Nominations for the head of the World Bank have now closed, and there are three candidates:
- Jim Kim, nominated by the United States; President of Dartmouth College, former head of HIV at the World Health Organization, and a founder of Partners in Health;
- Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, nominated by Nigeria, South Africa and Angola; finance Minister of Nigeria, former foreign Minister of Nigeria; former Managing Director of the World Bank
- José Antonio Ocampo, nominated by Brazil; a professor at Columbia University; former UN under-secretary for economic affairs; former Finance Minister of Colombia.
That means that for the first time ever there is a genuine contest. In previous years other shareholders were faced with the choice of accepting or rejecting the US nominee. This time round, with three serious candidates to choose from, it is not clear that the US nominee has to win. The other shareholders should now take a moment to consult, and assess which candidate they think is best for the job; and it is very important that they should do so in an accountable way, for the sake of the integrity of this appointment and for the future of the governance of international institutions.
Should merit or nationality determine which person becomes President of the World Bank?
In the past, the head of the World Bank was nominated by the United States, and has been a US citizen, under a so-called ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ reached shortly after the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. This does not reflect, as is sometimes supposed, the fact that the US alone has sufficient voting power to veto an appointment. The origin of this arrangement was that the US Treasury Secretary at the time, Frederick Vinson, convinced John Maynard Keynes that it was necessary for the World Bank to have an American at its head to secure the confidence of Wall Street, which was to be the main supplier of capital to the Bank in the early years. Of course today capital markets are global, and this rationale for US leadership of the World Bank no longer applies. In return for the leadership of the World Bank, the US gave up their claim to appoint the Managing Director of the IMF.
An appointment requires an 85% super-majority of the votes of the Board [UPDATE: I now believe that this appointment can be made by simple majority]; this means that the US can veto an appointment, but it also means that a candidate could be blocked by a coalition of three European directors plus the nominating constituency of one of the candidates; or by any four of the directors from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland. In other words, if the European shareholders choose to act together they have at least as much power as the United States to block an appointment.
In the past when there was only one nomination, it made little sense for any other country to oppose the person on offer – since that would mean getting off on the wrong foot with the new World Bank President and annoying the US administration to boot. Opposing the nominee would mean having to mount an invidious attack on the individual that the US government had nominated. So any US candidate had unstoppable momentum.
But with three candidates on offer, all this changes. If the European shareholders were to make it clear right away that they do not regard this as a done deal, and that it has not been stitched up already in private conversations between officials, then the dynamics change completely. Anyone can win, and that means that it no longer makes sense automatically to back the American nomination. That would make it both possible and necessary for each of the shareholders to consider the candidates on merit.
The world needs more effective global economic governance more than ever. This appointment can make an important contribution to that: as well as giving direction to an economically significant institution, the President of the World Bank has a seat at the table of G-20 meetings alongside the heads of state of the most powerful nations.
In the past, these decisions have been made by governments negotiating privately, with no public accountability for the choices they make. Europeans blamed the US for having nominated Paul Wolfowitz in March 2005, but their own governments did not exercise their power to prevent his appointment. The consequence of this lack of accountable decision-making was a series of poor appointments (such as Strauss-Kahn at the IMF and Wolfowitz at the World Bank) and the exclusion of highly qualified alternatives, to the detriment of the reputation and authority of both institutions.
These deals behind closed doors for posts in key institutions based on nationality are an obstacle to effective global governance. Right now the UK will be offering to support Jim Kim for the World Bank in return for US support for the UK candidate for the EBRD, Sir Suma Chakrabarti. But that is no way to make either appointment. Jim Kim should not be appointed because of his nationality; nor should he be precluded on that basis. Let all three candidates be judged on their merits against the criteria of who has the best qualifications for the post.
The United States and the European governments have all said that they favour an open, merit-based competition. A good step would be for shareholders to set out publicly what they consider to be the ‘merits’ required for the post. Do the governments agree with a CGD survey some years ago whose respondents ranked the criteria as (in order): efficient manager, experience of international organisations, knowledge of development, political and diplomatic experience, and banking and finance?
Having set out what they consider to be the main requirements for the job, the member governments should say publicly which candidate they plan to support. They should set out the case for their favoured candidate, which they can do without criticizing the other nominees. It may be clear quite quickly which of the candidates is best qualified for the job; or further discussion may be required.
Such a focus on qualifications will make it harder for appointments to be made in future on the basis of nationality. Governments would find it harder to acquiesce in the appointment of inferior candidates, based on some tawdry trade-off, if they have to set out the basis for their choice and be held to account for it domestically. Using transparency and accountability in this way would help to improve the governance and effectiveness of our global institutions.
Of course, much of the public has never have heard of the President of the World Bank and they are unlikely to be much interested. But there are some who will care, as befits international financial institutions which are ever important for the stability of the world economy. Furthermore, the average British household contributes more than £30 a year to the World Bank, and that alone entitles them to some involvement in the decision about how their representative on the World Bank board will vote on their behalf. The British government has a very good record of promoting transparency and accountability of the development system; they should put that into practice for this appointment.
The fact that there is, for the first time, a contested election, and no automatic presumption that the US nominee must win, creates an important opportunity to improve the way our global institutions are managed. Shareholders can act now to ensure that this really is an accountable and transparent appointment based on merit, and so start the world down the road of cleaning up the way we make these important international appointments.
The Guardian development blog is running a series of end of year reflections on development, including one by me. Many of the articles are upbeat about progress in developing countries, but pessimistic about the short term economic prospects for the industrialised world and for global cooperation to tackle shared global problems.
The series so far includes:
- Duncan Green from Oxfam, who contrasts progress in developing countries over the last year with the gloom of the ‘formerly rich’ countries of the G-8.
- Calestous Juma from Harvard, who identifies regional integration and better links with the diaspora as key drivers of Africa’s growth.
- Shanta Devarajan from the World Bank, who is cautiously optimistic, especially in the light of increased demand by Africans for their governments to be accountable.
- Linda Raftree from Plan, who also emphasizes progress towards more inclusive and open societies.
- Kevin Watkins from Brookings and UNESCO, calling for “a properly financed global fund for education like those that have delivered such striking results in the health sector“.
- Jonathan Glennie from ODI and the Guardian, who is pessimistic about the prospects for international cooperation in the face of rising protectionism and nationalism as a result of poor economic prospects in the US and Europe.
