#UNICEF Rees-Mogg - Unicef's donation of thousands of pounds to tackle hunger in Britain is a shallow political gesture.

UNICEF - United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund - does wonderful work for children - so why wouldn't you support them with your charitable donations? 

Here is possibly why - because instead of using their considerable donations in the most effective way s possible they choose to play misdirected political games at a real cost.

Here is a summary from Wikipedia regarding a recent row in the UK :-

 Funding of UK food charities

In December 2020 UNICEF made funding available to feed children in UK for first time as part of its Food Power for Generation Covid initiative. Tory MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons, accused UNICEF of "playing politics." UNICEF pledged £25,000 to School Food Matters a south London charity, to help feed children over the Christmas holidays. A partnership of Devon charities had also been given £24,000 to help feed 120 families over the winter of 2020. UNICEF said it was helping children in the UK because of an increase in food poverty in Britain, caused by the Corvid-19 pandemic. It estimates there are children going hungry in a fifth of households. Anna Kettley, from UNICEF said "We are one of the richest countries in the world and we should not have to be relying on food banks or food aid." Labour MP Zarah Sultana in the House of Commons said, "For the first time ever, UNICEF, the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian aid to children, is having to feed working-class kids in the UK but while children go hungry, a wealthy few enjoy obscene riches." Responding to this, Rees-Mogg said, "I think it is a real scandal that UNICEF should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars, and they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, I think, 25,000 to one council. It is a political stunt of the lowest order. UNICEF should be ashamed of itself." Chris Forster, from Transforming Plymouth Together, one of the Devon charities to benefit from UNICEF donations, said, "We had one family as part of the deliveries last week literally in tears with gratitude because their cupboard was bare." One unidentified Plymouth mum-of-three said: "I obviously would never see my children go without so there have been two or three days where I just haven't eaten at all. Rees-Mogg called the funding of UK charities, "A political stunt of the lowest order." The Scottish National Party MP, Tommy Sheppard said, “It is astonishing that these comments are coming from the same government that had to be publicly shamed into following Scotland’s lead and providing free school meals for children over the holidays.” LBC reported that the UN humanitarian aid agency are providing over £700,000 to feed hungry children in the UK.

Here is an article written by Andrew Roberts in The Telegraph in response to UNICEF's donations in the UK and Rees-Mogg's reaction to it in parliament.

We need more Rees-Moggs, to tell the truth about shameless Leftist posturing

Unicef's donation of thousands of pounds to tackle hunger in Britain is a shallow political gesture

Jacob Rees-Mogg has done it again, this time attacking the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) for having included Britain on its roster of countries where it needs to help children who are going hungry. “They make cheap political points of this kind,” he said. “It is a political stunt of the lowest order,” before adding that Unicef should “be ashamed of itself”.

Rees-Mogg really cannot go on being so truthful about organisations that have been accorded sainthood status by the Left. It simply isn’t done. Unicef, an organisation that has been institutionally anti-capitalist and anti-Western for many years now, must have thought its little wheeze was going to show how evil the Johnson government was. Instead, with Rees-Mogg’s intervention, the spotlight has fallen on itself.

So the £25,000 Unicef has given to Southwark Council to fight supposed food deprivation in the borough (where child obesity is a serious issue, but child starvation simply is not) is now being seen in terms of the hundreds of millions the NGO received in 2019 (in part from British taxpayers). In all, Unicef is spending £700,000 on this stunt, yet if it were really concerned about children suffering from malnutrition in Britain, why is it only putting such a tiny percentage of its budget towards alleviating this apparent humanitarian disaster?

Is it not concerned with the other aspects of health that come with the mass-starvation that Unicef deals with in genuine crisis areas like Chad, Ethiopia and Sudan? Has it directed its doctors to deal with the surely-expected outbreaks of beri-beri and dysentery in Southwark, indeed probably across the whole of the SE1 postcode? Or is it – as Rees-Mogg has spotted and bravely pointed out – just yet another politically-inspired jape from a Leftist NGO to try to put the British Government in a bad light?

