Ten years ago the idea of a British prime minister announcing a cut in foreign aid to 0.3 per cent of GDP would have been unthinkable.
David Cameron’s Tories had exempted the Department for International Development from austerity, repeatedly declaring that it would be wrong to balance the books on the backs of the world’s poorest people. Naturally, Cameron’s coalition partners the Lib Dems supported this stance, while Labour revelled in having been the party that raised aid spending to this level and legislated to create a legal duty for subsequent governments to maintain it.
The case for radically cutting the aid budget only saw the light of day in the 2015 Ukip manifesto, to which I contributed.
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