Jacob Rees-Mogg and the crusaders against compassion will shamelessly exploit this story, which is irrelevant to their cause
It’s hard to ignore the symmetry. On Thursday, the Times reported that Oxfam had covered up the use of prostitutes in Haiti by its aid workers. On Friday, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the current darling of the Tory grassroots, arrived in Downing Street to deliver a petition of more than 100,000 Daily Express readers demanding cuts to the aid budget. There is, of course, no formal connection between the Times’s important story and Rees-Mogg’s appearance as a well-spoken mortician, come to collect the corpse of compassion. But there is an undeniable psychological link, one that the Conservative right will exploit pitilessly.
It seems aeons ago, but there was a time when the Tory high command, in the high season of party modernisation, was deeply and persistently preoccupied by the question of foreign aid. As shadow chancellor, George Osborne grew close to Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty, pledging to ringfence at least 0.7% of national income for international development spending (a promise that was finally given statutory force in 2015).
Continue reading...from Voluntary Sector Network | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2nS9399
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