As well as the miserliness of the Unicef contribution, the other way that we can tell that this is a political gesture are the words used by Anna Kettley, Unicef's head of operations in the UK, to justify the donation. “We believe that every child is important and deserves to survive and thrive, no matter where they were born,” she said.

There you have a classic example of the Political Opposite Statement Test. “If no-one on earth can possibly disagree with a statement,” the Test states, “then the statement itself is utterly worthless, and possibly moronic.” Kettley’s statement utterly fails the test. By making it, she appears to imply that this Tory Government does not believe that every child is important and that some deserve not to survive and thrive, and that it does matter where they were born.

It is a political trick as old as time – used with particular skill by the likes of Tony Blair and Barack Obama. But when literally no-one short of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin (and possibly not even the latter) would fail to subscribe to Kettley’s statement, its triteness is starkly revealed. An avowal of principle in politics only means something if someone, somewhere, might disagree with it.

As a UN official, Ms Kettley is meant to be apolitical, yet instead she writes articles for the Independent demanding Government support for her pet projects, such as special winter relief, little realising how much it damages the Unicef brand in the UK to be quite so closely aligned to Labour Party policy. Her claim that one in five households in the UK are struggling to find food this Christmas – i.e. households containing 13.2 million of us – is demonstrably untrue. And if it were true, why is Unicef dedicating a mere 5.28p to each person to deal with the issue?

A much more reasonable use of Unicef’s time than inventing scare stories and suggesting that Tories want to starve children might be for the NGO to tell us what it is doing to prevent future Guardian headlines such as that of 2018: “Unicef admits failings with child victims of alleged sex abuse by peacekeepers.” Or whether it has finally got over its positively Corbynesque bias against Israel and its work with dictatorships. For years, Unicef provided funding for Palestinian “summer camps” which have been accused of encouraging children to become suicide bombers. One was even named after Wafa Idris, a female suicide bomber. In the late 1990s, meanwhile, Unicef and the Saddam Hussein government collaborated on a report stating that hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq died because of the sanctions regime. More recent analysis has found that these figures were completely untrue.

Unicef appears to believe that the major cause of child poverty in the world is the free market, despite the fact that countries that adopt free enterprise have vastly lower levels of child poverty than do the corrupt statist economies that Unicef occasionally praises in its reports. It was not so long ago that Unicef reported of the North Korean dictatorship that “the particular strength of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s policy framework lies in its comprehensiveness, integration and consistency in addressing the interests of children and women ... The government has proactively broadened and updated its laws and policies on an ongoing basis, also making an effort to harmonise with international innovations and standards”. Would that Boris’s government ever received such praise as meted out to the Kim family.

Standing against all that is Rees-Mogg, who joins the all too small list of MPs who still consider the truth to be an excuse for saying something important, and who almost never indulge in the meaningless kumbaya political bromides of the “Kiddies mustn’t be forced to starve” variety. It was he who pointed out the obvious truth that, despite what local government officials are telling you, if you are in a burning building like Grenfell Tower you should obey your instincts and do everything to try to get out. It fell precisely into the category of a statement that everyone knew was true, but for which he got castigated just the same.

When the House of Commons was full of people who entered politics out of a sense of public service, and who had achieved things outside politics beforehand, there were plenty of MPs who were willing to say things because they were true, regardless of whether people wanted to hear them. Parliamentarians of the kind of William Plimsoll, Keith Speed, Peter Shore, Eric Forth, Robin Cook, Sarah Champion and Frank Field are fewer and farer between, and British politics is the weaker for it. The very fact that you might not even have heard of all of them is testament to the way that they were willing to put their principles before their careers.

The deluge of ad hominem criticism of Rees-Mogg for daring to criticise Unicef will scare off politicians in the future, inevitably emboldening the Left and its network of supporters to conduct further stunts of this kind. The saddest thing of all, however, is that there are genuinely starving children in Chad and Somalia and Yemen at this time of year who are now going without £700,000 worth of desperately needed food. But at least Unicef will have made its egregious political statement.

Andrew Roberts is the author of ‘Churchill: Walking with Destiny’ (Allen Lane)

Just to be clear I share Andrew Roberts view. I am with Rees-Mogg's assessment on this issue.