- and my contribution, reproduced below, which gives a positive account of progress in many countries in Africa over the past year, and emphasizes the importance for developing countries of better global decision-making.
This joint post with Stephanie Majerowicz first appeared on the Views from the Center blog at the Center for Global Development
“The defining division these days is increasingly: open or closed? Are we open to the changing world? Or do we see its menace, but not its possibilities?”
—Tony Blair, A Global Alliance for Global Values, September 2006
It is easy to be cynical about international summits and their carefully drafted communiqués. But they sometimes matter more than people expect. (If they didn’t, why would government officials put so much time and effort into negotiating the text?) Even if the text is often a bland compromise, these meetings can help to move an issue forward, by locking in a new consensus which forms the platform for further progress.
We saw how this works at this week’s High Level Forum on development effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. In a speech notable for a thinly veiled warning about aid from China, Secretary Clinton made the welcome announcement that the US would join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which entails the publication of the details of all US aid projects. This decision has given a major impetus to the international movement for aid transparency, which has been one of the important outcomes of the Busan meeting. According to US administration insiders, this decision was in part a consequence of an earlier international initiative, which has not had as much attention as it deserves: the Open Government Partnership (OGP).
The OGP is an effort to create a club of nations committed to good governance and transparency. It was launched a few months ago in New York, at a side-event of the UN meetings, by 26 heads of state, the culmination of months of work by the White House and eight partner governments.
David Eaves (an open government enthusiast from Canada) sees the Open Government Partnership as more than just another meeting. The OGP, he says:
…is much more than a simple pact designed to make heads of state look good. I believe it has real geopolitical aims and may be the first overt, ideological salvo in the what I believe will be the geopolitical axis of Open versus Closed. This is about finding ways to compete for the hearts and minds of the world in a way that China, Russia, Iran and others simpley cannot.
The Economist blog is less convinced: in their view “this is really nothing new or major” especially because the partnership includes “such beacons of openness as Russia and Pakistan.”
We’ve warmed to the Open Government Partnership after some initial skepticism. The architects never had the grandiose ambitions that David Eaves suggests: rather they wanted to do something which might encourage small, tangible improvements in the way governments promote transparency and good governance. The idea is to provide a network of support to reformers across the world pushing for open government, to enable them to share ideas and lessons, and to strengthen their hand by demonstrating to sceptics that they are part of a broader international movement. It brings government’s domestic achievements to the international spotlight to encourage reforms and reformers. By that modest yardstick, the initiative is a step in the right direction.
Why were we skeptical at first? Partly for the reasons set out by the Economist: the standards for joining the OGP (and the implicit endorsement that it confers) are not very exacting. What kind of transparency club has Russia and Azerbaijan as members? More importantly, we felt that an international initiative would have most value if it focused on transparency of cross border flows such as payments by companies for minerals, cross-border transactions between multinational companies and their subsidiaries, aid transparency, and cooperation between tax authorities. It is in tackling transnational problems that an international coalition makes most sense. But there was little political appetite for starting with these difficult international problems, and the OGP has focused mainly on encouraging its members to implement policies which promote transparency domestically.
But although the OGP has not focused on improving the transparency of international flows, there are already signs of how it can work to put pressure on its members to be more open. It has apparently contributed to the announcement this week that the US would join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, bringing the US into line with other OGP members. Furthermore there is now a debate bubbling up in the UK about the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative which requires governments publicly to disclose their revenues from oil, gas, and mining assets, and for companies to disclose the payments they make. President Obama announced at the launch of the OGP that the US would itself become a member of the EITI. As a result, the UK is now under pressure to follow suit. Although the UK was a supporter of EITI from its inception, it has never joined itself (partly because of opposition from the Business Department): a position which will be more difficult to sustain if and when the US fulfills President Obama’s commitment to join. That is exactly the kind of international peer pressure which OGP is designed to generate.
So the OGP is, to misquote Churchill, a modest initiative with much to be modest about. It was not conceived as the opening salvo of a new battle, but as a small step to encourage and support those countries round the world who want to move towards greater openness and transparency. There are some welcome signs that it is already making a difference. It may eventually lose momentum, especially as the politicians who put it together move on, and it may become too diluted by the undemanding criteria for membership. We hope not.
This blog post first appeared on the Media and Government site.
The Institute for Government is hosting a panel debate on ‘Policy by Twitter’ today with Tom Watson, Tim Montgomerie, Alberto Nardelli and David Babbs, chaired by Jill Rutter. It is part of the Media and Government series in collaboration with Fishburn Hedges.
Online engagement may have bigger implications for politics than many commentators, journalists and politicians have yet realized. The generic description ‘new media’ could lead to a false sense that little has changed by implying that facebook, twitter and blogs are just a faster, less professional version of the ‘old media’. But perhaps they are the early signs of a form of social engagement which is qualitatively different from old media, in ways with important implications for government and policymakers.
Consider the demise of the News of the World. The paper was not killed by competition from new media: it brought itself down by a failure of journalistic integrity, and by management which either did not know or did not care how journalists were getting their scoops. In the past this might have been a survivable incident: it would merely have joined a long litany of press misjudgments, alongside the Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, Piers Morgan’s anti-German Mirror headline and the Daily Mail’s support for Hitler and Mussolini. But this time the error was terminal for the News of the World. What has changed?
The collapse of the News of the World is partly the result of a new understanding by British politicians that their political future no longer depends on the patronage of Rupert Murdoch. David Cameron and Ed Milliband realized that they not only could but should disown their relationships with him – an act which would have been considered political suicide only a few years before. And it was not just that the stranglehold of newspaper proprietors over politicians had been relaxed. The final nail in the coffin for the News of the World was a short campaign on twitter which persuaded companies to withhold their advertising from Britain’s biggest highest-circulation newspaper.
This suggests that new media is not just a faster and 24 hour news channel. The political economy of media is changing in three important ways.
First, the economics of media are changing in a way which could shift political power. The old media required expensive equipment for printing presses and broadcasting studios, and income from advertising revenues or governments to cover significant running costs. Wealthy individuals and business provided the capital for old media, and often subsidized loss-making newspapers. The wealthy owners acquired political influence through their ownership of limited means of mass communication. By contrast, new media requires no capital. From Mumsnet to the Huffington Post, everyone now has the tools of mass communication in their hands, irrespective of wealth. The decision of British politicians to ostracize News International appears to be an unconscious recognition of a new world in which wealth no longer buys control of mass communication, and so buys less political power too. If so, this will have significant implications for the way that policy is made in future.
