Scotland to open its own ‘cashpoint in the sky’? – Bill Jamieson

Might the Scottish Government create its own Department for International Development, wonders Bill Jamieson, as the UK Government merges DfID into the Foreign Office.

Cargo from UK Aid waiting to be loaded at East Midlands Airport. (Picture: Simon Cooper/PA Wire)

Would the SNP wish to retain the UK Department for International Development on independence? It employs 948 at its headquarters in East Kilbride. The decision by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to fold it within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office presents a tricky political challenge for the SNP. Many of its supporters would view it as an imperial outpost of Whitehall and would shed no tears over its disappearance.

For others, its abolition as a separate entity is seen as a penny-pinching outrage that weakens our presence on the world stage. Thundered the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford: “The prime minister and this UK Government are using the cover of a terrible pandemic to rip apart the UK’s structures for international development and humanitarian aid at a time when we should be standing with the world’s poorest, acting as a beacon of hope.”

The department’s reputation has been badly bruised over the years, causing it to be branded “the cash point in the sky”. While austerity raged at home, billions of pounds were sent to the accounts of international organisations where control was lost. Only three per cent of the money spent on British aid contracts actually went to suppliers in poor countries. Former Prime Minister David Cameron’s rule that 0.7 per cent of the UK budget was spent on aid was seen as a fatally flawed target, forcing civil servants to spend what is now £15 billion every 12 months in rushed and poorly researched commitments to opaque organisations.

It could fairly be said that the least questionable beneficiary was East Kilbride itself, said to enjoy an economic benefit worth £30 million to the local economy.

Surely a saltire solution cannot be far off: a separate Scottish Government department for international aid with a generous budget, high-level secondments and informed officials organising overseas fact-finding missions, on-the-spot research and appropriate travel and hotel accommodation. Whatever largesse Whitehall could dispense, could we surely not better it?

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