EU The Purveyor Of Fake News.
I wrote about this last year but it’s worth reminding people how the EU lies with a big smile on its face especially in this pandemic, they have no shame.
Last year the UK gave the EU $2.3bn of aid money, what did they do with it? They rebranded it as theirs and theirs alone
For years the EU has been lying about its achievements in the area of what most people still call “overseas aid”. The official term now is “Official Development Assistance” (ODA). In the EU’s latest propaganda sheet for 2019, the EU has continued to misrepresent facts in a grotesque fashion.
The EU claims to be the World №1 Donor but the official body (OECD) says it is FIFTH
Each year the EU Commission continues to produce blatant and highly-misleading propaganda in an attempt to present themselves as something they are not. The BBC has remained silent on this scandal, despite the clear evidence.
In this summary of the latest official 2019 aid figures, I once again expose the EU’s propaganda for what it is. The OECD is the official arbiter of overseas aid so as usual I have quoted from them and used their data, as well as using the EU’s information as a comparison.
The EU Commission has issued yet another statement saying the EU is
“The world’s leading donor of Official Development Assistance (ODA)”
This is not and has never been true, and yet the EU has been claiming this for years
It is the OECD that decides these things, and the EU is in FIFTH place
The EU is not a country — not yet at any rate
As an organisation, the EU spent $14.8 billion on ODA in 2019 and ranks FIFTH, not first
The OECD says that “The United States continued to be the largest DAC donor of ODA (USD 34.6 billion)”
The OECD adds that the USA is “followed by Germany (23.8 billion), the United Kingdom (19.4 billion)”
The United Kingdom can stand VERY tall
The UK is one of only five OECD countries worldwide which meets the OECD’s minimum target for ODA of 0.7% of GDP
The UK was the only major EU country to meet the target in 2019
Germany doesn’t come close — even when it includes its $3.1bn spend on in-country migrants as ‘overseas aid’
In reality, the UK is the second-biggest provider of overseas aid
- using the definition most people recognise -
as I shall show in Part Two of this article.
This is the EU as the purveyor of fake news
Members of the EU — such as the UK for the 2019 period being reported by the EU — have their own donor programmes. The EU as an institution also takes some of the money given to it by member states and uses this in its own donor programme.
The EU should simply report its own donations from its own donor programme. Even that might be argued to be disingenuous, as the European Union is not a country and the money it donates comes from the individual member states.
Instead, the EU takes the amounts which its individual members donate individually, it then adds them to monies collated and distributed by the EU institutions, and then claims the whole lot as ‘EU donations’.
What is “Official Development Assistance” (ODA)?
Defined since 1969 as “government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare of developing countries”, in recent years ‘foreign aid’ or ‘overseas aid’ has been redefined as “Official Development Assistance” (ODA).
The body adjudicating and monitoring this aid is the OECD based in Paris — a body which took an anti-Brexit position back in 2016 and subsequently. The OECD has a minimum target of 0.7% of GDP for Official Development Assistance. The United Kingdom has for many years been the only major EU economy to meet this target.
Here is what happens to the overseas aid which the UK gives to the EU each year
Each year the UK gives billions to the EU for official EU budget contributions and also for “off-budget” EU funds about which I have reported many times. Last year (2019) the UK gave $2.32 billion of this to the EU’s foreign aid programme, on top of what the UK gives unilaterally to poorer nations around the world. These are official OECD figures.
It all adds up to the 0.7% of GDP which the UK now gives each year in foreign aid
When the UK Government via the responsible department DFID gives taxpayers’ money to the EU,
here is what happens to it.
$2.3 billion is suddenly transformed from “UK Aid” into “Funded by the EU Humanitarian Aid”
BECOMES
The EU’s propaganda continues to be a disgrace, and it’s getting worse year by year and decade by decade.
Over the last couple of years, I have published a significant amount of evidence showing how the EU has grossly misrepresented itself (putting it mildly) on the subject of overseas aid, to say nothing of all the other propaganda sheets on other subjects pumped out by the EU Commission.
In my opinion, it is high time that the BBC and other broadcast media in the UK covered this story.