Second, the new media is a conversation not a broadcast. This is more than a difference in form: it is a difference in attitude and meaning. For digital natives the impact of the internet on media is analogous to the impact of the enlightenment on science: the authority of a message is not derived from the position of the person from whom it comes, but from it being exposed to human interaction, review and scrutiny. Digital natives increasingly do not rely on a newspaper editor to curate news stories, but on their extended social network which guides them to interesting news and commentary. They expect articles to be followed by user comments, which draw attention to errors of fact and weaknesses in reasoning. This combination of social filtering and the wisdom of crowds draws good content to the surface in a way which is both more reliable and more democratic than the old media. The government is at risk of treating new media as if it were a new way to transmit information to the public, without being willing (or knowing how) to engage in the conversation which for digital natives is the essence of its legitimacy.
Third, digital citizens engage in a long tail of conversations. Chris Anderson explained in 2004 how online businesses such as Amazon and Netflix make money by selling a large number of distinct items in relatively small quantities to consumers with specific interests. For bricks-and-mortar stores the costs of distribution and inventory made it impossible to serve this ‘long tail’ of niche interests. Similarly old media, with high marginal costs, has only ever been able to serve a narrow range of topics which they deem to be of wide appeal. This has led to a conceit that they are the centre of the ‘national conversation’, as if popular interests were normally distributed along a bell curve and they were able to serve people within one or two standard deviations of the typical citizen. But the public’s appetite for engagement is not normally distributed: it follows a power law (or ‘long tail’) distribution. With zero distributional costs, new media can serve small groups of people with deep interests in niche topics in a way that old media never could.
These three characteristics of new media – low capital needs, a culture of engagement and the long tail distribution – could have profound implications for policy making and especially the way that the government interacts with citizens. The public will increasingly expect to have a conversation with government, not a one-way transmission of information. They will be less inclined to accept the authority of pronouncements from the government, unless they are confident that it can be the subject of detailed scrutiny. They will expect engagement on a wide range of topics previously regarded as of interest only to a limited few, not a focus on a single issue of the day.
This could bring about considerable changes in the way policy is made and communicated. For example:
a. The government will have to become accustomed to publishing all the data it holds, and the analysis which underlies its policy choices, to enable calculations to be reproduced and judgments scrutinized. The public will be less and less inclined to take the government’s word for it. (Examples: OBR, ICAI)
b. Social media strategies will have to mean more than employing someone in the press office to post press releases online and link to them on twitter; government departments will have to become part of the online conversation. (FCO Ambassador blogging is moving in this direction).
c. The long tail of public interests means that most public communication can no longer be channeled through ministers and press offices. Guidelines requiring officials to refer all enquiries to the press office will need to give way to new rules which allow technical experts across the range of subjects to engage directly with citizens, in the way they have in the past through meetings with lobby groups.
d. The erosion of the political power of media proprietors may democratize policy-making to a broader cross section of society. It will be harder to sew up a consensus among the political classes.
None of this means, of course, that government will make policy or have conversations with the public in 140 character tweets. Twitter is merely the dial tone of new media. It is the background hum which confirms you that you are online. It is increasingly the gateway to interesting content and conversations. Policy by new media – including Twitter – could look very different from today’s world.
From the Financial Times comes news that David Cameron and Nick Clegg are planning to employ more political special advisers than the previous government; while the media and public try to work out whether there is anything improper about the Defence Secretary’s working relationship with Adam Werritty. The role of Special Adviser was invented by Harold Wilson to address the need for Ministers to have access to explicitly political advice alongside the civil service.
It is a shame that an increase in the number of special adviser posts is treated as an indicator of either profligacy or politicization of the civil service. Special advisers have played an important role which has helped the civil service and protected it from being drawn into party politics. In my civil service experience over 25 years, I worked with some excellent special advisers. Some of them, such as David Cameron, John Bercow, Ed Miliband and James Purnell, have gone on to other jobs in politics. Others have returned to jobs in business, think-tanks or public relations. I worked with some duds too: that’s when you really came to appreciate the advantages of having good one.
Norman Lamont, then Chancellor, with his Special Adviser
A good special adviser plays an important role in government by helping the civil service to think about the political implications of policy options – which is an essential perspective if policy is to be well-designed and implemented. They work with civil servants to identify the political questions that ministers are likely to ask, and to provide satisfactory answers, helping to smooth the policy-making process. They deal with party political issues – such as writing speeches for party events and dealing with party processes. Without special advisers, civil servants in Ministers’ offices would inevitably end up being drawn into these party issues. Special advisers also play an important role in helping to break down the silos across Whitehall – they often do at least as good a job as the civil service at identifying issues requiring cross-departmental discussion, and helping to broker agreements across government. All this is provided within a reasonably well-regulated structure which helps to avoid accusations of improper influence by outsiders.
The total cost to government of all this is about £7 million a year – in other words, negligible, relative to the institutional benefits of having a transparent arrangement which ensures that Ministers have access to alternative sources of advice from a political perspective. The Institute for Government recently recommended the appointment of additional special advisers to strengthen the functioning of the coalition government.
Michael White asks in today’s Guardian why Liam Fox didn’t make Adam Werrity a Special Adviser. I don’t know the answer, but a possible explanation is that each minister has a quota, in an attempt to keep the numbers down. Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor, got round this by appointing a “Council of Economic Advisers” instead. It is sad to see a cheap political tail (a fetish about the number of Special Advisers) wag an important institutional dog (having a structured mechanism for Ministers to draw on political advice if they wish).
The political establishment has become absurdly fastidious about the idea of Ministers getting advice from a variety of different sources. There is no principle – nor should there be – which prevents Ministers from listening to the opinions of a wide range of people from outside the ranks of the civil service and special advisers. We should welcome a diversity of opinion, especially from people who are well-informed in an issue, which almost always means they have some sort of interest in it. These interests may be financial, institutional or simply a matter of doing something in which the person believes. There is no requirement that a civil servant must always be present when Ministers meet other people: the civil service is not there to police a Minister’s interaction with the outside world (and nor does the civil service wish to do so, though sometimes they may wish they had). It is up to Ministers to choose which advice they wish to heed, and they are accountable to Parliament for those decisions. The civil service already has privileged access to decision-making: it should not (and in my experience does not) aspire to have a monopoly.
