Our foreign aid target is absurd

At last someone has said it. Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems have hitched themselves to a spending target for foreign aid that is outdated and makes no sense.

In an astute report published today, International Policy Network, a London-based free-market think-tank, takes aim at the mantra that richer countries should spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas development.

“Britain now faces the perverse spectacle of an election fought over the failure of increasing domestic spending on unreformed public services,” Alec van Gelder says in the British edition. The perversity is that “the same politicians tell us that increasing funding for unreformed international development aid is the only possible choice”.