My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Let us just imagine what would happen if the Government intended to support a particular project somewhere, but found towards the end of the financial year that it was rife with corruption and therefore thought it best not to spend money on it. They would not be able to do that. The Government would not be allowed to say, “We’ll keep the money and not spend it,” but would be forced, at the last minute, to spend it, because Parliament had insisted that it had to be spent, come what may. How on earth is that a sensible way to ask a Department to act?
We heard the idea that if we did this and set the lead, all other countries would follow. We hear it time and again in different contexts. CND started this in the 1980s—“If we get rid of all our nuclear weapons, every other country in the world will follow.” We all knew—even the Labour party came to realise—that that was a load of old nonsense. Then we started hearing it on climate change—“If we hit our climate change targets and do all this, every other country in the world will follow”—but that has been proved to be a load of cobblers as well. All the big people churning out all the carbon emissions
are doing absolutely nothing to curb them, apart from welcoming our industry to their countries, but still we hear it, even though it has been proved wrong time after time—“If we do this, every other country will follow.”
What has actually happened in practice? While we have been ramping up the proportion that we spend on overseas aid, similar countries in the developed world have been reducing the amount they spend as a percentage of their GNI. Why have they done that? There are two possible explanations. The first is that they actually have some sense and realise that if they cannot afford to spend the money, they would have to spend less on something that is a discretionary spend—something that we might consider doing at some point.