UK Foreign Aid - 13.9 Billion in 2016

[jagdmesser]

Foreign aid: how and where is the UK’s budget spent?

UK is the only major western economy to meet UN target to donate 0.7% of GDP to overseas aid



The amount of foreign aid paid for by UK taxpayers could be slashed by hundreds of millions of pounds under proposals put together by International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt. So how much does the government currently spend and what are her plans?


How much does the UK pay in overseas aid?

For decades the UN has encouraged donor countries to contribute 0.7% of their gross domestic product (GDP) on foreign aid. Enshrined into law by the coalition government in 2015, foreign aid spending has, like the NHS, long been ringfenced from years of austerity cuts. Last year, the government hit its 0.7% spending target, contributing a total of £13.9bn to the international aid budget.


How does UK foreign aid compare to other countries?

Britain was the only member of the G7 to meet the 0.7% target last year, according to figures published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“The only donors more generous than Britain by proportion of their economies are Sweden (1.01%), Luxembourg (1%), Norway (0.99%) and Denmark (0.72%),” The Times reports. The non-western countries that exceeded the UN target were the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, it adds. The UK’s donation is frequently the second largest in the world in terms of volume. The top spot goes to the US, which contributes the equivalent of around £25bn, although this makes up only 0.18% of the country’s national income. President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to to slash spending by more than one third and threatened to link foreign assistance to support for the US.

Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen said “one of the justifications of adopting the 0.7% target for foreign aid was to encourage other countries to also achieve that target, but unfortunately that appears not to have happened.” This “casts questions over the sustainability and desirability of the target”, he told The Daily Telegraph.


Where does our foreign aid go?

Last year, 38% of the UK’s aid budget went to multilateral organisations such as the UN, while the remainder, classed as “bilateral aid”, went directly to developing countries.

Africa was the largest recipient of bilateral aid, with increases in East African countries, such as Somalia, affected by drought. Aid to Asia fell last year, reflecting a drop in spending on countries affected by the Syrian refugee crisis, particularly in Jordan, where the UK had already made its full contribution to the World Bank’s Global Concessional Financing Facility in 2016. The graph below shows how bilateral foreign aid changed from 2016 to 2017.


Why does Britain give foreign aid?

The government says the money helps to build “a safer, healthier, more prosperous world for people in developing countries and in the UK”.

British aid goes towards vaccinating children from preventable diseases, enabling them to go to school and helping people work their way out of poverty, as well as providing food, nutrition and medical care.

Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates previously joined the president of the World Bank and various international aid groups in urging Theresa May to maintain the UK’s commitment to international aid. As well as saving millions of lives worldwide, he said aid was “visible proof of the UK’s goodwill and humanity”, adding that by “creating stability to avoid war and migration” in other countries, Britain was “getting something back” and “avoiding problems for the UK”.

Martin Wolf in the Financial Times argues that with Brexit looming, “continuing Britain’s aid pledge will maintain its position as a world leader and show that leaving the EU does not mean isolationism”.


So why is spending so controversial?

Cutting the foreign aid budget has long been a favourite clarion call of the right-wing press, as well as a sizeable number of MPs.

While many argue that in a time of deep economic uncertainty, money spent abroad could better be used to help ease a health and social care funding crisis at home, some critics take issue with how and what the UK spends its foreign aid budget on. It is important to note that with a large proportion of the foreign aid budget going directly to multilateral organisations, DfID has little say over how that money is distributed.

Yet this has not stopped a steady stream of stories about how British taxpayer’s money is being misspent. For example, The Daily Telegraph published a report by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact which detailed how UK money was being used to “keep Indian houses cool during the summer and cutting smoking rates among migrant workers in China”.

Stories such as this drew yet more consternation when it was revealed that British overseas territories in the Caribbean, devastated by Hurricane Irma, were not eligible to receive any of the UK’s £14bn aid budget because they were classed as “too wealthy”.


The Telegraph says this makes a mockery of the pledge by the Conservatives not to send any more British cash to nations that can support themselves, including India and China, “where money is still funding projects”.


So will it be cut?

Mordaunt has “vowed in effect to privatise a portion of the UK’s £14 billion aid budget”, says The Times, “redefining the rules on what could be counted towards the aid target”.
She wants profits from development projects included in the 0.7% commitment, thus reducing the amount taken from taxpayers.

International rules dictate that this re-investment does not count towards the target, explains the BBC’s political correspondent Chris Mason, and changing the rules “won’t be straightforward”. Labour has also accused her of trying to water down the target. “This is an outrageous distortion of the country's overseas development programme,” said Kate Osamor, shadow international development secretary. “The Tories’ plans to rewrite the international rules on aid and slash billions of pounds of public money will do nothing to end global poverty or reduce inequality.”


