Left Luggage
We're all familiar with the attacks on economic aid from the self-help school of economists of the right, and in the case of Mr. Peter Bauer these criticisms have reached a high level of sophistication and understanding. But it's not often one comes across a salvo from the left. Listen to this, then, from the recently-published inaugural lecture of the new Professor of Economics at Cambridge, Mrs. loan Robinson: 'Individuals who advocate and administer aid to the developing countries are sincerely concerned to help them to overcome poverty and to establish their independence, but the programme as a whole is based upon a contradiction. Its under- lying purpose is to prop up a number of Con- servative, feudal and fascist governments: which can be relied upon in return to respect foreign property.'
Mrs. Robinson is a distinguished Keynesian economist, and much of her lecture is a perceptive account of the new world economic order and a just indictment of Britain's current economic policy. But the section on aid is sheer, arrant, nonsense. Of the top ten countries who receive two-thirds of Britain's aid programme, I would imagine that even the Daily Worker would classify only two of them—Pakistan and Aden— as 'Conservative, feudal and fascist.' And India
alone gets twice as much as these two added together. Presumably, however, any country that 'respects foreign property' (like Britain, for example) is ipso facto regarded by Mrs. Robinson as Conservative, feudal and fascist. I only hope, for her sake, she's planning to take her next holiday among the fascists. At least her luggage will be safe.
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