How to make foreign aid work for Britain

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Justine Greening has made sensible decisions to stop pouring money into the pockets of relatively wealthy foreign powers

Is the penny finally beginning to drop that, at a time of spending restraint at home, it is morally unsustainable to lavish extra billions on overseas aid?

Officially, David Cameron remains wedded to his wrong-headed policy of handing 0.7 per cent of national income – or £11billion a year – to the Department for International Development.

Yet, quietly, plans to enshrine this posturing commitment in law appear to have been sidelined and will not appear in next week’s Queen’s Speech.

Meanwhile Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, has made sensible decisions to stop pouring money into the pockets of relatively wealthy foreign powers.

First, space programme-endowed India was stripped of aid. Now South Africa – which accounts for over a third of sub-Saharan Africa’s total GDP – is to lose its  £19million-a-year government handout.

Perhaps even more significant is the decision by the Prime Minister to allow the aid budget to be used to fund work by other government departments.

Rightly, the Ministry of Defence, which performs peacekeeping and disaster relief in some of the most dangerous places on earth, is most likely to benefit.

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It’s ludicrous to expect the MoD to make further cuts in troop numbers, while DfID sits on a budget so bloated that it does not know how to spend it all.

But ministers in other corners of Whitehall who make grants to projects abroad must also be able to reclaim money from the aid budget. For example, spending by Michael Gove on initiatives overseas should never be allowed to divert funding from Britain’s schools.

In these troubled times, the Mail continues to believe that ring-fencing the foreign aid budget is misguided posturing of the worst kind.

Is it too much to hope ministers are at last taking steps in the right direction?

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As three British soldiers are killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, all of the Mail’s thoughts are with the families of these fallen heroes.

But it’s impossible not to worry that, as we edge closer to the date when our troops will leave this still benighted country for good, such sickening loss of life will become ever more likely.

As Lord Dannatt, the shrewd ex-army chief of staff warned yesterday, the Taliban will do everything they can to ‘play up the fact they have driven us out’.

Many serious political mistakes have been made over Afghanistan. Publicly announcing a 2014 departure date some four years in advance could prove to be the one with the gravest of consequences.

Let's see justice done

Over the past two weeks, the Mail has shone a light on the disturbing array of powers held by the secretive Court  of Protection.

Not only has it seized control of £2billion of assets belonging to people who it says are unfit to look after their own affairs.

In one Kafkaesque case, a woman who was not even present in court, and had no legal representation, was thrown in jail for ignoring the court’s orders not to remove her father from a care home where she feared he would die.

So we welcome the decision by Chris Grayling, the increasingly assertive Justice Secretary, to order an urgent review of whether it is appropriate for the court to continue to carry out its work almost entirely behind closed doors.

Yes, this court has onerous and delicate judgments to make, many of which will not be controversial.

But the sacred principle of open justice demands that its work should be subject to proper scrutiny.