Foreign aid: how and where is the UK’s budget spent? | The ... Oct 10 2018.

We continue to give ‘Foreign Aid’ to Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons and a space programme, which allows a large number of its people to migrate to the UK. Foreign Aid should be linked to migration. No migration should be a condition of Foreign Aid.

[Wuotans Krieger]

Indeed it beggars belief that £4,000,000 was given to the USA-that really sticks in my craw.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/808410...ich-countries/

[Fire spirit]

The UK has just finished paying the debt owed to the USA since the two great world wars.

[jagdmesser]

The United Kingdom has reportedly been sending millions of pounds sterling to the communist Chinese state in foreign aid, subsidising one of the world’s largest economies as well as one of the most totalitarian regimes on Earth.



Despite the growing tension between the two countries over China’s violation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong and the UK’s decision to ban Chinese telecom Huawei from its 5G network, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has continued to ship millions to the dictatorship in Beijing. An investigation carried out by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in conjunction with the Daily Mail, revealed that £81 million of British taxpayer money was sent to China, mostly between 2019 and 2020.



Stunningly, the report revealed that Britons spent £900,000 on preventing pandemics in China. The funding also went to study ‘zoonotic’ viruses which jump from animals to humans, as was believed to be the case with the Wuhan virus that continues to devastate the British economy.


Cash was also shipped to the world’s second-largest economic power to subsidise their agriculture industry, including projects funding research on rice production and apple harvesting. The UK government splashed out on projects from British scientists to help China develop “the world’s first digital fully connected rice mill”, using artificial intelligence to yield “substantial production increases and cost benefits to the Chinese rice processing supply chain”. A further £1 million in taxpayer money was spent on a campaign by the Global Challenges Research Fund to convince Chinese families to eat sweet potatoes in order to prevent obesity.


The Conservative Party chairman of the defence select committee, Tory MP Tobias Ellwood, said of the spending of taxpayer’s money: “Given how Beijing has leveraged its economic might to abuse international standards and norms, we should no longer be funding any aid programmes in China.” Ellwood went on to say that rather than funding the CCP, “China’s errant behaviour should warrant consideration of sanctions”.


Conservative MP David Davis said: “There’s no excuse for gross wastage of taxpayers’ money at a time when we are struggling to cover the necessary and important costs of government.” In more examples of foreign aid handouts, the British Council spent some £41 million to “research and promote the development of arts and culture” in China between 2016 to 2020. Last year, over £290,000 was given to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) to stage productions of The Bard in China, according to Arts Council England. Another £500,000 was spent on adapting Shaun the Sheep, a Wallace and Grommit animated spin-off, for the Chinese market. The project in Shanghai aims to use AI to create an “immersive experience… that can be enjoyed by a wide [family] audience in China… while recognising China’s cultural context and value”.


More money still was spent on helping the superpower develop its wind energy industry, despite predictions that China will surpass the UK in that capacity by the end of the year. The communist nation is constructing more wind farms than the whole world combined, yet Britain granted £3.5 million in four separate projects through the Newton Fund to bolster China’s energy production. A government spokesman for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said: “Funding through the Newton Fund supports British scientists and researchers working across the world to tackle global issues such as climate change and driving economic growth and prosperity.”


The revelations come as Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is planning to introduce a temporary cut the UK’s foreign aid budget from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 per cent, in light of the economic devastation caused by the Chinese coronavirus. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has reportedly pushed for the foreign aid spending to return to normal levels by as soon as 2022. However, China is expected to continue receiving aid money until at least 2023.



The former leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, said: “A country that is set to become the largest economy in the world, with plans to become the most powerful and threatening military power, guilty of widespread persecution of minority groups and aggressive behaviour to its neighbours – and UK Government officials, in the middle of an economic crisis, are sending them money.”



Imagine the money saved if western nations just ended 'foreign aid' and 'military aid'. It's nothing more than welfare and it comes from working taxpayers who receive zero benefit from that spending of their tax dollars.



We owe those countries nothing and the aid actually encourages population growth beyond their economic ability. It's like giving a heroin addict more smack. Except the addict doesn't die, it just keeps multiplying.



Since 2000 "UK overseas development" spending has increase from 4 billion a year to 13.4 billion a year.
The top 10 recipients of that aid are: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Somalia.
Who do these nutters think we are?



Guess which countries most of the illegal immigrants originate from?



Yes, it's such a coincidence, isn't it? It's almost like they realise we are a soft touch and now they come here in their droves because we are just so soft. We being the government.



UK Sent £81 Million in Foreign Aid to Communist China: Report

24 XI 2020.

How much longer can phoney politicians ignore public opinion and act contrary to it?
We need a referendums on immigration, islam, foreign aid, capital punishment, lobbying (buying) politicians, etc.