UK aid budget claims are wrong, Nationalists say

Published on 26/06/2012 00:05

Nationalists have accused the Better Together launch of “peddling misinformation and untruths” about UK aid budgets.

Alistair Darling claimed in his keynote speech that the UK was the world’s second biggest aid donor, but the SNP pointed to official OECD aid figures which they claimed “disprove” this in both monetary and percentage terms. Instead, they say the UK has failed to meet the official UN aid target to spend 0.7 per cent of national income (GNI) on aid, which it is signed up to, for the past 42 years. Small European nations such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway all have.

SNP MSP Humza Yousaf said: “Day one of the No campaign and already they have been caught red-handed peddling misinformation and untruths. That missing aid would have saved lives and reduced poverty around the world.

“If this is the standard of statistics being used by the No campaign, it undermines all of their other dodgy figures in their threadbare case against independence.”