A death foretold: watch as Priti Patel trashes our proud record on aid

..By development, I mean emergency relief for Syrians bombed out of their homes, healthcare for new mothers and their kids in Sierra Leone and school lessons for girls in Pakistan. Who could be against any of that? The answer is: no one in mainstream politics. It may have been Labour that pledged a target for government aid spending, but it was the Tory-led coalition that made that promise reality so that, of every £100 Britain earns, 70 pence goes to poor countries. That, David Cameron claimed on his last day at No 10, was one of his proudest achievements.

Even then, Cameron heard a constant hum of discontent from the Brexit brigade: taxpayer-funded blimps such as Peter Bone and Philip Davies (he of the recent attacks on “feminist zealots”) . Their line never changed: development money funds corrupt Africans and charity begins at home. Penned in for years on the fringes of politics, the Brexit brigade took a big stride on 24 June towards the mainstream of their party. And now one of their number controls spending on aid and development.

In all the hilarity over Boris Johnson sharing Chevening with Liam Fox and David Davis, one of the most remarkable of May’s appointments went almost unnoticed. Because by making Priti Patel international development secretary, the new prime minister placed the department in the hands of someone who is on record as calling for it to be shut down.

If you want to see in which direction Britain’s right wing is travelling, follow Patel’s career. In the same generation as Cameron, she shares none of his anxiousness to “modernise” and claim the centre ground. Patel is an out-and-out rightwinger, of a kind that senior Tories have been trying to keep out of the cabinet for a generation. On Question Time, she called for the return of the death penalty, in parliament she voted against same-sex marriage. The woman who would go on to become employment minister co-wrote a book attacking Britons as “among the worst idlers in the world”. The austerity maven, who spent years banging on about the need to bring down the budget deficit, was last summer asked by a BBC interviewer how much the deficit actually was. She blinked. She squirmed. She patently didn’t have a clue.



(By Aditya Chakraborty: more at link):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/23/priti-patel-foreign-aid-world-poverty