No good deed goes unpunished

The UK coalition government's austerity measures have left very few areas of public spending untouched. Even the the National Health Service, whose budget has supposedly been "ring-fenced", is only protected in nominal terms, so real spending is being seriously crimped by persistently above-target inflation.

There is, however, one exception: the overseas aid budget. David Cameron has repeatedly boasted of his government's commitment to get UK aid spending up to the internationally-agreed (though never achieved) goal  of 0.7% of GDP by 2013. This translates into a 34% increase in aid spending over the first three years of the government's term, which has not gone down well with a lot of voters at a time when domestic programmes are being slashed.

No good deed goes unpunished, and Cameron has just learned the reward for his -- or rather our -- generosity. It transpires that India, which is still the largest recipient of UK aid, wanted to put an end to the programme last year, on the grounds that the amounts involved are so minuscule in relation to India's own development spending -- "a peanut", as the Indian Finance Minister described it to parliament in New Delhi last year. Remarkably, the UK's aid authorities leaned on India to keep taking the money, on the grounds that ending the programme would be deeply embarrassing for the UK government.

That embarrassment is likely to be dwarfed by the opprobrium that may descend on the government once the tabloid press gets its teeth into this story. Giving aid purely for development purposes has never been popular with the electorate, and the government has always sought to justify it in part by pointing to its role in promoting UK trade. In the case of India, however, even that has backfired spectacularly. As the story linked above points out, UK aid to India was partly based on a desire to win a big jet fighter contract with the Indian Air Force. Last week, however, India awarded the contract instead to France, even though the French aircraft, the Rafale, is regarded as technically inferior to the Eurofighter Typhoon that the UK was trying to flog.

Most UK voters, if they have bothered to think about it at all, probably regard it as odd that the UK's biggest aid recipient is a country that has been growing by 10% a year, and one whose own companies have been enthusiastically buying up chunks of the British economy in recent years -- especially when that country fails to deliver the expected quid pro quo in the form of trade deals.  There are dozens of countries around the world where British aid is desperately needed. It would be very sad if the whole aid programme now gets gutted just because the aid ministry has been doggedly throwing the money at the wrong target.

UPDATE, 7 February: It bothers me a bit to find that I keep agreeing with Dominic Lawson about things, but he has a very good piece on aid to India here.