Thankfully the Daily Mail’s mean-spirited campaign to get the government to cut aid to pay for the UK’s flood response was swiftly dismissed by the PM in his press conference yesterday. To recap: dealing with suffering at home by creating suffering in some other country probably isn’t the most moral or sensible approach, and anyway it’s an utterly unnecessary conversation to have because we know there is money elsewhere – the Treasury has a contingency fund for just this sort of thing, just for starters.
But it’s particularly ironic and wrong given that an international peer review of the UK’s plan for ‘building resilience to disasters’ (for which read floods), recommended just last year that
A more consistent approach, in terms of resilience and exporting national good practices through international cooperation, could be achieved through improved coordination between the Civil Contingencies Secretariat and the Department for International Development (DFID).
Or in other words, that the UK’s systems for flood defences could learn a lot from the work DFID is funding to build resilience in other countries. Betting that the Mail won’t be reporting on that though….
