifiably proud to be British.

     People ought to take some pride in the fact that their country was at the forefront in the fight against Ebola in Africa. Many of us remember the level of international concern about this deadly virus and how it could have become a massive global health crisis, but it did not advance far and was contained thanks to the efforts of the UK leading the way on the ground against it. The massive response involved 10 governmental departments, four other public bodies, and several non-government organizations (NGO’s) and charities.  In Sierra Leone, this effort resulted in reaching a 42 day target period during which there were no new Ebola cases in the fall of last year, and while there is still work to be done on several fronts, the highly coordinated effort in halting the spread of Ebola undoubtedly saved countless lives throughout the world and – in the UK national interest – was “the single most important way of preventing Ebola from infecting people in the UK.”

     This is good enough in and of itself, but it only marks the end of the five year period during which the United Kingdom made great strides with the use of its foreign aid and international development resources, and can stand tall and proud with what it has accomplished.

     In terms of wealth creation, UK Aid has provided 68.9 million people with access to financial services to help them work their way out of poverty, so that they have the tools to improve their lot and become self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency is aided by efforts to increase access to education, and in this area, the UK has been responsible for supporting 11 million children in primary and lower secondary education, so that they can have better opportunities and life outcomes, and such outcomes are largely dependent on factors like health, water and sanitation, and nutrition.

UK Aid being delivered in Dubai.  Image Credit: UK Department for International Development via Flickr cc

      Again, the UK played a significant role as it assisted in alleviating hunger among 28.5 million children under five and pregnant women through nutrition-relevant programs and ensured that those women could give birth (to the tune of 5.1 million births) safely with the help of professional medical staff., which have saved the lives of women in pregnancy and childbirth, as well as newborn babies. Britain also invested in vaccines, drugs, and 47 million insecticide-treated bed nets which have helped to contribute to malaria deaths falling by 60% in the last 15 years, as well as supporting efforts to increase access to clean water, better sanitation, and improved hygiene conditions to 62.9 million people. Thanks in part to Britain, 43.8 million children have been immunized against preventable diseases the Gavi Alliance, 13.2 million people have been given access to vital treatments for tuberculosis through its contibutions to the Global Fund, and it has helped the fight against AIDS – saving lives every day.

     Additionally, there has been the general provision of humanitarian need such as emergency food assistance to 13 million people, helping 15 million people cope with the effects of climate change, and engaging in critical scientific research which helped to eliminate cattle diseases and develop a new disease-resistance crop which has increased food production and security for around 3 million people. UK Aid also helps to build civil societies by enabling better governance and security by supporting free and fair elections in which 162.1 million voted, as well as funding organizations which work to defend freedom of expression and the free flow of information. Among these are BBC Media Action, which encourages the opening of societies by using the power of media, along with ADD International, SightSavers, and other organizations dedicated to the rights of the disabled.

A breakdown of what the UK has done in response to the Syrian crisis. Image Credit: DFID via Flickr cc

     Indeed, this is quite a lot that the UK has been doing year after year, and yet it still does more during emergency situations such as dealing with the effects of war and natural disasters. This is seen in its response to the plight of people displaced by the Syrian Civil War, who have been the recipients of nearly 20 million food rations that have been distributed by the United Kingdom, in addition to sanitation needs, water, medical care and other relief items. UK Aid has also been helpful in assisting 200,000 Syrian refugees back into school after being uprooted from their schools back home.

     In the aftermath of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal last year, Britain helped in the recovery and relief of that devastated country by delivering shelter kits which have helped to house over 280,000 people, British humanitarian workers were among the first to descend on the Philippines to help out after a typhoon hit, and UK Aid also assisted in the effort to safely remove landmines from places ravaged by war such as Afghanistan, so that farmers can use the land that have without fear.

     With regard to women and girls, the UK has taken action to substantially improve their lives in areas where they are particularly vulnerable to the effects of war, poverty, and cultural traditions. It has worked to help child brides get out of forced/arranged marriages and into school, so that they came be empowered to take control of their lives and go on to become doctors, educators, engineers, lawyers, business professionals, and other professions and occupations. Britain has also taken action to combat against women and girls, as well as female genital mutilation (FGM) by getting various tribes to abandon the awful practice and to campaign against it themselves. More generally, it has worked to increase access to essential medical care, modern methods of family planning, vaccines, food and water, clothing, improved security and justice, and shelter for woman and girls.

