From January 27, 2023, to save £28 million towards a shortfall caused by inflation and freezing of the license fee, BBC Radio’s ten foreign language services were shut down and several hundred staff made redundant. It’s digital or TV now – for those who can afford it, which certainly is not good news for a large segment of the people throughout the world – particularly those poverty-stricken nations, such as Yemen.
Yemen is a destitute, hungry, war-torn country, where few will have the money to buy a mobile phone to catch news from BBC on-line. This unseen discrimination against the poorest in the world may seem a minor, distant matter. But it is a small part of a bigger picture.
For the last few years, the UK has been behaving as if it did not have enough money for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to pursue a coherent humanitarian and development policy. Yet Britain was one of the 19 founder signatories of the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) in 1960. It numbers 38 democracies today. Its mandate is to promote “a collaboration in policy standards to promote sustainable growth”. It describes development assistance as directed at “economic development and welfare of developing countries”. Does Britain really share these goals anymore? There is growing evidence – it doesn’t.
In 2021 the Britain’s aid budget was “temporarily” (weasel words – it is likely to stay that way until the end of the decade) reduced from the UN target of 0.7 percent of GNP (Gross National Product) to 0.5 percent. This amounted to a cut of 21 percent, from £14.5 billion to about £11.4 billion, of which about £7.14 billion (62.6 percent) was in the form of direct bilateral aid to individual countries, some of it via the World Food Program – for example feeding the starving in Yemen. The overall budget for Yemen was halved in 2021 from £221 million to £114 million. Yet the country’s need continued to grow.
Cuts in spending for Lebanon are another egregious example. In July 2021, a year after a huge explosion in a port warehouse caused extensive devastation in Beirut, and on top of Lebanon’s economic collapse, the incoming British ambassador, Ian Collard, inherited an aid budget of £140 million, cut from £260 million for the period 2019-2020. According to the newspaper L’Orient Today a further 2021-2022 cut was scheduled to reduce the budget to about £32 million.
Lebanon hosts 2.2 million Syrian refugees and over 200, 000 Palestinians. Its total population is 5.6 million, 40 percent of whom now require humanitarian assistance. It doesn’t take much imagination to predict the impact of across-the-board cuts of this magnitude on British embassies’ capacity to promote “economic development and welfare”. People may think that Lebanon, a failed state, tucked perilously between Israel and Syria, would fall within the FCDO’s priority category, alongside Syria and Afghanistan. But it didn’t.
In June 2020 then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the aid budget as a “giant cashpoint in the sky” and amalgamated Britain’s development ministry with the Foreign Office. But who is making the withdrawals and for what purpose? The Home Office, for one. A more accurate description is the budget for plugging holes – of which there are many, such as the rising cost of housing and feeding refugees in this country.
United Kingdom has an aid ceiling. So, payment of hotels, for food and other burgeoning refugee expenses cannot be covered by adding to an overall budget that is fixed. An interesting set of submissions to a December 2022 Parliamentary Select Committee on International Aid on the funding of asylum seekers and economic migrants arriving in UK (on-line thanks to the Washington and London-based Global Center for Development) provides detailed evidence.
It shows that 12 percent of the UK aid budget is being used to meet some of the current Treasury shortfall. And that sum could double. Just as the effects of climate change are being felt, this means drastic cuts in life-saving humanitarian aid, let alone development aid. UK£700 million went to East Africa to mitigate the consequences of the 2016-2018 droughts. UK£156 million was budgeted for last year’s continuing and no less severe drought.
Over 150,000 applicants for asylum in Britain are waiting for a decision on their status; tens of thousands have been waiting for over three years. In Germany, using a UNHCR triage system, the wait is on average 6-7 months.
Britain is dealing with far fewer Ukrainian refugees than Germany, which has issued six times the number of UK visas, or neighboring Poland which has accepted 1.26 million. Yet in the UK, the arrival of 45,750 people in small boats in 2022 is treated as a national crisis. Meanwhile the inefficiency and waste of the Home Office is covered by money taken from the world’s hungry.
The Home Office under Priti Patel and Suella Braverman appeared incapable of managing, processing and integrating new arrivals. Part of the problem is the plethora of un-coordinated special programs for select categories of refugees from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria. Staff do not even have an adequate database and rely on spreadsheets. But at the root is a dysfunctional Home Office, led since Priti Patel’s appointment in July 2018 by ministers who are simply not up to the job. They have played to the Conservative back benches while expenditure and backlogs soared. They offer rhetoric rather than action.
Pre-COVID, in 2018, the British Government was spending £370 million on refugee costs inside the UK. Today it is projected to be about £2.7 billion. And this will come out of the aid budget.
The OECD does acknowledge that members may want to fund refugees from their aid budgets for the first year after their arrival [my italics]. But none of the G7 countries are funding most of what are called “in-donor costs” from aid in the way that Britain now does. This expedient is not illegal, simply unethical. It is condemned by a wide range of British NGOs concerned with human rights, the plight of refugees and international development aid.
Dipping into the aid budget began in a small way in 2009 under Gordon Brown, but it has reached unacceptable proportions under Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Priti Patel’s “Migration and Economic Development Partnership”, a deportation scheme in collaboration with an African state, Rwanda, now championed by Suella Braverman, is the embodiment of the way Britain’s former vision of development assistance, and that of the OECD, has been deliberately degraded. It is costing more than £120 million.
So, no surprise that “Global Britain” has proved to be an empty slogan.
