Aid, Governments and Taxpayers – The Insurance Policies Just Ran Out
I learned a couple of weeks ago that Rory Stewart's wife's project in Afghanistan, 'Turquoise', has been informed that the latest payment of $1.0 million from USAID will not be turning up in Kabul because President Trump closed USAID. Rory's very upset about this.
I’d like to share his grief, but I’m more inclined to wonder what the hell sense of entitlement to US taxpayers’ hard-earned cash, without their knowledge, much less consent, drives this man’s bizarre belief that their cash must be disbursed in this way?
It’s born of a mentality which is utterly divorced from the communities within our societies in both the UK and the US. It’s an attitude, and a prevailing sense of ineffable ‘rightness’ which pervades our ruling classes, political, public sector, and media.
They are right, ergo, we’re always wrong. Public funds don’t belong to taxpayers – We determine how that money shall be spent.
The voters in the US turned out last November, across the country, and made it clear that this isn’t right, and they really didn’t want to carry on with this appalling arrangement any longer.
One wonders, naturally, how many US$s have been spent on Rory’s project over the years since the Taliban took over? How many £’s from the UK’s Foreign Aid budget have gone this way? In fact, the UK has sent some £600.0 million to Afghanistan since 2021, and I’d bet that Rory’s wife’s ‘Turquoise’ has seen a sizeable chunk of this.
The Foreign, Commonwealth, and Overseas Development Ministry spends about £13.0 billion a year on aid, although this is being cut shortly to boost spending on defence. Where is it going and who gets the benefit?
In the US, President Trump has taken a more novel approach to the annual spend of USAID of $77.0 billion by simply closing this agency down until a proper accounting and evaluation has been completed. You can quickly see why the US has sent $21.0 billion in aid to Afghanistan since 2021, which should be the most counter-intuitive aid spend in history. After Joe Biden’s administration left about $8.0 billion of military materiel lying around in the lead-up to a catastrophically awful retreat/evacuation, one imagines that the Taliban probably needed lots of spare parts for the kit they’d inherited? Most of the stuff was sold to grateful customers around the world at knock-down prices, including Iran. Funnily enough, something similar has been happening in Ukraine, but I digress.
This scenario is as astonishing as it is perverse, and I was amazed at the declared and verified amounts.
Without being unduly uncharitable about a charitable cause which works with women and poor people in Afghanistan, I'd ask a few questions:
- How much in bribes does Rory Stewart’s wife’s NGO 'Turquoise' pay to the Taliban per $1.0 million to get its cash disbursed in Kabul? Less than 25%?
2. At what point does a 'Non-Government Organisation' become a 'Government Organisation'? Is it soon after over 50% of its income comes from government or is 90% the benchmark?
Unlike Rory Stewart, I’m a big fan of transparency in government and all its dealings. He pontificates on such matters when it suits and doesn’t, as in this case of transparency for NGOs and Aid, when it doesn’t suit him.
Transparency is integral to the concept of democratic societies and a fundamental premise upon which citizens either have confidence in their elected representatives or not.
The unravelling of the US Federal government’s departments and agencies under examination by DOGE offers an insight to the way in which taxpayers’ money is wasted, and worse.
This is real transparency, and the howling and wailing can be heard from all of those who have just lost the argument, along with many thousands of useless jobs and state funding for Diversity Inclusion and Equity ‘initiatives’. How many ‘White Racism Interpretation Shows’ or ‘Trannie/Drag Queen Reading Hours’ can a state school budget carry on limited funds?
Slipping the odd few hundreds of millions of aid to Afghanistan via a ghastly Islamist misogynistic oppressive regime taking its cut, and hiding this, doesn’t really work for me. Obviously, they missed a few beats by not exporting a few ‘Drag Queen Reading Hours’ sessions to Afghanistan. Who knows, there’s probably a market for this in the Taliban, behind closed doors.
The fact that HMG has been a party to this persistent waste of taxpayers’ money merely reinforces the case for having DOGE applied in UK Government. We may have a very long wait.