     All of these things are important because it makes it more likely that women and girls will marry later, have higher incomes, take part in decision-making, escape poverty, and have fewer but healthier children who end up going to school themselves. As such, they will also be less likely to contract diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, undergo FGM, die in pregnancy and childbirth, or have children who die in infancy. These are significant achievements in the name of the British people.

     In an overall sense, these actions by the UK Government are about getting developing countries on their feet by improving the lives and life outcomes of the people who live there, so that they may go on to help build their communities and improve their countries from within. From global perspective, it is about using the UK’s substantial expertise in science, research, and development to combat scourges such as disease and violence so that they may be contained and eliminated. In the long-term, it seeks end the cycle of poverty, disease, and war which has prevented people and countries from reaching their full potential, and it speaks to working in the UK national interest, because all the aforementioned issues are the root causes of insecurity, lack of development, wide-scale public health risks, and general instability, which is not in the UK national interest.

     To this end, the government has outlined four objectives for foreign aid and international development:

• Strengthening global peace, security and governance: the government will invest more to tackle the causes of instability, insecurity and conflict, and to tackle crime and corruption. This is fundamental to poverty reduction overseas, and will also strengthen our own national security at home.
• Strengthening resilience and response to crises: this includes more support for ongoing crises, including that in Syria and other countries in the MENA region; more science and technology spend on global public health risks such as antimicrobial resistance, and support for efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
• Promoting global prosperity: the government will use ODA to promote economic development and prosperity in the developing world. This will contribute to the reduction of poverty and also strengthen UK trade and investment opportunities around the world.
• Tackling extreme poverty and helping the world’s most vulnerable: the government will strive to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030, and support the world’s poorest people to ensure that every person has access to basic needs, including prioritizing the rights of girls and women. This will build security, stability and opportunity that will benefit us all.

     In addition, the government has outlined the need for ensuring that there is value for money in all of this for the taxpayer, so there will be a focus on particularly stressed and fragile states, while also driving development in countries and regions where the UK has strong historical, cultural, and diaspora links, such as Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia, as well as honoring commitments in British Overseas Territories.

A young woman standing outside a UK Aid tent in the Philippines following a Typhoon. Image Credit: DFID via Flickr cc

     At the end of the day, all of this is being done with strategic objectives in place to provide help, relief, and development, and not doing it out of a sense of post-imperial guilt, but because it’s the decent, moral, and right thing to do and because it is in the national interest of the United Kingdom. Hence, the phrase at the beginning of the government report: “Tackling global challenges in the national interest.”

     Now, what do the British public think of all this? Well, a recent survey shows that far from the heavily negative and hostile attitude perpetuated by some in the press, the people of the UK actually do believe in the value of helping people in developing countries and 86% believe that the government should keep good on its aid promises. Not only that, but the British people have also expressed their generosity through the donations from their own pockets to the tune of 1.1 billion pounds to the Disasters and Emergency Committee alone, as well as over 20,000 churches coming together for Christian Aid week in May.

     So the British people are a generous people through the actions of themselves as private citizen and through the actions of their government, and even SNP MP Mhairi Black – committed as she is to the break-up of Britain – praised the UK Government for its role in providing critical aid. She said that such assistance has been used to help educate people on the basics of things such as preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and noted that in one case, “drugs British aid has funded” was the reason for an HIV-positive woman named Mary along with her children still being alive after her husband had infected and abandoned her.

     Black further stated:

“It’s very rare to find me praising the Government but Britain is one of the better countries in terms of commitment to foreign aid…and having seen the difference it makes to people’s lives, I think it’s highly important that we maintain that level of support.”

     Indeed, Britain does have one of the largest aid budgets in the world, which fluctuates year-to-year according to how much gross national income (GNI) is generated. What’s interesting is how the Department for International Development (DFID) is one of the smallest among Whitehall departments, spends the second-smallest amount on administrative staff, and spends only 1% of its salary-related costs on consultants and temporary staff, compared to 6-8% in other departments. Together, it has a staff of around 2,000 to conduct such important work, and all of this may be a model of efficiency and value for money which other departments should seek to emulate.

     Again, the money spent and the role of foreign aid is controversial, but in a world where soft power is increasingly important to the building and shaping of international relations, the United Kingdom’s deployment of soft power is second to none in the world and overseas aid is a significant part of that. If done correctly and with a stated strategic purpose, it can result in long-term dividends to make the world a better place for all of us, and can count as one of many things for which Britain is a force for good as a significant world power. Indeed, there should be some satisfaction in seeing people around the world receiving much-needed help in form of a tent or food package with the Union Flag and the words “UK Aid – From the British People”.

