So the British Overseas Territories hit by hurricane Irma (which I just misheard on the news as "Harry Kane Irma", must have that hearing test) are too rich to qualify for us to spend our £13 billion overseas aid budget on. We can only allocate dosh from some smaller emegency aid budgets. Who says? The OECD? Well, sort of. The artificial target of 0.7% of gross national income for overseas aid that we signed up to - actually yonks ago, but we made it a self-imposed legal requirement in 2015 - and that few countries get anywhere near (only five spend more against the GNI stat) comes with an OECD list of approved countries that includes China, India and North Korea but doesn't include the hurricane-hit islands.
Hmm, I've been to Grand Turk (though not the Caicos Islands) and it was one of those places you feel a bit embarrassed walking round as a tourist because it is grindingly poor and there is obviously a lot of unemployment. And that was before it got trashed by Irma.
But there's nothing actually stopping us switching some of the £13bn aid budget to the Caribbean, where it is clearly sorely needed. We might miss the 0.7% target officially but Parliament could vote for this easement, just as it voted to ditch the fixed term Parliament requirement when it fancied. So we might slip down the international aid league table but we would know that was artificial, that we'd spent just as much and that we'd allocated the money wisely. And, as one Tory MP said "if they weren't poor enough before, they bloody well are now". The OECD might amend it's list but people there need help now. And we've all read stories about how the Department for International Aid has to scurry round finding projects to spend all their bounty on, so they almost certainly have unallocated cash.
What is actually likely to happen is that the Treasury will find the money from other budgets. So other necessary spending might get squeezed. And it's unlikely we'll be as generous as is required.
This sort of thing really irritates me. We are very good at blaming others (the EU, the ECJ, the European Court of Human Rights) when all too often it's just that we can't get an act together and plough through the bullshit. Though the Tories aren't the only political party that I've ever been a member of, I tend to think that they are usually better administrators than their rivals. I think this is partly because their MPs are drawn from a broader gene pool, with experienced business people in particular, which gives them a better chance of running the proverbial piss up in a brewery. And they tend to do best at running operations as it were when there isn't much of a legislative programme: don't just do something, stand there as I think Ronnie Reagan said. There's a lot to be said for competent ministers running departments well, rather than being distracted by having to concentrate on passing new, usually irrelevant, laws. The moribund Major government, after we crashed out of the European Monetary System on White Wednesday, actually ran the country well. So did the coalition government of 2010-2015 for the most part.
Whatever else is going on, Boris Johnson and others would have gone up in my estimation if, instead of allowing the press to whinge about the OECD, had said that they were going to reallocate the aid monies immediately and figure out how to account for it later. It reminded me of a saying from where I worked 20 odd years ago: "ask for forgiveness, not permission" when we were encouraging our teams to get on with things rather than always delay and ask for guidance.
Not much danger of that piss up being organised at the moment, is there?
"A hurricane force farce" said Mail online at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4881734/Britain-BANNED-using-13billion-aid-budget.html
"British territories hit by Irma 'too wealthy' to receive aid budget funds" said the Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/13/uk-to-provide-further-25m-aid-to-hurricane-irma-hit-bvi-and-anguilla
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