Should Britain’s foreign aid budget be raided to help homes hit by the flood? There are plenty calls for this today, making the splash of the Daily Mail (below).
A local MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger, says:-
“We send money all over the world now we need to give people down here the hope that they will get what they need. We should divert some of it down here. We don’t have to divert it forever, but we need it now.”
But this demand is based on a misunderstanding of how aid money is allocated. David Cameron’s commitment to double the aid budget until it is equivalent to 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income has another caveat: that ‘aid’ will not be defined by him, but by the OECD. This makes it impossible for aid to be diverted from DFID’s budget to other Budgets – even the reconstruction side of the military – as the bean-counters in Paris wouldn’t categorise it as ‘Overseas Development Assistance.
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