     This is the face which Britain would do well to show alongside its military and diplomatic abilities on the world stage as a country what is compassionate, generous, and willing to do its bit to help others with the resources it commands.

Losing Faith in the SNP?

     Yesterday, Darren McGarvey – known as Loki the Scottish Rapper – wrote an open letter to Nicola Sturgeon on STV in which he laid out his frustrations with the SNP and the independence movement, along with his intention to not vote for the party on Election Day in May.

     The letter consisted of McGarvey describing the harrowing details of his mother’s upbringing in Gorbals, one of the worst slums in Glasgow, and how she had to deal with alcoholic parents who could not look after their children – leaving McGarvey’s mother to take up the slack. He spoke of the disgusting filth and squalid conditions of their home, personal belongings sold off to purchase cigarettes or alcohol, the lack of privacy (in the old-fashioned way), the debt collectors, the drug dealers, and the disgrace of children being made to fight over scraps of food as a spectators sport for drunks.

     It was in short, not really a home so much as it was an “open-plan torture chamber where deprivation, in the truest sense of the word, was the absolute default position” and where “poverty had not only corrupted people, but left them grotesquely deformed.” There was no place to hide and no one to find for comfort.

     Without a support structure, McGarvey’s mother could not properly cope with life’s challenges, and would descend into her own bout of alcoholism following the birth of McCarvey himself. From here, he vividly described his own upbringing, which included being at the receiving end of her drunken sprees, watching her calm herself with drugs via needles, the abandonment brought upon him and his siblings, and generally living in a chaotic atmosphere.

     Eventually, he too would fall into a similar trap with alcohol and drugs which rendered him unable to look after his brothers and sisters as the family tore itself apart.

     Thankfully, he has come out of this, been sober for over a year, is back to being active in the lives of his siblings, and celebrated the birth of his first child. Unfortunately, his long-suffering mother passed on long ago at the tragically early age of only 36.

     McGarvey’s heart-breaking personal story is one that can repeated throughout multiple generations in Scotland, and it speaks to the sort conditions which have led to what he describes as a “desperation for change.” For him and many others, this was seemingly answered by the SNP and the idea of independence, and as he continues to speak to Nicola Sturgeon (as well as the rest of us), he tells of how he has been voting for the SNP since 2006 “because something radical needs to be done about poverty in this country” and saw independence as a means of “paying more than lip service to tackling the deep social inequality that creates the conditions for deprivation to thrive.”

     He explained that Sturgeon was the first politician he ever believed in, and now he finds himself disappointed in the some of the proposed policies of Sturgeon and the party going into the election only a month away – policies such as keeping tax rates the same as the rest of the UK and halving air passenger duty, which are “aimed at affluent communities who voted No in 2014” and “providing assurances more of the same awaits them should they throw caution to the wind and decide to vote Yes at the next referendum.”

     The result is that he wonders that if this is going to be the case in a devolved Scotland within the United Kingdom, what does the future hold should Scotland become – as he campaigned for in 2014 – an independent country? How can Sturgeon expect to get the well-off to pay more in taxes as an independent country when she, “the most powerful First Minister ever”, won’t ask them to do so now for fear that they will leave Scotland?

     He watches as the SNP pursues policies based on pragmatism and the need for votes from the middle classes, and he expresses his frustration at the party “cultivating a tolerance for low taxation coupled with moderate incremental reform, peppered with comforting social justice rhetoric that barely tweaks the status quo never mind challenges it.”

     For McGarvey, separation was not simply about “getting over the line”, but it was about achieving a new direction with new policies which spoke to urgency of dealing with poverty. With the new powers under the recently-passed Scotland Act, Holyrood under Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP – with a fresh mandate expected in May – is in a greater position than ever to act on many of Scotland’s generational societal ills in a way that the SNP (dubiously) claimed could not be done under the old constitutional arrangements. Separation may be desirable in the long-term, but it is not necessary now to achieve many of the goals of McGarvey and others like him who have “more than just a passing interest in social justice.” His life experiences have shaped who he is, and as far as he is concerned:

“There is no pragmatism where inequality is concerned. There is only action and inaction. If you can't make an argument for slightly higher taxes to a class of educated people who are fortunate enough to be doing well in a terminally unequal society then I already know what is required of me as a citizen.”