The EU’s fake news
If this isn’t ‘fake news’ from the EU, what is? If a commercial company produced advertising leaflets such as the ones the EU Commission regularly produces, they would be subject to all manner of legal actions from the authorities. I see no reason that the EU Commission should be exempt from these standards.
In this case, the official body responsible for monitoring Official Development Assistance — the Europhile OECD based in Paris — flatly contradicts the EU’s latest propaganda sheet. I have checked all the figures and the OECD is correct, as would be expected.
Is it finally time to re-evaluate the UK’s generosity to the EU and to the world?
Firstly, I hope that the Government Dept responsible for overseas aid (DFID) is rapidly moving to stop all payments of this kind to the EU. Huge amounts go to the EU from DFID each year, only for the British people’s generosity to be re-badged by the EU as “EU humanitarian aid” when it arrives in the recipient countries.
Secondly, I hope there is currently a major re-evaluation of the UK’s foreign aid programme underway. We generally prefer not to single out individual countries, but the UK is continuing to give ‘development’ aid to India — a country whose economy is now larger than the UK’s and a country which even has its own space programme. Surely this aid must be stopped immediately?
Thirdly and above all, I would like to see a very strong statement from Mr David Frost and his team of Brexit trade negotiators that the UK will make its own decisions going forward, regarding British generosity towards poor and developing nations. These decisions should be made without any reference to the EU, and without UK aid being re-badged by the EU any longer.
Lets now look at all this in more detail in part two.
Real “overseas aid”? The UK is №2 donor in the world after the USA, not Germany
I now show how the EU and the OECD have distorted the truth and put down the UK
On Thursday in Brussels, the EU Commission’s official statistics agency released the preliminary flash estimate of GDP across the EU27 in the first quarter of this year. In Part One of the expose of the EU aid scandal I showed how the EU wrongly claimed to be “The world’s leading donor of Official Development Assistance (ODA)”. According to the official figures from the OECD — the official body which monitors and manages such matters — the EU is FIFTH, not first, on the list of leading donors of aid.
This is not a marginal error on the part of the EU’s propaganda machine based in Brussels. It is a deliberate deception which has been going on for years.
The deception of the public is even worse in part one I gave the OECD’s official numbers for top aid donors for 2019, which showed that the USA is №1, Germany is №2, and the UK is №3.
If, however, a more common definition of overseas aid is used, the reality is different. For one thing, the United Kingdom jumps into second place. Here’s the real picture — if loans and monies spent internally in the donor’s own country are removed we see this
The USA is №1
The UK is №2
And Germany is №3
How to make your country look more generous and rise up the international donor rankings
- Include vast amounts of loans, which increase the debt burden for poorer, developing countries
- Include money you spend on migrants in your own country
Many countries inflate their ‘generosity’ by including huge loans instead of grants to poor nations
To use Germany as an example, $4.1bn of its 2019 ‘aid’ was in fact in the form of loans or other “non-grants”
The UK included only $0.07bn of non-grants in its ODA figures
Loans increase the debt burden of poor countries — Grants from the UK do not
They represent true overseas aid and this is what the UK currently gives
- unlike the EU and other countries.
Who includes the most loans instead of actual grants?
What about countries which inflate their figures
with monies, they spend on migrants in their own country?
Some donor countries also inflate their ‘generosity’ by including their spend in their own country on migrants
In 2019 Germany claimed $3.1bn of its ‘aid’ was spent in-house
The UK included only $0.6bn of in-country spend in its ODA figures
What do most people consider to be aid?
For most people, aid is money given to a poorer, developing country. Indeed the OECD’s definition is “government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare of developing countries”. In recent years ‘foreign aid’ or ‘overseas aid’ has been renamed as ‘Official Development Assistance’ (ODA).
Perhaps when most people think of foreign aid they think of something like this. I know I do.
I have been showing up the EU for its false claims of being the “world’s no.1 donor” of aid for the last couple of years. I have also exposed the scandal of billions being claimed by certain countries as “aid” when in fact it is spent internally as a part of its welfare system. I will continue to so in the future.
Sources: OECD | EU Commission | DFID
