Hypocrite or Hero?
By: Daniel Clarkson
Tags: Travel, Tourism, Africa, UK Politics

Layla Moran cares so much about the poor it hurts…the poor

Former teacher and Right Honourable MP for West Oxford and Abingdon, Layla Moran, was in full political battle mode this bank-holiday weekend. As chair of the powerful-sounding All-Party Political Group (APPG) she, in all her righteous, lecturing might has told the government not to open up international travel from 17 May as laid out in the road map.

“It is staggering that the government is even contemplating encouraging overseas holidays…”.

Powerful words delivered with the conviction that only comes from the fanatical belief in one’s own usually abysmally misplaced sense of morality and superiority of intellect.

Her heroic performance focusing on keeping the UK safe from the terror of Overseas comes mere months after her equally righteous and heroic performance in parliament, published of course on her own website to ensure that everyone else outside of parliament can also see her righteous commitment, demanding that Dominic Raab commit to the overseas aid budget while pontificating that “we all share one planet”.

The Right Honourable MP urged the Foreign Secretary to commit “right here, right now” to the 0.7% of Gross National Income aid budget, and for him to ensure that the primary purpose of Overseas Development Assistance is the economic development of partner countries and poverty reduction.

I love that last bit about economic development and poverty reduction and the use of “right here, right now”. Powerful stuff.

It must be so nice to be a politician. One can pivot and argue contradictory beliefs with equal passion and people are ok with this because it is expected. You may ask what in the above two performances is contradictory. In both she has the righteousness of the current sociopolitical winds behind her. She is standing up against the rich who can afford holidays that kill the poor and vulnerable when they return. She is standing up for the poor and vulnerable overseas who rely on the UK’s altruistic aid budget to sustain them. She is a model citizen and it matters not whether the truth gets in the way of her moralistic narrative.

What is contradictory is that on the one hand she is desperate for aid to be handed out to, for example, African governments and agencies who we all know are completely free from that pesky problem of corruption, to up-lift the impoverished citizens of these countries. On the other hand she is passionately calling for there to be no overseas holidays or tourism which across the African continent supports millions of jobs and lifts individuals out of poverty, not just the corrupt wealthy few who benefit from handling the aid handouts. Tourism, which has been all but destroyed due to the travel restrictions she is so passionately in favour of extending.

Across East Africa 38 million jobs have been lost in the region and the tourism industry has lost 95% of its cashflow. Sectoral GDP in Kenya for the third quarter of 2020 showed that Accommodation and Food Services was down 57.9%.

In this culturally rich and economically impoverished region where wildlife conservation and eco-tourism are the pillars on which local families build their lives, these travel restrictions are devastating. Not just for the local communities and businesses, but the wildlife as well.

What is, in fact, staggering is the sheer stupidity of making these grand statements from political soapboxes and not even considering the far-reaching and long-term consequences beyond her own short-term political capital. Cutting tourism to Africa when there are fewer cases per month in, for example, Kenya, than France has in a day is far more damaging to impoverished communities than reducing, or failing to commit to, the spread of overseas aid sent with minimal controls over who receives it nor how it is used.

What is staggering is that the esteemed MP, given her apparent lack of pronouncements on the issue, seems to believe that it is more important to the economy and less dangerous to allow people to group together drinking in pubs and clubs than to arrive home from a holiday, as airports are a “breeding ground for infection” spread by people who have all had to have a negative COVID test within the prior 72 hours.

What is staggering is that people living in a country in which 99% of the 99% most vulnerable are vaccinated against COVID, and with booster shots procured for the Autumn, are forcibly separated from overseas parents, brothers, sisters, friends, families.

What is staggering is that our heroic MP, fighting the good fight against the uncaring government, is so blinded by her love of political ‘rightness’ that she has presumably lost sight of the broader picture of what travel actually means to those destination countries, often poorer and more vulnerable than the UK, whose economies rely so heavily on tourism. Tourism that delivers the very ‘poverty reduction’ to which she was so desperate for Dominic Raab to commit.

So, Layla Moran. What are you? Hero or Hypocrite?