We wasted far too much money on feel-good schemes

Almost a quarter of a million pounds of “foreign aid” was pledged to a Brazilian-style dance troupe – in Hackney, east London – in 2009.
Given the farcical sound of this scheme, it is little surprise that incoming Conservative Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell had been in power for less than a week before he slashed its funding, declaring a freeze on all similar projects.

Progressives are right to promote awareness of international issues, universal freedoms, and the benefits of development in poor countries. But this is different from a government funding domestic feel-good schemes, and paying NGOs to champion its own policies – a self-serving system which threatens to provoke a reaction against the very causes that progressives support.

In 1997 Clare Short (then Secretary of State) wrote of DfID’s strategy “to inject a greater sense of optimism and of progress” into people’s opinions on governmental aid programmes. Over ten years DfID then spent around a billion pounds on schemes related to “awareness”, “publicity”, “communications” and so on.

Yet questions must be asked: have these schemes improved attitudes to global development; do they actually help development; and most importantly – is it right for government-endorsed ideological messages to be disseminated in this way?

A newspaper opinion poll this year suggests that attitudes to international affairs may have got worse. Asked about the expanding foreign aid budget, 58 per cent thought the money should be spent “at home” instead. Only 7 per cent thought the UK should spend more on international development. And disturbingly, when asked how concerned they were about the situation in Haiti, 44 per cent responded “not at all”, “not much”, or “a bit”.

Such results should not come as a great surprise. Revelations that warlords bought weapons with money donated for the Ethiopian famine risked turning Band Aid into “bad aid” in many people’s minds. Other examples of development awareness spending include £183,375 towards a photo exhibition by the Brighton Peace & Environment Centre.

Two thirds of DfID’s Development Awareness Funds are aimed at schoolchildren, some just toddlers. Government programmes like these, which seek “inject optimism” about its policies, surely fall under the banner of “bad aid” in many people’s eyes.

Views disseminated by these projects are often highly debateable, and prone to being influenced by the ideology of the incumbent government. This is worth considering now that DfID is under a Conservative Secretary of State. In an article written before the election, Andrew Mitchell described foreign aid as a “resilient solution to terrorism” and a way to “stem the flow of economic migrants to our shores and tackle the scourge of the drugs trade”. Aid is therefore becoming, he argued, “an imperative that the centre Right is championing.”
After forming DfID 1997, Labour increasingly used the department to fund organisations that spread its favoured ideas. British trades unions, for example, have been large recipients of DfID’s awareness spending (the TUC has received £3.6m). Who could blame a Conservative government for similarly spreading their own ideas through third party groups in this way?

Hopefully they will not do so, and will continue with their pledge to cut spending in this area. It is simply wrong to spend taxpayer funds on domestic cheerleading for the government, especially when many taxpayers will fundamentally disagree with the messages being put forward.

Civil society should be a lively forum for debate, for grassroots movements. Funding NGOs from the top-down to tell the rest of us what to think compromises their independence and does nothing but grant the state a vehicle to disguise its own ideology behind the smokescreen of ‘the third sector’.