British PM rejects pressure on overseas aid budget

UK: British Prime Minister David Cameron insisted Tuesday he would keep his promise to set in law a hike in the overseas aid budget, despite a challenge by a senior minister.

In a leaked letter, Defence Secretary Liam Fox warned that making a legal commitment to increase aid spending to 0.7 percent of gross national income by 2013 could tie the government’s hands if it could not afford it. “The government is committed to the 0.7 percent,” Cameron told lawmakers Tuesday. “We are going to achieve that in the timeframe that we set out. We will be bringing forward legislation in this parliament (by 2015).”

The pledge to ringfence the aid budget has angered some on the right of the Conservative party, of which Cameron and Fox are both members, as it coincides with huge cuts in spending at other government departments.

“I cannot support the proposal in its current form,” Fox wrote in the letter to Cameron, revealed in the Times newspaper.

“The bill could limit (the government’s) ability to change its mind about the pace at which it reaches the target in order to direct more resources toward other activities or programmes rather than aid.”

Alan West, a former head of the British Navy, criticised Cameron in Wednesday’s Times.

AFP