So can we please embrace the role of Special Advisers in government; not impose too tight a cap on their numbers; and ensure that they are properly paid and supported? They play an important role in the strange ecosystem of government.
This is very impressive. Here in the UK we do not have paid political advertising: instead political parties are given a limited number of slots on British TV for a ‘party political broadcast’ to put their point across.
This year the UK Conservative party gave up their party political broadcast which usually coincides with the part conference, and used it instead to appeal the British public to give money for the East African famine.
This piece by Simon Kuper in the Weekend FT is so close to the bone it makes you wince:
I recently went on a business trip with three members of the British ruling classes. The late-night banter over drinks was predictably excellent. Sometimes, though, we had to work. When that happened, my companions showed up unprepared and without notes – and did just fine. No wonder, because their entire education had been a lesson in winging it. They knew that all you need to succeed is to speak well, and that’s what the British ruling classes do: they speak well.
… You also need to perform in a peculiarly British ritual: the Oxbridge interview. It works like this: you are 17 years old. You are wearing a new suit. You travel to an Oxbridge college for your interview. You find the tutor’s rooms. Perhaps you’re served sherry, which you’ve never seen before. Then you talk. The tutors, sprawled on settees, drawl questions about whatever is keeping them awake.
For my interview at Oxford, I sat in an ill-fitting new suit and had to explain the difference between ‘precise’ and ‘accurate’. If this was an issue keeping the tutor awake, he concealed his excitement at my answer pretty well.
The focus on speaking well is mainly an Oxford and Cambridge thing. The tutorial system – in which you have an hour-long meeting once a week with your tutor, at which you read out your essay – teaches people to wing it, and very often not much else. Life was quite different at the LSE, where I benefited from a fairly technical, mathematical education in economics. The trouble is too many people in the British establishment have been educated only at Oxford or Cambridge.
The article would be fun if it wasn’t also rather serious:
Numbers remain a challenge for Britain’s ruling class. It treats the City as a magical moneymaking machine, whose demands are best granted because lord knows how the thing works. Even the finance minister, George Osborne, has no education in economics beyond whatever he picked up studying history at Oxford. British public debate just doesn’t feature many numerate people such as Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or China’s ruling engineers. Britain’s own excellent engineers and quants are stuck in the engine room while the rhetoricians drive the train.
More than a decade ago a report for the UK Government reached pretty much the same conclusion. It called for “a comprehensive and coherent programme for creating the conditions in which rigorous analysis is routinely demanded and delivered.” (The present Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, was on the steering committee for the report.) I wonder how much has really changed since then.
Development advocates have to make the case for aid and development policy. They are right to say that development is in the national interest of the donor, but it may be a mistake to put this at the centre of the argument. Most people don’t need to be convinced that development is desirable; they need to be convinced that aid works.
Development is in our national interest
It is increasingly the conventional wisdom that it is in the national interest of industrialised countries to promote development in the rest of the world. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a speech saying so a year ago at the Center for Global Development:
… development was once the province of humanitarians, charities, and governments looking to gain allies in global struggles. Today it is a strategic, economic, and moral imperative – as central to advancing American interests and solving global problems as diplomacy and defense.
The UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, also argues that development is a key part of Britain’s strategic and security interests (for example, here and here).
We’ve come a long way over the last twenty years. In January 1991 my father, then a British High Commissioner, sent a despatch to the then Foreign Secretary in London to mark the end of his last post in Africa, arguing that it was in the UK’s national interest to pay more attention to Africa’s development. His despatch said:
There is an overwhelming case on financial grounds alone for acting sooner rather than later, collectively, to provide the resources required for removing most of the debt burden from African countries (provided that they are committed to active economic reform), for arresting environmental degradation, and for restoring the physical and human infrastructure sufficiently to permit diversification of economic effort and its re-direction into areas that will eventually become self-financing – as well, incidentally, as making a more positive contribution to world economic activity.
At that time, the foreign policy establishment was very suspicious of any argument based on ethical or moral imperatives: it believed that foreign policy should be based on narrowly-defined national interests. In 1980 the Brandt Report had argued that it was in our “mutual interest” to pay attention to development and inequality, but in the decade that followed Britain’s aid programme, and our attention to developing countries, had declined. Twenty years ago, when my father was making a case for paying more attention to development based on our national interest as well as our values and moral obligations, his view was regarded as so subversive that the foreign office limited the circulation of the despatch. Today it is received wisdom which is regularly the basis of speeches by the US Secretary of State and the British Foreign Secretary.
We should celebrate the fact that there is, belatedly, recognition among policymakers that promoting development is in our national interest, as well as being the right thing to do. But I am concerned that we are letting the pendulum swing too far, by placing this argument at the centre of the public case for aid. We should use every argument at our disposal for doing the right thing, of course; but if we focus too much on aid being in our national interest, we are danger of undermining the effectiveness of aid and of failing to address the real concerns of sceptical citizens.
The nature of public doubts about aid
If I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, “I don’t think we should spend money helping starving people because I don’t give a toss about them,” I wouldn’t have any nickels at all.
The foreign policy establishment may have been sceptical about focusing on the ethical dimension of foreign policy, but the public never was. Neither the British nor the American people lack compassion for their fellow human beings. My father’s prescient efforts to awaken policymakers’ interest in development were made several years after Live Aid, which had showed that the public needs no lessons in generosity.
I readily concede that the public is often sceptical about aid. I have witnessed focus group discussions which anybody who is interested in development would find alarming, anyway at first. In such a discussion, the person who says “charity begins at home” will initially get lots of support. But as the discussion goes deeper, it turns out that they are sceptical not because of any indifference to the plight of others, but because they are not convinced that aid works. In many such groups you’ll hear Bauer’s famous remark that aid is “poor people from rich countries giving money to rich people from poor countries.” Many people are worried that aid ends up in the Swiss bank accounts of despots and dictators, or of corrupt consulting and construction firms. Yet when the same focus groups are given evidence of the benefits of particular aid programmes, their mood changes sharply, and they soon ask: “Why don’t we give more aid like that?”
