Mean-spirited government

ONE of Chris Patten's gifts as a politician is his ability to say one thing and do another. When he was Minister for Overseas Development he gave an interview to the Catholic Herald and spoke of his goal of getting closer to the United Nations overseas aid guideline of 0.7 per cent of gross national product.
Mr Patten is widely regarded as having been a successful Minister for Overseas Development, a post not overly treasured in the government hierarchy. Yet the facts do not bear out such an impression. And, to be fair to Mr Patten, he wasn't alone among his predecessors and successors in failing to match fine words about commitment to the third world with actions.
We are repeatedly told in this pre-ele,ction period that Britain enjoyed unprecedented economic growth and standards of living in the 1980s. Why then did our aid budget not grow accordingly? Perhaps it was to fund that brief episode of domestic bliss that we cut back on our assistance to the poorer peoples of the developing world.
Christian Aid this week produced figures that undermine our government's vocal concern about what happens in the third world. In 1990 for the first time ever we made more money from the world's poorest of the poor than we gave them. The rigours of a market economy?
And Britain prosperous, thriving Britain, soon to burst into a fever of economic growth again after the blip of the current recession if our government is to be believed has fallen to fifth from the bottom in the table of western industrialised countries giving overseas aid.
Over a decade we havegone from a net outflow to the needy of other countries of .0.3 billion to a net income of .£2.4 billion. If that is the success that we must thank this government for, then Christians can have no part of it.
And neither, it seems, will the British public. It has responded in times of prosperity and even during recession by increasing its support to charities working in the third world. This mean-sprited government has responded to the 13 per cent growth in such contributions not by matching such generosity, but by cutting back on its outgoings.