A lot of the information has been gathered and published by The Taxpayers Alliance over some years. Sadly, it doesn’t get much space in our media. The Spectator has just launched its own monitoring, humorously named ‘Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding’, or ‘SPAFF’ which may be just an echo of an earlier editor but could prove to be useful. I’m unconvinced. It may sell a few more subscriptions, but it’s a facsimile of the real thing which we need urgently.
I’m pleased to see that Guido, ‘Order Order’, has joined in by promoting ‘UK DOGE’ which picks up examples of waste in national and local government and illustrates this by showing examples of how this money could have been spent sensibly by numbers of potholes filled to firefighters/nurses recruited. It’s a start. But it’s a long hard road ahead, as demonstrated by this from Guido:
‘The MoD has just advertised for a new position: ‘Diversity and Inclusion Learning and Development Professional’. For £38,790 the department is looking for someone to “maintain and deliver a blended methodology of existing Defence-specific D & I Programmes and Initiatives” within the Defence Academy, which provides higher education to armed forces and civil servants. This apparently contributes towards sustaining “the strategic and operational advantage.”
This comes at a time when our abysmal Prime Minister is cheerfully committing our threadbare British Army to a security force to protect Ukrainian borders when he can’t even protect UK borders. It’s beyond parody.
Merely highlighting the manifestly absurd expenditures by HMG, Holyrood, and Cardiff, as well as sundry wasteful allocations by regional and local councils doesn’t get sufficiently close to the heart of the matter.
As we’ve witnessed, in real time, the only way forward is a ‘root and branch’ in-depth audit across the board. Javier Millei took this ‘root and branch’ approach with his chainsaw without the in-depth analysis. It’s less sophisticated, but it’s working well in Argentina which now shows net surpluses in the government’s current account.
It’s happening in the US, and Donald Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk are widely despised by the Democrat ascendency in the US and its dominant mainstream media supporters. Why? Because they’re doing what voters and taxpayers want to see.
They are equally despised by the leaders of the European Union both in France and Germany as well as the British government, whether Labour or Conservative.
The unelected people who run the EU from the European Commission were inculcated with an anti-USA sentiment which dates from Charles de Gaulle’s days of the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve watched the EC/EU for over 50 years. The European Union and its European Commission are avowed ‘Big State’ agencies, with everything that this entails from over-regulation to high taxes. It’s cell-deep in these institutions in Brussels, as well as Paris, Berlin, and London.
It’s logical to conclude that the dismantling of the worthless and expensive components of a federal state apparatus in the US is going down like a rat sandwich with all of the usual suspects. It’s not mystical. It’s preordained.
Taxpayers/voters aren’t supposed to have a real voice in governments, much less in the federal governments in Washington and Brussels, or our own national government. The people in charge worked this out many years ago and insured against this.
I’d contend that those insurance policies ran out last November in the US. They’re running out across Europe, in different ways. Giorgia Meloni stands alone at the old Western Europe High Table today. I’m betting that France will join the new club in 2027. Germany has just voted and the new Chancellor will exclude over 20% of the electorate from the latest multi-coloured coalition of losers. They will regret this.
The UK? God knows. I’m an optimistic cynic. By 2029 the UK will be a genuine ‘basket-case’ economy, broken by incompetent fiscal and economic policies and immiserated by the insanely expensive impositions of Net Zero.
Recovery from that point will only be possible if the ‘root and branch’ eradication of waste in the public sector which accounts for an astonishing 45% of GDP is implemented. By this stage we’ll be talking about resuscitation, rather than reinvigorating, of our wrecked private sector in pretty well all sectors from agriculture and manufacturing to services across the board.
It’s a shame that we will have to watch our demise for another four years and remain unable to do anything about this. Ah well!
We really need to make sure that we get the chance to change our trajectory in 2029. A divided opposition to the Labour behemoth isn’t going to cut it, and at this point I shall demur from further comment other than to point out that the mathematics of our national electoral system are quite clear and understood.