The idea that “charity begins at home” clearly resonates with many people. In part the phrase expresses the idea that we have stronger social ties and obligations to people who live in our neighbourhood than we do to people on the other side of the world. But few people really believe, on reflection, that we should pay no heed to people dying of hunger or for lack of medical facilities just because they are far away. Perhaps “charity begins at home” resonates for another reason: we can observe at first hand whether the effort we make to help our family and neighbours is actually working, whereas with foreign aid we can’t, and we have a sneaking suspicion that this means that it isn’t.
The most popular critique of aid in recent years, Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo, does not challenge aid on the grounds that the plight of the poor is not our concern. It is a poorly argued book in many other respects, but it would be wrong to accuse Dr Moyo of callous indifference. Indeed, all the famous aid sceptics, from P. T. Bauer to Bill Easterly, explicitly accept development as the objective: they simply question whether foreign aid is a good way to achieve it.
The dangers of relying on national interest
So perhaps the public does not need to be persuaded that development matters, but needs instead to be convinced that aid makes a difference. Even so, it seems reasonable to say that we should use every argument at our disposal for aid: we should appeal to the public’s self-interest as well as their moral values, and we should at the same time set out the evidence that aid works.
But there are two big risks to this approach which should lead us to think carefully about the balance of how we make the argument.
First, if we promote aid principally on the grounds that it supports our security and commercial interests, we should not be surprised when people expect that this is how aid should be used.
In the long term our national interest coincides with our moral urge to promote development and to reduce poverty. But in the short term there is often a trade-off between development and poverty reduction on the one hand, and our commercial, security and strategic interests on the other.
During the Cold War a huge amount of aid was wasted currying favour with despots for geo-strategic reasons and accordingly propping up failing industries and businesses. Even today, less than 40% of aid is spent in the poorest countries. This makes a kind of sense if your aim is to increase your influence in emerging economies and in fragile states like Pakistan and Iraq. There are many poor people in these countries, but all the evidence suggests that these are not the places in which aid is most needed and can do the most good. A significant portion of aid (though none of the UK’s aid) is still tied to firms in donor nations. This makes sense if the aim is to support the donor’s commercial interests but not if the aim is to have the greatest possible impact on the reduction of poverty. It is legitimate and proper for donors to want credit for their aid, to enhance both their international reputation and their image and influence in the recipient country. But this goal leads donors to give too much aid through bilateral aid programmes, on which their national flag can be stamped, and too little through more efficient multilateral institutions and other shared funds, resulting in unnecessary duplication, overheads and transaction costs.
We do not have institutions that can protect our long-term national interest in development and poverty reduction from the pressures to use aid to pursue these short-term strategic, security and commercial interests. In a world of short time horizons, our immediate interests tend to prevail over our longer-term goals. So the more we justify aid chiefly on the grounds of national interest, the greater the danger that our short-term national interest will dictate the way aid is used, with negative consequences for the effectiveness of aid and for our longer-term interest in poverty reduction.
If the public were unsure whether they cared enough about global development to give aid, then it might be worth deploying aid in ways which are most obviously in the national interest, even if that required sacrificing some of its effectiveness. (For many years, the Danish government justified tying aid to Danish suppliers on precisely these grounds.) But if the public is already convinced that development is important, and their doubt is primarily about whether aid is effective, then it makes no sense to use aid in less effective ways in an effort to win greater public approval.
The second reason why we should be cautious about focusing too much on our national interest when justifying aid is that we are in danger of setting ourselves up to fail.
Take an example which is, literally, close to home for me. School enrolment here in Ethiopia has risen from a quarter of all children fifteen years ago to more than four fifths of children today. About a third of Ethiopian children – 8 million boys and girls – are at school as a direct result of foreign aid. My house in Addis Ababa is a few hundred metres from the local primary school, so I see boys and girls going past my window to school every day.
If the British public could see as I do how their aid money is being used, they would, like me, be encouraged and touched by the good that aid does. This is a direct, demonstrable benefit of aid, and one which appeals to the British sense of justice and empathy for our fellow human beings. It would soften the heart of the hardest sceptic.
Kids going to school near my house in Addis Ababa. A third of Ethiopia's education system is financed by aid.
Why then is there such widespread doubt that aid works? In part it is because people at home cannot look out of their window and see it working. But it is also because we have made extravagant claims about what aid will do. Even if it is true that aid leads to faster economic development, and that it thereby reduces the risk of global health contagions, organised crime and drug smuggling, this would be impossible to demonstrate statistically. (It would be like trying to show that the EU has prevented war in Western Europe since 1945: plausible, very probably true, but unprovable.)
People are right to be doubtful about the validity of some of the more grandiose claims for what aid can achieve. Perhaps it seems too modest to say that we pay for millions of children to go to school, and for people to have access to clean water and basic health care. But this is a reality which we can prove beyond any doubt; and for most taxpayers it will seem well worth the modest amount of money we spend on it. And it is probable, even if unprovable, that all this works in favour of our own long-term interests as well.
The public and the politicians who represent them will inevitably devote only a modest amount of time to thinking about development. If we use up scarce bandwidth making an argument with which few disagree – that poverty matters – we waste the opportunity to make the argument of which they are yet to be convinced: that development policy and aid can and do make an important difference to the lives of the poor.
The aid that was used to prop up Mobutu in Zaire during the Cold War may have served a foreign policy interest, but it did little or nothing to reduce poverty and raise living standards in that country. Money used today to buy food aid may be a convenient subsidy for American and European farmers but if we bought the food locally we could feed twice as many people with the same money and at the same time support the growth of sustainable agriculture in developing countries. The more we use aid to support our strategic and commercial interests, the less effective that aid is likely to be in the fight against global poverty, in which we have an important long-term interest.
It is in our national interest to see faster development and the end of global poverty, and we should not be shy about saying so. But we should think twice before using this as the central plank of the case for more effective development policies and more aid. People do not need to be persuaded to care about global poverty: they do need to be convinced that there is something we can do about it. Just reminding them that it is in our national interest to promote development fundamentally misses the point. The more we defend aid mainly on the basis that it is in our national interest, the more likely it is to be bent to our short-term commercial and strategic interests, the more ineffectively it will be used, the harder it will be to demonstrate its benefits, and the greater the justification for public scepticism. Give the public some credit: they don’t need to be persuaded to care about poverty. Aid does work: and the first and most pressing task is to demonstrate to the public with persuasive evidence that this is so.
I don’t think it is possible to determine statistically whether aid makes a lot of difference to how quickly a country develops. But there is a very good case for aid on different grounds: that it enables people to live better lives in the meantime.
