In the next issue of the magazine Sarah MacKinlay is having a look at international aid - speaking to Douglas Alexander and Andrew Mitchell, she's asking: Why should we care about Africa?

John Owens, who's doing some work with us until August, had a think about the recent Conservative aid policy, One World Conservatism, announced last week and below shares his thoughts:

David Cameron’s steady efforts to wash away the Conservatives’ ‘nasty ‘ image and convince disillusioned liberals that the party are no longer out of bounds can’t have been hindered by his speech last week on international aid.

Pledging to meet UN target spending of 0.7% of national income by 2013, the Tory leader has already placed such aid alongside the NHS as one of a ‘untouchable’ areas to be left alone by the inevitable cuts if (when?) his party win the election.

That he is a man considerably closer to the centre of the political spectrum than most of his party, and, according to Conservative Home, his future party is confirmed by the reaction to such proposals. A recent poll of political ‘insiders’, including influential commentators, journalists and politicians, showed that 81% of those who considered themselves right wing disagreed with the idea while 67% on the left agreed. Meanwhile, all of the Liberal Democrats asked backed the idea the unaligned were split exactly down the middle.

International aid has had a long, complex and controversial history. Squandered, exploited for political capital and often siphoned to corrupt leaders Swiss bank accounts, it is , for some, a dirty term. But that is not the full story. If Cameron can back the measures laid out in the green paper One World Conservatism about greater selectivity and accountability in the provision of aid and avoid the squandering that has blighted previous efforts then some good might result. Plans to reduce aid to China, for example, seem sensible. The same, however, cannot be said for MyAid, which proposes that aid is given to one of ten competing projects according to the votes of that wild and fickle thing, the public.

As a leader who has so far done what those before him in the last decade have failed to do —namely give the Tories a more than decent chance of returning to power- Cameron is untouchable from within his own party and can afford to irritate those to the right of him with the odd brazenly populist measure. But the £40m MyAid fund, with its name curiously reminiscent of a certain social networking website and a allocation process reminiscent of X Factor, drags in ‘the people’ exactly where they are not needed.

The last thing that development money, if it is to be allocated efficiently, needs is to be subject to the whims of popular opinion. Whilst there will always be competition behind the scenes where money and resources are to be given, to entrench this and make it a public event threatens to degrade those who ‘win’ the money and break the hearts of those that don’t. How are any but the most involved and informed voters, when deciding whether to give budget support to Malawi or sex education to Ugandans, going to make a decision on anything but subjective sympathies and gut feeling?

This money may be a small proportion of the overall international development budget. But it sends a worrying message about the degree to which Cameron introduce people power where it is tokenistic. Fresh from feeling exploited and excluded by those within the institutions that underpin British society- whether it is bankers, policemen, politicians or journalists- the public have a right to demand a greater say over what goes on in their name. Cameron, however, is wrong if he thinks this is the right way to bring about such empowerment. He also risks wrecking what are otherwise some bold, ambitious proposals.