Labour shuns aid choices

Government is about choices. In opposition you can like anything, support any measure, back any proposal. But when in office you either make choices or invite dismissal. So when International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell looked at Britain’s development spending he was determined to make choices. Now that he has, some people don’t like it. Not one bit. They like choices in general, much as they accept a theoretical form of cuts; but they recoil from real ones.

Former Europe Minister Denis MacShane is one of the choice-avoiders. Writing in the New Statesman, he rails about cutting funds to the International Labour Organisation, seeing a Tory plot to undermine trade unionism. But DfiD’s review of the ILO showed that the organisation “does not have a significant impact on the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) because its operations on the ground in developing countries are limited. The ILO also has a wide range of organisational weaknesses including weak cost control, and results reporting, limited transparency and not taking systemic action on evaluation findings.