Though the effects of aid on development are uncertain, there is a huge amount that industrialised countries can do – or not do – which affects how quickly countries develop. The policies of rich countries on trade, investment, migration, the environment, security and technology can make a huge impact on how quickly poor countries are able to develop.
Yet we tend to judge industrialized countries too much according to how much aid they give, and too little to how they behave in all these other ways.
The Center for Global Development provides an essential service by ranking the rich each year so we can see how we are doing. They use a series of quantitative measures on all these dimensions to create a composite picture of how a country’s policies affect development. The 2010 results are now in.
The overall rankings in the 2010 Commitment to Development Index
For people in the UK who feel smug about the UK’s approach to development, the Commitment to Development Index makes pretty sobering reading. The UK is in 16th place, out of 22 countries in the index.
The UK has fallen ten places since 2005, when it was in joint fifth place, after only Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands and Norway.
The UK is one of only three countries to have got worse rather than better since the index began in 2003. (The other two are Denmark – which started at the very top, and Switzerland.) And this isn’t a point about the change of government: Britain was 16th last year too.
Given that the UK has a relatively generous and effective aid programme, why does it come so far down the league of overall impact on development?
In short: arms exports.
The Commitment to Development Index uses three measures of a country’s security policy. It tallies the financial and personnel contributions to internationally mandated peacekeeping operations and humanitarian interventions. It rewards countries that base naval fleets where they can secure sea lanes vital to international trade. And it penalizes arms exports to undemocratic nations, on the grounds that putting weapons in the hands of despots can increase repression at home and the temptation to launch military adventures abroad.
The UK is by far the worst of the the 22 nations in the index on selling arms to poor and undemocratic governments. UK arms exports, weighted for undemocratic and unaccountable states, are four times worse, as a share of GDP, than the next worst arms exporter, the United States.
The bars shows the scores from 2003 to 2010in each of the 7 dimensions
As well as being stand-out bottom of the pack on arms exports, the UK does badly on migration policy, because it takes too few unskilled immigrants and students for its size; and technology policy both because Government R&D spending is unduly focused on defence, and because the UK tends to pursue intellectual property rights policies that are not in the interests of poor countries, such as allowing patents on plant varieties, and pushing to incorporate into bilateral free trade agreements “TRIPS-Plus” measures that restrict the flow of innovations to developing countries.
Critics of aid often argue that we should focus more on helping countries to develop, rather than what they call ”handouts’ to poor countries. In that context, they usually mention the need for more open trade with developing countries. That is certainly important. The Commitment to Development Index suggests that they should also be advocating changes in UK policy to: reduce arms sales to undemocratic countries, accept more unskilled immigrants, increase the number of foreign students, remove patents on plant varieties and stop arguing for TRIPS-plus.
The UK gets credit for its environmental policies, mainly because it has done relatively well on limiting carbon emissions and because of high petrol taxes. Global warming has a disproportionately negative impact on developing countries, so these measures have an important impact on developing countries.
Many British people are proud of the UK’s commitment to reducing poverty in developing nations, and Britain’s model of an independent development agency within Government led by a separate Cabinet Minister is widely admired. But is it working? Judging by the scores in the 2010 Commitment to Development Index, the UK is doing a better job at securing and spending a rising aid budget than it is at getting the rest of government to pursue development-friendly policies.
It is fashionable in polite society to be critical of politicians: we talk as if they are generally corrupt and stupid.
I have worked as a civil servant very closely with politicians of all parties, and my impression of them is much more positive. There have been many politicians that I have not agreed with, but have found to be principled, hard-working, and genuinely committed to the pursuit of public good. I’ve seen a few wrong ‘uns too; but most of those have been exposed in time. There are many politicians who I admire and respect, and I’m sorry to see some of them leave the House of Commons. Politics will be worse for the loss of people like Tony Wright, James Purnell and Bob Marshall Andrews for Labour, John Maples and Ann Widdecombe for the Tories, Matthew Taylor from the Liberal Democrats, and Clare Short, all of whom decided not to contest the 2010 election.
Though I am not a Liberal Democrat supporter, for me the biggest loss to the House of Commons came with the defeat of Dr Evan Harris in Oxford West and Abingdon. He has consistently stood up for sound science, and evidence-based policy. He has been the most consistent voice in support of secularism and free expression. He has advocated disentangling the church from the state, and for remaining respectful of religion while resisting the idea that it should be immune from criticism or ridicule. We need more people like him in Parliament, and I hope that he will soon return. (This is no reflection at all on Nicola Blackwood, who defeated him, whom I do not know at all.)
The Clock Tower of the House of Commons within which Big Ben, a bell, resides
Since there will be a lot of politics on our TV screens in the next 48 hours, I should like to take this opportunity to issue some timely pedantic reminders:
- England, not the House of Commons, is the “Mother of Parliaments“
- “Big Ben” is a bell which is found in the clock tower of the House of Commons. The clock tower is not Big Ben, nor contrary to the opinion of faux pedants is it “St Stephens Tower”.
- There are no “keys to Number 10″. The front door of Number 10 Downing Street has no lock. Nor are there any “books” containing the nation’s finances to be given to incoming Ministers.
- If Mr Brown goes to Buckingham Palace he will have “an audience of the Queen”, not “an audience with the Queen”
- The side of the House of Commons where the MPs supporting the Government sit are the “Treasury Benches”, not the “Government benches”
- Anybody “measuring the curtains at Number 10″ will be examining the curtains for the flat occupied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Prime Minister Blair, and subsequently Prime Minister Brown, used the larger flat above Number 11 Downing Street.
Update: 6 May. For the record, here is St Stephen’s Tower:
St Stephen's tower
Tonight’s UK election debate between the party leaders focuses on foreign policy. I expect there will be at least one question about international development. If I were in the audience, I would ask this:
We understand that all the main parties are committed to increasing aid to 0.7% of GDP, with some relatively minor differences about how that would be used. But if we are serious about development, we need to look beyond aid to address the circumstances in which developing countries are trying to establish economic growth and political stability. Our other policies – for example, on trade, climate change or immigration – make a huge difference to how quickly poor countries can develop. Will you, as Prime Minister, be willing to make changes to UK policies which are against the immediate interests of a group of UK citizens – for example, arms exporters or pharmaceutical firms – but which support our collective longer term interest in seeing a fairer, safer and more prosperous world? If so, what concessions would you make?
