Our money, abroad

“I’ve paid taxes for things you wouldn’t believe” So goes the internet meme parodying Roy Batty’s iconic ”tears in rain” monologue from the 1982 Ridley Scott classic Blade Runner.

The reason this meme is so funny is that it encapsulates a painful and even somewhat dark truth for many taxpayers. Every month, millions of hard-working Brits see a chunk of their hard-earned salary vanish from their payslip straight into the Treasury’s coffers. In return, they are promised and indeed expect that their money will be spent on their priorities. Then they check the news.

One day, they’ll discover they’ve funded yet more EDI roles in the NHS. Next, they’ll hear about how the Ministry of Defence has done another botched procurement deal costing billions more than first expected. Increasingly, taxpayers find themselves asking a simple question: why am I paying for all of this?

Few areas of public spending provoke that question more than foreign aid. YouGov polling consistently shows that around 60 per cent of all UK adults believe that Britain is spending too much on foreign aid, even though this number has decreased in recent years, with total foreign aid spending being reduced to just 0.3 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) in 2027 (although this is still going to cost British taxpayers an estimated £9.2bn).

This scepticism and opposition to foreign aid is easy to understand when public services are broken, and taxes are too high

This scepticism and opposition to foreign aid is easy to understand when public services are broken, and taxes are too high. And while this spending is often presented as compassionate, strategic and carefully targeted, the public has seen one too many examples of money being sent abroad and going into the wrong hands to buy into Whitehall’s rhetoric around it.

Recent revelations by The Telegraph show that the public’s concerns are well-founded.

The Telegraph has revealed details of a previously buried government report estimating that more than £28 billion of taxpayers’ cash ended up in the hands of terrorists, hostile states and organised criminal groups between 2015 and 2021. The dossier reportedly found examples of British aid, grants and emergency support being diverted to organisations linked to Russia, Islamic State and criminal networks.

This was not just a few rogue payments slipping through the cracks, either. According to the report, billions were misappropriated over six years, and the dossier itself was burned because of the political embarrassment it would cause.

However, the more important point to make is that this story shouldn’t surprise anyone. Especially if they have closely watched the institutional rot within Westminster over the last few decades. Foreign aid and other funds have long been treated as bottomless pits of cash by global criminals and terrorists due to the incompetence and bureaucratic arrogance of our Whitehall mandarin class.

A key case study highlighting this kind of incompetence came from none other than Rory Stewart in his book Politics on the Edge, wherein he writes how, when he was minister in the then Department for International Development, he faced a similar issue.

Civil servants had come to his office asking him to provide funding to municipal councils in North-West Syria, even though jihadis had taken over these areas. When he attempted to veto this funding, using his experience and knowledge of how a similar problem had happened in Iraq, he was told by a group of senior civil servants that he did not have the power to do so, with one even citing that “the decision is above our pay grades, minister.” However, the civil servants couldn’t tell Stewart, who had the power to veto the funding.

After endless meetings and trips attempting to find the person who could veto the programme (receiving a variety of answers along the way), he finally found out that only the prime minister could veto this deal, so he wrote him a letter asking him to do so. His letter was edited, which removed his challenge to the policy, and when added back in, it was removed again. He even tried to convince the then prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, who, according to Stewart, never brought it to the attention of No. 10.

A few months later, it was found out that the funds had already been sent and, as Stewart predicted, ended up in the back pockets of people who were attending events sponsored by al-Qaeda. He was advised to end the funding, despite the fact that he was previously told he had zero power to be able to do so and had been relentlessly campaigning to make sure the funding never happened in the first place.

What is remarkable about this story is not that money found its way into the wrong hands but how difficult it was to stop it in the first place. Stewart’s story demonstrates how minimal responsibility, negligence and bureaucratic dysfunction are the root cause of why aid can fall into the hands of literal terrorists.

It also helps explain why stories like the Cabinet Office dossier keep emerging because it speaks to a culture where failed government operations and programmes ultimately fall on the backs of taxpayers, while those responsible face little personal or even professional cost.

The response to these revelations have been depressingly familiar and even trite. Officials will make pithy statements about stronger safeguards, improved due diligence and how lessons must be learned. But we’ve heard it all before.

Supporters of foreign aid often argue that these failures represent a small proportion of overall spending. But even if that was true, it ultimately misses the point. If billions of British taxpayers’ cash can end up in the hands of terrorists, criminals and hostile states, then the system is clearly not functioning.

So what can be done about a system that isn’t functioning? The obvious solution is to stop it entirely. The foreign aid budget should be scrapped, and the legal requirement to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on it repealed. Half measures and promises of tightening “due diligence” are not good enough if the government genuinely wants to stop this happening again.

Not a single penny from British taxpayers should be ending up in the bank accounts of bad guys. And if the government cannot guarantee that this won’t happen, then it should have no business sending taxpayers’ money abroad in the first place.