IF, LIKE me, you’ve been watching Trump 2 then you will no doubt have been following the debate about USAID.
In recent days, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have all suggested that for too long the organisation which oversees foreign aid spending has been run by ‘radical left lunatics‘ and riddled with fraud, corruption and waste.
Ever since Team Trump returned to power, social media has been filled with one astonishing revelation after another about how American taxpayers’ dollars have been used to bankroll some truly bizarre, pointless, far-left projects around the globe, with much of this money going to people who basically hate America and the West. Like the $1.5million that’s gone on ‘advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces’. The $47,000 on funding ‘a transgender opera’ in Colombia. Or the $2million on sex changes in Guatemala – seriously.
All of which raises an intriguing question for those of us looking on from across the pond, and one that my friend Douglas Murray asks in the Spectator this week. Given that Americans have finally seen sense on foreign aid, when will the British?
It’s a good question.
After all, am I the only person on these islands who finds it utterly mind-boggling that despite the British people grappling with the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War, and a country which is visibly in managed decline, their leaders in Westminster are still sending an eye-watering £15.3billion of taxpayers’ money every year to people overseas?
Am I the only one, furthermore, who cannot understand why, such is the abysmal state of our National Health Service that we are leaving millions of British people on record-long hospital waiting lists and treating them in hospital corridors and car parks while sending, in 2023, some £250million to Ukraine, £164million to Ethiopia, £115million to Afghanistan, £109million to Syria, £100million to Yemen, £99million to Nigeria, £97million to Somalia, £64million to Pakistan (or £133million this year), £62million to Brazil, and £57million to Bangladesh?
And am I the only one who struggles with the fact that we have just taken winter fuel payments off British pensioners to save a paltry £1.5billion and are smashing family farms to raise just £500million while our leaders are sending millions in foreign aid to China and India, which have been sending people into space? Am I the only one who thinks all this is completely and utterly insane?
Not so, according to recent polling. While you certainly won’t hear about it among the elite class in Westminster, for whom foreign aid, like mass immigration and woke idiocy, is a sacred value that can never be challenged, the reality in the country is that nearly two-thirds of British people want to see the amount we spend on foreign aid sharply reduced.
And you know what? If you look at the following list of projects that British taxpayers are funding overseas, you’ll soon conclude they are entirely right to think this way. Here, as a starter, are ten projects (taken from the Government website) that hardworking British taxpayers are funding overseas while their own country and people decline.
1. Empowering institutions and civil society in Palestine
Don’t worry about empowering our collapsing public sector institutions and fraying communities here in Britain. Why? Because the British state is too busy sending your money to improving the ‘viability, legitimacy and inclusion of governance and service delivery, protecting and supporting civic space, and empowering women in Palestine’. Empowering women in Palestine? Good luck with that. What about empowering the hundreds of thousands of women and girls here in Britain who were assaulted by the rape gangs and now deserve a full national inquiry (one, apparently, we cannot afford)?
Total budget: £35,499,984
2. Climate adaptive farming in Nepal
While the British state is smashing family farms to raise a few hundred million for Rachel from Accounts, your hard-earned taxes are going towards ‘building climate adaptive farming opportunities and improved livelihoods for women and marginalised groups in Nepal’. What about the very marginalised and vulnerable people within our own rural communities who are being smashed to pieces by Net Zero policies, new taxes, and an urban elite minority that clearly hates their way of life? Can they not be prioritised for once?
Total budget: £1,813,574
3. Protecting workers’ rights and decent employment for Syrian refugees and migrant workers in Turkey
Wondering why millions of British people are out of work and relying on welfare? Think we should create programmes to get them off benefits and back into work? Well, hold that thought because right now the British state is too busy sending a big chunk of your money to support a ‘Refugee Response Programme’ in Turkey, which includes ‘promoting decent working conditions for refugees’ and something called the ‘Coordinating Group of the Global Coalition for Social Justice’, which advocates for, you guessed it, social justice ideology. So we are paying to help Syrian refugees and migrant workers in Turkey find decent work while somehow being unable to get one in nine Brits off out-of-work benefits and back into employment.
