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YThe men remained among the world’s worst humanitarian crises, said James Cleverly, junior foreign minister responsible for the Middle East, in response to an urgent question from fellow conservative Andrew Mitchell. Two-thirds of the population needed assistance. 47,000 people were living in famine conditions and another 16.2 million were at risk of starvation.
After an opening like this, you expected Cleverly to explain why the UK government was increasing its foreign aid budget to the country. Instead, he chose to justify cutting it by more than 50% over the next financial year. Yemen would receive “at least” 87 million pounds sterling of the 214 million it currently receives. In fact, if he played his cards right, the minister might even spend an additional £ 100,000 as a gesture of goodwill. The truth is that the UK had already been doing too much to help Yemen and it was time to step back and let the country fend for itself.
He may cleverly be one of the most misnamed MPs, but even he could see the flaws in his argument and spent much of the next 45 minutes fending off blows from both his own bench and the opposition. The first to enter was Mitchell, who questioned the morality of the world’s fifth-richest country by cutting off aid to one of the poorest in the midst of a pandemic. “This is not who we are,” he said. Unfortunately it is.
That was just the beginning. The shadow secretary for international development, Preet Kaur Gill, wondered if it was a coincidence that we were cutting aid while selling weapons to the Saudis who used them against the Yemenis. I guess everything that goes around comes around. David Davis and Damian Green reminded the government that it had been elected through a manifesto donating 0.7% of GDP in foreign aid and that any budget cuts could only be approved by a vote in the Commons. This was not just a matter of trust; it was also a moral duty.
By now Cleverly was making a completely broken figure in the dispatch box and could only repeat in a monotonous and boring tone the faint lines that her advisers had prepared for her. Workers had never donated more than 0.51% of GDP in foreign aid, so they could shut up to begin with. It didn’t seem like it occurred to him that doing the right thing before by donating 0.7% was no excuse for doing the wrong thing now.
Over and over again he repeated that the 87 million pounds to Yemen was “a floor, not a ceiling”, but no one really believed him. Once the money had been cut, there was not a single jackpot in the possibility that it would be revised up when the economic situation improved. Rather, MPs on all sides viewed the government as taking a calculated risk by assuming that most Conservatives would be more interested in money spent at home than in helping hundreds of thousands of Yemenis to stay alive. And if all it took was for Cleverly to appear a bit desperate and unreliable for just under an hour, then it was a price worth paying.
Next on camera was Matt Hancock, who had come to give a completely unnecessary update on the coronavirus, given that almost everything he had to say was already in the public domain. But the health secretary is now living his best life and he’s determined to make the most of it. Not long ago, every Commons statement was fraught with danger for Door Matt. An opportunity for his opponents to raise uncomfortable questions about the death toll in the UK and the flaws in testing and tracking.
But the success of the vaccination program has changed everything. While the Pfizer and Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccines provide unexpectedly high levels of immunity to the virus in older members of the population, they give the secretary of health near-total immunity to all uncomfortable questions. Nobody wants to focus on negative things, like the death rate, when there is finally some hope on the horizon. Even the missing person with the Brazilian variant is simply a nuisance rather than a serious cause for concern.
It may all go crazy, of course, with a mutant strain that is resistant to the vaccine, but for now Matt is happy to ride the wave. More disturbingly, the change in luck has freed his inner rambunctious child. He shows little kindness when rescued by scientists: rather, he increasingly acts as if he just saved the UK and gets upset when MPs aren’t grateful enough. Still, if that’s what it takes to beat the pandemic, I guess most of us can live with it. For a while at least.
