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David Harewood wrote a piece called “I have seen with pride how British overseas aid saves children’s lives. That is why I say cuts should be reversed”. He describes, movingly, how while visiting a hospital in Sierra Leone,
… I noticed a UK aid sticker fixed above a tiny incubator. Inside was a premature baby fighting for breath. Nearby stood oxygen equipment that staff explained had been funded through UK support. I learned that when power outages struck the hospital, as they often did, that equipment helped keep vulnerable newborns alive.
Being in the presence of these sometimes inconceivably small children, seeing the UK aid sticker labelled across the incubators that were keeping them alive, emotion completely overcame me. It was not only sadness. It was pride. Pride that people in Britain, most of whom would never meet that baby or their family, had helped make survival possible. Seven years later, that moment remains one of the most impactful of my life.
Many years ago, I turned against foreign aid – well, against most government-to-government foreign aid except immediately after natural disasters. How can I justify such a stance? Don’t I want premature babies in Sierra Leone to have incubators? I do want it. I want it very much. But take a look at this graph comparing the change in GDP per capita in current USA dollars of Sierra Leone and South Korea from 1960 to the present. In 1960, South Korea was at $158.8, a little higher than Sierra Leone’s $142.0, but still desperately poor. The next year South Korea’s figure ($94.2) was actually lower than Sierra Leone’s $142.3. I don’t know why that sudden year-on-year dip in South Korea’s wealth happened or if the effect were even real, but there can be no possible doubt about the reality of what happened over the next six and a half decades. The GDP per capita of the Republic of Korea is now $36,227.0, forty-three times higher than that of Sierra Leone, which is $846.7.
I want Sierra Leone to have incubators the way South Korea has incubators.“The Republic of Korea (South Korea) maintains excellent maternal and newborn health outcomes through its advanced healthcare system. With a maternal mortality ratio of approximately 8.1 deaths per 100,000 live births and a neonatal mortality rate of approximately 1.3 deaths per 1,000 live births, the country ranks among the world’s safest for childbirth.” South Korea did receive some foreign aid in the 1960s and 70s. Then it stopped. The country is now a donor rather than a recipient. Sierra Leone has received orders of magnitude more aid, and it has never stopped. In terms of things you can point to, like the incubators Mr Harewood saw, no doubt all that aid did some good. But in terms of that which is not seen, I believe that aid did more harm than good. The unceasing torrent of money made it less likely that Sierra Leone would do as South Korea did and so get South Korea-like outcomes.
So I’m not a fan of foreign aid. You knew that. Bet you didn’t know until you saw the headline to this post that Guardian readers are scarcely more enthusiastic about it than I am. Here are the top-level comments to Mr Harewood’s article ordered by number of recommendations:
misterrusty
27 Sep 2026 8.51
133
If Africa, which is 3 times the size of Europe stopped all the tribal infighting, it might become rich enough to support itself. The question is why a continent with such huge resources is so poor it has to rely on aid.
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aunib
27 Sep 2026 9.07
120
We’re currently running a 4% GDP deficit and the interest on our debt is £110B a year. Charity is for surplus cash, and our government doesn’t have any of that at the moment.
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Manchotte
27 Sep 2026 8.52
110
But the question remains: when will these African countries be able to support themselves? Sixty years since independence and they are still relying on British aid. Where did all the £100 billion go? apart from Swiss bank accounts!
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Firtree
27 Sep 2026 9.26
92
Can someone please explain to me how it is okay for the government to borrow 10s of billions every month to keep us afloat while giving a big chunk of of it to others for free?
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Bathreader
27 Sep 2026 8.50
83
Foreign aid is laudable but has to take its place with other priorities.Defence is the urgent priority after years of underspend.
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The Guardian does its best to hide this preponderance of aid-sceptical sentiment among its readers by taking all eight of its “Guardian picks” from among the pro-aid comments, but anyone who sorts by “recommends”, as most people do, cannot fail to note that it is only on the sixth comment down that we finally reach one that is unambiguously in favour of foreign aid.
Edit: if the link to the graph comparing historical GDP per capita for the Republic of Korea and Sierra Leone is too much for your browser, you can generate it yourself by going to the World Bank “GDP per capita” page, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD , and entering both “Sierra Leone” and “Korea, Rep” into the search bar.