The development policy discussion in the UK has focused too much on aid. As I’ve argued here today, aid is important, because it helps to improve people’s lives while their countries are developing. But I don’t think aid is the most important factor in accelerating development – for that it is much more important whether we adopt fair global polices on climate change, trade, agriculture, immigration, intellectual property, conflict, corruption and international governance.
The manifestos are largely quiet on how the political parties would address these issues, and they have not yet been pushed to address it. I think this is because so many people who work in development are dependent for their income on aid, so they tend to judge parties’ policies by their willingness to increase it. A worthy and notable exception is Alison Evans at ODI, who is always smart, who picks this up in her recent blog post on development in the election:
.. a crucial question is whether there is any a wider read-across from the manifestos to the international development agenda? Development is not only about aid and there is a danger that the allure of the 0.7 debate can and will detract from a much wider set of policy concerns that impact on the prospects for growth and prosperity in developing countries. Each of the manifestos cover growth, trade, immigration, security and climate change – all areas in which the debate about international development policy and global poverty reduction is increasingly engaged – but none of them spell out in any detail what this means for the way their governments would work on these agendas or how the funding would work. Where is the coherence between policies and between policies and implementation?
This is exactly the right question to ask (it is a pity that the post is entitled: “main parties pledge 0.7% for aid but how will it be spent?”). We have been assured that the three largest parties are committed to retaining DFID as a separate government department, with its own Cabinet Minister, and with a budget that rises to meet the UK’s commitment to increase aid to 0.7% of GDP. But if they are serious about development then DFID will also need to have an important role right across the government, ensuring that the UK’s interests in development are taken into account when the government considers other policies from immigration to climate change. That does not mean that the development interests should always trump the UK’s other national interests, but they should be considered and there will often be ways to adjust the details of the policy in a way that costs us little but has a huge impact on the developing world.
If we want to help to accelerate development, then some of the time we will need to put the UK’s broad, long-term interest in building a safer, more equal and prosperous world ahead of the UK’s narrower and short-term commercial or political interests. The most important international development question for the UK election should be: which of the political parties is willing to do that?
On January 13th, a leader in The Times and Kevin Watkins in The Guardian attacked the development policies of the UK Conservative Party, from opposite sides of the political spectrum. The Times Leader says that the Conservatives are wrong to commit themselves to increase aid to 0.7% of GNI; and Kevin Watkins says that the Conservatives are wrong to want to reform the way aid is given. Both attacks appear to be bone-headed efforts to make political mischief by undermining not just Conservative party policies but the mainstream consensus on development. Neither attack does credit to its perpetrator.
The Times criticizes the Conservative Party for their commitment to maintain the planned increases in development spending. The leader recycles discredited assertions about the negative effects of aid rather than offering solid analysis. There isn’t a single reputable econometric study showing that aid causes harm through exchange rate appreciations, corruption or slowing progress to democracy. Peter Bauer, whom the leader article quotes, was criticising Cold War foreign assistance programmes which bear little resemblance to aid programmes today. Aid today is increasingly practical, targeted and measurable, just as The Times says it should be, and it works.
Britain was one of 147 countries which pledged we would “spare no effort” to meet the Millennium Development Goals. As The Times implies, we should not be judged on what we spend but on what we achieve. On this basis we are not yet doing enough to achieve the goals to which we are committed. That is why it is important that Britain should continue to increase its world-class development programme, and press other nations to increase their spending too. To resist this on the grounds that 0.7% is an arbitrary figure is a clever-sounding point for a debating society, not a reasoned argument against the commitment of all the main political parties to meet Britain’s international promises, and to press other countries to do the same.
From the other end of the political spectrum, Kevin Watkins in The Guardian seems to be determined to use development to score party political points – and to do so he has had to put himself in the strange position of arguing against the country-led approach to development which is supported by all main UK political parties.
Under the Labour Government Britain has helped build an international consensus that aid works best in support of a country’s own development strategy; that policies imposed from outside rarely work; and that governments should be accountable to their own citizens for their policies and actions. Kevin Watkins rightly supports these points in other contexts. Yet he apparently won’t entertain the idea that other countries may have different views from his (and mine) about the best way to organise and fund public services.
I’ve read the Conservative Green Paper and it does not call for state services to be rolled back in developing countries. It says that governments should guarantee access to education for all their people; and that donors should fund that guarantee and support and encourage governments to choose whatever path enables them to expand education provision fast and effectively. It does not propose or advocate market-based solutions in education: it says explicitly that the Conservatives would work with the public, not-for-profit and private sectors.
Kevin Watkins quotes the Green Paper saying “We bring a natural scepticism about government schemes“; this is the entire basis of his claim that “the Conservatives will use aid to roll back the state in key services“. But it is clear when you read this sentence in context that the Conservatives are questioning the role of the government in aid, not planning to tell other countries how they should manage their public services.
There is now a valuable cross-party consensus on the need to use aid money to support countries’ own development priorities and programmes. The challenge today is how to bring public sector reform to the aid business – including the possibility of some market-like disciplines to make aid more effective and accountable. There are proposals in both the Government White Paper and the Conservative Green Paper to make aid more transparent and accountable and to link it more closely to results. Kevin Watkins might have used his space to tell us what he thinks about these ideas instead of trying to score party political points on development.
(By the way, I admire Kevin Watkins, but I’m not comfortable with the fact that a UNESCO official, paid from public funds, is using his position to make highly partisan and inaccurate attacks in the newspapers on the main UK opposition party. )
I’ve got no party political axe to grind: my interest is in supporting the best possible policies to accelerate development, so that the world is a fairer, happier and safer place for everyone. It seems odd that the Conservatives should be attacked from both left and right for articulating development policies which seem to me squarely in the mainstream of development thinking.
The cross-party consensus that the UK’s development budget should continue to increase, and that British development policy is amongst the most effective in the world but nonetheless there is room for improvement, should be a matter of shared national pride, not scorn and sniping from whichever direction. Let’s sustain that consensus, and not allow development policy to be used as a political football even in the heat of an election campaign.
Update: see Kevin’s reply in the comments.
My new working paper, Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid is on the Center for Global Development website in the innovations in aid series.
In the paper I argue that more planning and coordiation among donors will not overcome the political constraints that prevent better aid. The aid system is in a political equilibrium which we need to try to change; we won’t solve aid’s problems by trying to move away from the equilibrium. This means making more use of market and network mechanisms to change incentives within the aid system. We need to stop thinking of grand new designs of the aid system and start putting in place mechanisms that force evolution in the right direction.
