If, like me, you’ve been watching Trump 2 then you will no doubt have been following the debate about USAID.
In recent days, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have all suggested that for too long the organisation which oversees foreign aid spending has been run by “radical left lunatics” and riddled with fraud, corruption and waste.
Ever since Team Trump returned to power, social media has been filled with one astonishing revelation after another about how American taxpayers’ dollars have been used to bankroll some truly bizarre, pointless, and far-left projects around the globe, with much of this money going to people who basically hate America and the West.
Like the $1.5 million that’s gone on ‘advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces’. The $47,000 on funding ‘a transgender opera’ in Colombia. Or the $2 million on sex changes in Guatemala —seriously.
All of which raises an intriguing question for those of us looking on from across the pond, and one that my friend Douglas Murray asks in The Spectator this week. Given that Americans have finally seen sense on foreign aid, then when will the British?
It’s a good question.
After all, am I the only person on these islands who finds it utterly mind-boggling that despite the British people grappling with the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War, and a country which is visibly in managed decline, their leaders in Westminster are still sending an eye-watering £15.3 BILLION of taxpayers’ money, every year, to people overseas?
Am I the only one, furthermore, who cannot understand why, such is the abysmal state of our National Health Service (NHS), we are simultaneously leaving millions of British people on record-long hospital waiting lists and then treating them in hospital corridors and car parks while sending, in 2023, some £250 million to Ukraine, £164 million to Ethiopia, £115 million to Afghanistan, £109 million to Syria, £100 million to Yemen, £99 million to Nigeria, £97 million to Somalia, £64 million to Pakistan (or £133 million this year), £62 million to Brazil, and £57 million to Bangladesh?
And am I the only one who struggles with the fact that we just took winter fuel payments off British pensioners to save a paltry £1.5 billion and are smashing family farms that have been on these islands for generations to raise just £500 million while, at the very same time, our leaders are sending millions in foreign aid to the likes of China and India, which have been sending people into space? Am I the only one who thinks all this is completely and utterly insane?
Not so, according to recent polling. While you certainly won’t hear about it among the elite class in Westminster, for whom support for foreign aid, like support for mass immigration and woke idiocy, is a sacred value that can never be challenged, the reality out there in the country is that nearly two-thirds of British people —including me—want to see the amount we spend on foreign aid sharply reduced.
And you know what? If you look at the following list of projects that British taxpayers are funding overseas then you’ll soon conclude they are entirely right to think this way. Here, as just a starter, are ten projects that hardworking, tax-paying British people are funding overseas while their own country and people continue to decline. And just trust me on this —you’re going to want to read until the end.