The sad reality here is that virgin steel production in the rich countries is a dying technology. We just don’t need it any more. Pretty much every steel we do want can be made from scrap in an electric arc furnace. And those few – very few – steels that cannot be won’t cover the costs of running our own blast furnace. It’s over, like hydraulic power companies and thorium lamp mantles. This is, of course, what happens with every company, every technology, eventually. It stops being worth doing so people stop doing it.
The only thing of value here is what lefties and socialists put on manly men doing manly things, buffly. And while that’s a perfectly acceptable, even sensible, kink there’s no reason why the rest of us have to pay for that. But there we are, nothing so conservative as a socialist or lefty. Nothing can ever be allowed to die off, all must be preserved.
And, you know, wouldn’t it be nice if they’d thought through what their plan was going to be before they spent the half billion? With that more – ooooh, much more – to come?
– Tim Worstall
The economist who says a policy will probably raise employment, other things being equal, is telling the truth as far as it goes. The one who says employment will rise by exactly 2.3% has mistaken a guess for a measurement, and dressed the guess up in a suit it did not earn.
Markets do not work because they are mathematically optimal but because they let millions of separate judgments, made by people with knowledge no central model could ever gather, correct each other in real time. That is not a formula. It is closer to a conversation, conducted in prices instead of words, and no economist has yet written an equation that listens as well as a market does.
– Madsen Pirie
Months before Starmer’s departure, Dominic Cummings appeared on Michael Gove and Madeline Grant’s Quite Right podcast and issued Nigel Farage with an extraordinary warning. Cummings predicted that senior figures around Whitehall would conclude that they had made a historic mistake by allowing Brexit to happen and would not repeat it with Reform. In the imagined voice of this establishment, he said: “Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage and make sure that he doesn’t win it by fair means and foul.”
Cummings went further. He predicted leaks of medical records and tax records, phone bugging and the disclosure of private information.
– John Hardy (£)
Interesting factual summary from Commander Salamander…
This is where it scratches the old Cold War itch while addressing the very real fact that regardless of what happens in the Russo-Ukrainian War and with the demographics of those nations in the coming decades, the geography is not changing.
Russia is not going to disappear.
“BBC removes 11 Mitchell and Webb comedy sketches from iPlayer,” reports the BBC.
You want to see the sketches more, now, don’t you? Thank you, “Basil the Great”.
Edit: And here’s the Civil War re-enactors sketch, courtesy of Giop Saus on YouTube.
Season 2 of “That Mitchell and Webb look” was made in 2007. At that time, TM&WL’s style of comedy was seen as mildly left wing and definitely anti-racist. They certainly saw themselves that way. Almost twenty years later, the Civil War sketch is genuinely thought-provoking comedy. Within the context of the sketch, I instinctively get why Mitchell’s character stops the re-enactment after Webb’s character says, “I am going to kill you with this big machete” in an African accent. I think the fake accent coupled with a portrayal of motiveless savagery tips it over to being racist (remembering that the whole thing is a act within an act, and the man waving the machete is portrayed as being frightfully worried that his portrayal of a “real” Sudanese machete-waver might be racist). But if asked to point out exactly why the whole idea of white British people re-enacting the Second Congo War is racist, my hand does several mid-air circuits without ever quite coming in to land. Why is it perfectly OK for a man to put on a great big wig and wave a sword about in order to play a Royalist officer in the English Civil War but not OK to put on a great big wig and wave a machete about in order to play a militia leader in the Second Congo War? Is it because the re-enactor played by Webb is white and presumably is descended from ancestors who might well have fought in the English Civil War but no one (so far as I know) looking like him fought in the Second Congo War? If so, would it be equally unacceptable to have a black British re-enactor play the Cavalier – as seems to be the fashion these days?
Related post: The fact that a British person’s ancestors were not British is not shameful and need not be concealed
The charge that followed was not that I phrased it badly. It was that my position was racist.
I have two children. Both were born in England to British parents who each came here from somewhere else. They are not English either. They’re British. I said this in the very same podcast Sunak pulls quotes from in his article.
My kids also happen to be whiter than a Michael Buble Christmas album. So either I’m a racist against my own white children, or this isn’t an argument about race.
Suella Braverman, Sunak’s own former Home Secretary, responded to the row about my comments by penning an article in which she argued that as a proud British Asian she herself is not English. Is she racist against herself or is there perhaps more of a substantive discussion being had than people would like to pretend?