I’ve listed a set of measures, from the commonplace (untying aid, for example) to the unusual (tradable missions permits, or a tax on proliferation pollution) to illustrate the ideas.
I’ll be discussing the paper at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) on Friday, and on a forthcoming episode of Development Drums.
I’m looking forward to comments and feedback.
George Osborne told the Conservative Party Conference eight times:
we are all in this together.
This is a powerful message.
When 15 million people face starvation in East Africa this Christmas, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When twenty thousand children die tomorrow from easily preventable and treatable diseases, purely because they don’t have enough money to buy drugs that cost cents to produce but for which we charge rich world prices, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When the developing world demands proper compensation for their part of the atmosphere, which we have filled up with carbon emissions far beyond our share, resulting in the risk of destruction to entire nations, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When the people of the Niger Delta demand a share of the wealth lying beneath their ground, and an end to the environmental destruction caused by our oil companies so that we can drive our cars and cool our houses, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When we complain about corruption in the developing world, forgetting that all the money that pays for those bribes comes from us, and then choose not to prosecute our own companies that pay the bribes, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When we continue to be one of the largest manufacturers and exporters of arms in the world, fuelling conflict all around the world, but are more concerned about a hundred jobs on the Isle of Wight, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When people are forced to leave their homes, their family and their country because they lack freedom or face persecution, or because they cannot find work that pays them enough to support their family, and they look for a new beginning in rich countries, and we decide how we will treat asylum seekers and immigrants, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When the world’s poor demand fair payment for their coffee, cocoa, and minerals, and for their labour which provides us with the cheap clothes and electronics which we take for granted, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When the world economy recovers, companies of the rich world begin to prosper, when bankers get their bonuses again and the rich start to become richer, and we decide how to share the proceeds of that growth within and between nations, let us say:
we are all in this together.
It worries me that people who are interested in reducing world poverty leap so readily on the Tobin Tax bandwagon.
There are three questions to answer:
- should we spend more on reducing global poverty?
(my answer: yes, if we have to) - should we tax transactions in financial markets?
(my answer: maybe, though I am not persuaded) - should we link aid budgets to revenues from such a tax?
(my answer: definitely not)
My answers are explained below the fold.
I can see why some people are attracted by a combination of extra money for the world’s poor and a poke in the eye for the unacceptable face of capitalism. But to support the Tobin Tax on these grounds is at best opportunism, and at worst reveals a hostility to the functioning of markets which will, in the end, not serve the poor.
Danny Finkelstein in The Times sticks up for Special Advisers. Alex Evans, who was a Special Adviser in DFID, tells a funny story about being put at the end of a corridor
I returned from leave to discover that my office had halved in size: the wall had been moved six feet. To create a new meeting room for the Permanent Secretary on the other side.
For the first time I can remember, I agree with Danny Finkelstein (and, less unusually, with Alex). We need special advisers; and if anything we need more of them, not fewer; and we need to give them proper power and authority.
I say this partly for the reasons that Danny gives: we should be glad to have a diversity of ideas and advice to Ministers. If civil servants can’t stand that heat of competition, they should get out the kitchen. And as Danny says, the special adviser network can actally enhance effective Cabinet Government, by maintaining political conversations between government departments that do not work as well through the civil service networks.
But there is one other reason why civil servants should be in favour of having more special advisers: they help to prevent politicisation of the civil service. For as long as we have sufficient, high qality special advisers, they can write speeches, brief journalists, write political strategies, liaise with MPs and the more political lobby groups – which prevents Ministers from having to ask civil servants to perform tasks which brings them into the gray areas at the margins of political neutrality. So a greater number of Special Advisers does not imply an increasing politicisation of the civil service, as is sometimes claimed, but rather a protection against it.
I have worked closely with many special advisers, some of whom are now quite well known (whatever happened to David Cameron, John Bercow, David Milliband and James Purnell, I wonder?) and I found most of them to be extremely smart, productive, and responsible. Working with special advisers helps civil servants to understand the political context of their advice better. A good partnership between civil servants and special advisers enables them to design policies and explain them in ways that are politically attractive, helping to introduce better policies which might otherwise be ruled out on political grounds.
I’d like to think that the Yes, Minister days are behind us, but Alex’s recollections suggest that, at least unconsciously, those civil service attitudes are not yet entirely in the past.
The BBC reports Gordon Brown’s speech at the TED conference today:
The power of technology – such as blogs – meant that the world could no longer be run by “elites”, Mr Brown said.Policies must instead be formed by listening to the opinions of people “who are blogging and communicating with people around the world”, he said.
Mr Brown’s comments came during a surprise appearance at TED Global.
“That in my view gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world,” he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.
“Foreign Policy can never be the same again.”
I agree with that. I’m very proud of my team’s work to develop and promote open data standards for aid and other resources for poverty reduction, to enable everyone in the world to engage on how resources for poverty reduction are used. It ensures that the world is not run by elites, whether in developing countries or donors.
I fear I may be turning in to Bernard, the Private Secretary in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Bernard is the slightly naiive, pedantic character who corrects mixed metaphors and challenges figures of speech. (I once had a job in No.10 a bit like Bernard’s job).
Nick Robinson – the BBC Political Editor – should know better than this:
The fate of nations, of monarchs and of the British people have been sealed in the Commons. Yet now the reputation of the mother of all parliaments has been brought low by rules written and exploited here by claims for a kitkat, a tin of pet food and a bottle of shampoo.
England, not the House of Commons, is the “mother of Parliaments”. This phrase was coined by John Bright, in a speech in 1865, in which Bright was advocating an extension of the right to vote. His campaign led to the Reform Act of 1867 which gave the vote to the (male) urban working class. Bright said:
We may be proud that England is the ancient country of Parliaments. With scarcely any intervening period, Parliaments have met constantly for 600 years, and there was something of a Parliament before the Conquest. England is the mother of Parliaments.
I realise that this is pedantry. But I would expect the BBC Political Editor, of all people, to understand the resonance of this phrase and to know what it means.
The most satisfactory sight yesterday was that of Dick Cheney, looking for all the world like Dr Strangelove, being wheeled off the scene in a wheelchair. The only problem is that he was then helped into a limousine rather than a police van.
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