PENNY Mordaunt, the International Aid Secretary, is about to go on another spending spree and seems bent on flinging fistfuls of our money at yet more despots and dictators. The Department of International Aid and Development (DfID), under her leadership, is now dispatching police to Africa to help combat terrorism, slavery and illegal migration.
Britain is rife with crime and terror threats. Returning Isis jihadists and their brides, gang warfare and a stabbing epidemic are all regular abhorrences, blighting our lives. The police already divert far too much of their time to patrolling Twitter and arresting Christian preachers, leaving ever fewer to tackle real crime.
The government is failing in its duty to keep law-abiding citizens safe. Why then is Mordaunt sending British police out of the country to risk their lives abroad when they are so badly needed here?
She claims this will combat terrorism. This is laughable given DfID’s penchant for funding dictators, anti-Semitic organisations, suspect charity bosses and terrorist regimes, about which I have written several times.
Is Mordaunt aware that DfID sends £75million annually to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas? Does she know that neither the PA nor Hamas are lacking in funds and that they use this British taxpayers’ money to enrich themselves and to finance terror campaigns against Israel? Have her civil servants told her that their department has funded, among others, a ‘work camp’ for Westerners on the ‘Palestinian cause’ at An-Najah University on the West Bank and with proven links with Hamas?
DfID, in case she is not on top of her brief, is also inadvertently financing Palestinian school textbooks which demonise Jews and incite violence against Israel. After being rightly criticised for this DfID did announce, in December 2018, a review of this debacle. The end date for this showboating is September. We look forward to its conclusions.
Though why it will take so long is anyone’s guess. Surely government funding of violence and anti-Semitism is a top priority to remedy. If it isn’t, the mandarins who run DfID really should check their moral compasses.
DfID claim they have been ‘clear’ that their funding mustn’t be used to incite violence. No doubt jihadists who learnt their trade in the numerous DfID-funded Islamist schools and universities on the West Bank and in Gaza will be quaking with fear at these stern words. And on whom does DfID rely to vet teachers in the Palestinian territories? Surely it cannot be so obtuse as to take advice from Hamas, the PA or one of the numerous anti-Israel organisations operating there? Maybe it can.
Handing out money to Islamist regimes is a nasty habit for DfID. Since 2011 more than £1billion has been given to Pakistani citizens. Why is DfID giving money to those who live in a country wealthy enough to have its own nuclear weapons?
Why should the Pakistani government want to divert their financial resources away from building nuclear bombs to helping their poorest, when DfID gladly does that job for them? The same logic applies to the many corrupt regimes which not only steal the money that DfID earmarks for those in need but have yet another excuse to neglect their own citizens. Why should they have the impetus to look after their own citizens if DfID does it for them? DfID’s perverse policies are not only paternalism of the worst kind but also a form of creeping colonialism.
DfID also contributes a good-sized chunk of its annual £14billion budget towards the bloated salaries of charity bosses who seemingly work to undermine British interests.
These include the UN, EU, World Bank and IMF – to the tune of millions of pounds. Any who think that most of this money finds its way to the needy poor are fooling themselves.
Surely the best contribution DfID can make to fighting terrorism abroad is not to fund terror regimes? If only they could stir themselves out of their virtue-signalling stupor, Mordaunt and her civil servants would see what the rest of us know to be true – that their department is a travesty, a turgid vanity project and should be disbanded.