– Konstantin Kisin, responding to Rishi Sunak
He is even a bit of a joke by his own metrics.
“Dear Ed Sheeran, fence-sitting is so last century: musicians can no longer opt out of politics”, writes Zoe Williams in the Guardian.
Macklemore, both onstage and in his own statement, has rebuffed the argument that voicing support for Palestinians and criticising Israel and its actions in Gaza and the West Bank is antisemitic. (In 2014, he apologised for a costume he wore on stage, which critics said was antisemitic, saying: “I respect all cultures and all people.”)
So musicians “can’t” opt out of politics, but political opinion journalists opting out of either stating their own opinion as to whether Macklemore’s grotesque “Jewface” costume shown in this BBC article from 2014 might be a teensy-weensy bit anti-semitic, or of linking to a picture of it so that readers can decide for themselves, is just fine, apparently.
Macklemore should be free to throw Nazi salutes while prancing in his fake black beard and prosthetic hooked nose. He should be free to insult the general public’s intelligence and flatter his own public’s bigotry by saying with a smirk that he had no idea that anyone might think he was caricaturing a Jew. Zoe Williams should be free to pretend that she didn’t see the pictures in that BBC article despite having taken her “which critics said was antisemitic” line straight from it. And I’m free to say that for Zoe Williams, who was once longlisted for the Orwell Prize, to write an article demanding that Ed Sheeran take a side while averting her own eyes from blatant racism and concealing it from her readers makes her a worthy successor to Squealer.
Yet when it comes to AI, I have found the evolution of this carefully staged exercise in scaremongering different in some respects. For a start, this is clearly a top-down campaign, orchestrated by industry insiders. Indeed, as far back as 12 years ago, those in the know began to raise the alarm about AI. In 2014, Elon Musk told his followers on Twitter that AI is potentially ‘more dangerous than nukes’. Bill Gates informed millions of his followers on Reddit that ‘I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned’. Needless to say, these fears did not stop either of them from pursuing the development of AI.
– Frank Furedi
The other day the people of the small Oxfordshire village of Piddington voted to leave Great Britain. Of course, they have no intention of doing any such thing: this was an attempt to demonstrate locals’ anger at the proposal to house over a thousand illegal immigrants at a nearby disused military base.
But what if a few more towns and villages were to follow suit? After all it is difficult to see why decent people would want to be part of a debt-ridden, crime-ridden, economically-stagnant, fascist dystopia whose leaders would much rather the said decent people were dead. What if such a movement snowballed and ended up with swathes of the country voting for what might be called Brexit2? They might join forces. They might have a convention. Sonorous phrases like “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…” might get an outing in England’s green and pleasant land. They might even make a stab at self-government.
Of course that would cut no ice with Britain’s rulers who believe in the divine right of the communist election-rigger. Any attempt by the secessionists to actually leave would be ruthlessly crushed. The only real question would be if the British (anti-British?) state would have the wherewithal to do it. If they did not, who knows? maybe we would all be applying for a passport to Piddington.
Why do the unions fund Labour? Because it works for them. The Employment Rights Act is very close to a straight transfer of TUC conference policy into the statute book, and nobody involved is embarrassed about it, nor should they be, since that is what affiliation has meant since 1900.
Sharon Graham has been admirably plain about this. Standing for the general secretaryship she told Keir Starmer there would be no more blank cheques. She has put Unite’s funding under review when Labour councils have crossed her. She treats the money as leverage because it is leverage, openly, on the record, in the Sunday papers. Then she stands up and objects to donations from men who want nothing.
Because that’s the difference, and it’s the bit her argument cannot survive. Harborne and Delo aren’t buying policy. There’s nothing to buy. We were low tax, pro-enterprise, anti-quango and hostile to the regulatory state before either of them wrote us a cheque, and we’d be all of those things tomorrow if both of them stopped. You cannot purchase a conviction from someone who already has one. All you can do is pay for the envelopes.
What they’re buying, as far as I can see, is a fair fight. The most conventional British appetite there is, the one that makes a crowd turn on a man who kicks somebody off the ball, and the one thing the modern establishment has decided it cannot afford to concede.
Nobody woke up. That’s the insult, and it isn’t aimed at two crypto billionaires who can look after themselves. It’s aimed at you, and it always was.
– Gawain Towler
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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