Total budget: £18,111,761
4. LGBT+ rights around the world
Another generously funded programme will, I quote, ‘transform the lives of millions of LGBT+ people around the world by reducing violence and discrimination against the LGBT+ community and by improving access to services and legislative reform’. I have no idea what any of that means but it’s clear this involves transferring money from British taxpayers to ‘grassroots LGBT+ organisations’. This is very clearly yet another Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) initiative with no stated goal or expected outcome beyond the very vague ‘inclusion and diversity’. How about we suspend this programme for a while and use the enormous budget to instead pay for 113,000 winter fuel payments for British pensioners? Just a thought.
Total budget: £34,000,000
5. Supporting ‘knowledge sharing’ in India
This fund supports India’s development ‘through innovations, evidence-building, and knowledge-sharing, while co-designing interventions with Indian and UK institutions to inform policies and promote sustainable outcomes’. I don’t know what that means either. What I do know is that devoting large sums to ‘sharing knowledge’ in India, which has vast economic resources and its own space programme, does not seem like a productive way to use taxpayers’ hard earned money.
Total budget: £729,393
6. Teaching languages to children in the Arab world
Don’t worry about declining standards in British schools or the disastrous impact of endless covid lockdowns on British kids, because the British state is too busy splashing cash on teaching languages to children in the Arab world. This programme sends money to ‘socially disadvantaged children’ in Arab nations, which some will think could be better spent helping kids who are falling through the cracks in many of our own working-class communities – kids who, let’s be honest, are less fashionable and interesting to the elite class than kids in the Arab world.
Total budget: £1,520,612
Don’t worry about the British women and girls who were raped, abused and harassed across 50 British towns – we can’t afford a national inquiry for them. What we can afford right now is to give millions to ‘grassroots, women-led, feminist civil society organisations and women’s rights organisations in Iraq’. What the British taxpayer really needs is to spend money on ‘fostering women’s meaningful participation in society and decision making in Iraq’.
Total budget: £5,000,000
8. Helping obese children in China
China is one of the most developed nations on the planet with enormous technology and resources at its disposal. So why, you might ask, is British taxpayers’ money going to help ‘urban populations’ in China which ‘show a rapid rise of obesity owing to unhealthy diets and imbalanced energy intake’? Seriously, why on earth are we giving money to this when, I think at least, we should be spending this money on the estimated 4.3million children who are living in poverty here in Britain?
Total budget: £1,006,949
9. Climate change, gender, equality and social inclusion in Nepal, Rwanda and Tanzania
Here’s another classic. Your money is being spent on conducting ‘country-level studies in Nepal, Rwanda and Tanzania’. Working closely with key actors from government, the private sector and civil society, this project ‘will update previous studies on the economic costs of climate change and costs of adaptation to include gender equality and inclusion dimensions’. More money no doubt for a bunch of academics to travel to these nations, hold conferences and write reports nobody will ever read. More pointless work, more waste, at your expense.
Total budget: £901,275
10. Governance and Climate Engagement in Nigeria
Last but not least, another example of taxpayer cash being spent on a country that is perfectly capable of funding its own work on ‘governance and climate change challenges’, namely Nigeria. Once again, we encounter a sea of meaningless terms such as ‘governance challenges’ and ‘tackling social exclusion’, with no real detail on what this money is being spent on or how the effectiveness of these programmes will be evaluated, if they are evaluated at all. It is, put simply, another woke initiative disguised as a valuable intervention and one that will yield no visible benefit to the British taxpayer who is funding it to the tune of some £40million.
Total budget: £38,799,273
I could go on.
I could point to the £1.3million British people are giving to ‘increase the representation of women in the Mauritian renewable energy sector’ —a country that is also demanding that we give up the Indian Ocean territory.
Or I could show how British taxpayers’ have bankrolled Chinese opera, cycle lanes in Mexico and road schemes in Malaysia, supporting parts of the world that are often richer than regions here in Britain.
But I think you get the point.
Despite already living through one of the worst cost-of-living crises on record, and despite the hardworking British people having already been forced to hand over billions to fund the elite’s obsession with mass immigration, Net Zero, and their failure to fix our broken borders, they are also having to fork out some £15.3billion on often pointless and absurd projects in other parts of the world.
I simply do not think this is right or fair. It is neither treating British taxpayers with the respect and decency they deserve nor offering them value for money. Which is exactly why, when I travel across the country giving speeches and talks to the Forgotten Majority, I often come back to this key point.
Let’s fix Britain first before helping the rest of the world!
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on February 12, 2024, and is republished by kind permission.