     He further laments that Scottish independence appears to be “an increasingly elastic notion” with no real substance behind it except aside from being all things to all people, which breeds centrist policies to maximize votes and not “scare the horses”, but which fail to even come close to the radical vision he and so many others bought into.

     For many of them who voted Yes in 2014 and for the SNP in 2015, McGarvey goes so far to say that the current circumstances present a dilemma; some – likely most – are so committed to the dream of independence, that they will look the other way and will continue support Sturgeon and the SNP in a “bold and unwavering fashion.” McGarvey believes that this dilemma must be confronted head-on, but in the absence of that, he does not believe that the SNP is worthy of his vote this year.

     His story and his view is one that is being repeated throughout Scotland: people who voted Yes because they believed that separation would bring the change they desired, and then voted for the SNP because they saw it as being the best party to deliver that change – in or out of the UK.

     They had believed that with separation and breaking up the UK, Scotland could pursue radically different policies than the rest of the UK. Indeed, they bought into the rhetoric that Scotland and the rest of the UK were so different in political and economic thought, that separation was necessary; they painted a vision of radical Scotland needing to free itself from the reactionary conservatism of Tory England.

     They had believed the rhetoric of the Labour Party being “Red Tories” who were too scared to offend the English middle classes with radical policies and higher taxes, and that Scotland was much more egalitarian and amenable to paying more in taxation to pay for more public services and reduce poverty. They believed that the actual Tories were the root of all evil (and all of Scotland’s problems – not to mention “anti-Scottish” in the words of Nicola Sturgeon herself), that the LibDems were lapdogs at one stage or another for both parties, and that the Union was incapable of delivering on progressive policies because the overall electorate was too “small-c” conservative and required the main parties to compromise and be pragmatic.

     Now they are discovering that Scotland is hardly as radical as they had believed, that the Scottish middle classes aren’t that different in temperament and political/economic values as their English counterparts, and that the SNP – when given the choice – will stick to the middle ground on a centrist platform which embraces pragmatism, you know, like most political parties which aspire to have power and achieve other political goals.

     For the SNP, their main goal has been and always will be separation and breaking up Britain, and they know that they will need moderate Middle Scotland to carry them over the line. So while it is convenient to use left-wing rhetoric to get votes from the Scottish Left and displace the Labour Party, the reality is that the SNP will not do anything to cost them votes where they matter the most. If anything, the SNP is doing what the Tories and Labour did during their periods of dominance in the 20th Century: appealing to where Scots are comfortable at, and that’s in the moderate middle, which again, is the same winning formula in most Western democracies – including the United Kingdom as a whole.

     These sort of points were made time and again throughout the referendum to combat that simplistic notion of left-wing Scotland vs. right-wing England, but it was a notion that proved intoxicating to many people, including Darren McGarvey. If anything, the SNP shamelessly used long-term tragic circumstances such as his to get votes for the independence cause based on the idea that only with independence could Scotland build the sort of fairer society where children would not grow up in dire poverty like McGarvey and his family.

     Again, this was countered by the fact that there is deep poverty in other parts of the UK – in Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, Swansea, Manchester, Newcastle, Cardiff, Belfast, and London itself – and that it made more sense for the UK to stay together as a country in order to achieve progress together through common solidarity among the British people and the pooling and sharing of resources.

     The SNP slickly attempted to appeal to people’s fears and anxieties by telling them that independence would make it all better, and many – feeling they nothing to lose – voted Yes. Since then, they have stuck with the SNP, and as they watch to see the SNP make compromises to stay in power, some have become dismayed like McGarvey over tax policy. Others are concerned about the Named Person initiative, the lack of transparency in government, and more recently, the SNP cozying up to China. Increasingly, they are venting their frustration on social media, some are leaving the party, and prominent independence-sympathetic writers such as Iain Macwhirter and Kevin McKenna are warning the SNP to not forget the people and ideals they had brought to the fore in 2014. At some point, people may question the point of separation and ask whether it is truly worth it.

     But in the words of columnist David Torrance during the leaders debate on March 24th:

     That being said – and with Labour and the Liberal Democrats proposing tax increases – it is difficult to imagine the SNP not being in power once again – likely with another majority. However, there does seem to be a realization on the part of some people that the SNP and its vision for separation are not magic bullets that can solve anyone’s problems. The sooner this is realized by more individuals, the better, so that folks of all persuasions throughout the United Kingdom can join together to move forward to create the better society that everyone wants.