I used to disagree with UKIP’s hostile position on foreign aid but I’ve arrived at more or less the same conclusion (albeit by a different route). I still think there is a role of aid and development investment as part of a coherent foreign policy, but that simply cannot happen until there is systemic reform of the civil service and better oversight of ministerial advisers – who tend to hail from NGOs and development think tanks, all of whom subscribe to the same faulty groupthinks.

When it comes to aid policy, MPs generally haven’t got a clue what it’s for and believe it’s a slush fund to squander on their favoured humanitarian causes, and always to fulfil the UN Sustainable Development Goals rather than advancing the national interest. They often rely on NGOcracy and think tank wonks to tell them how and where to spend it – and when it comes down to it, I don’t think they have much of a clue either.

There are plenty of worthy causes, and if charities wish to raise funds independently and go and do good in the world, then government should cautiously support them – but not financially being that these NGOs are also lobbyists, advancing dubious, often ridiculous, left wing agendas. Any effort directed and financed by government must be part of an integrated policy to meet well defined objectives in the direct national interest.

One of those objectives must be to stem the tide of migration. For that we must review aggressive trade policies that destabilise and undermine developing economies, and look at how our aid spending can remove physical barriers to trade. The lack of internet and port infrastructure often stands in the way of nations trading their way out of poverty. An inability to maintain a clean water supply and stable electricity is also a cause of disease which further aggravates migration.

Being that the UK has its own energy crisis to address, the UK should go all in on small modular nuclear reactors, and partner with Israel to develop nuclear desalination and irrigation systems. Water, robust agriculture and reliable energy are the fastest route out of poverty. Lefty NGOcrats setting up transgender inclusion workshops is not going to cut it.

Alarmingly, the woke agenda permeates even the highest levels of the FCDO, and over the years there has been a gradual merger merger between the civil service and radical activist charities like Stonewall. Our trade and aid wonks see trade and cooperation agreements as a means to export “our values”, thus we see our embassies plastered with rainbow flags and trade agreements creaking with climate change dogma.

Like much else in British governance, not much is going to improve until there is a cleansing of the civil service and more detailed scrutiny of the many think tanks who ringfence parliamentary committees. There is a revolving door between the civil service and woke think tanks, closely guarding their monopoly on influence. Until we have rooted out the intellectual contagion, one is inclined to believe the foreign aid budget should be somewhere close to zero, save for natural disaster relief.

As it stands, the foreign aid system sustains a legion of well-to-do middle class NGOcrats who believe that firehosing money at corrupt NGOs equates with global influence. It’s a giant virtue signal where, in their eyes, the more we spend them more respected we are. This, of course, is a narcissistic delusion, and when it comes to it, the soft power of foreign aid amounts to little. It merely buys the approval of international NGOcrats which is not the same as actual influence. Neither Pakistan nor India care if we withdraw aid funding.

With the best will in the world, though, Britain can’t solve the world’s problems, nor is it our “moral obligation” to spend largely borrowed money on the developing world. We often find that spending on overseas infrastructure is wholly futile being that whatever we build is either vandalised, stolen or sabotaged. The problems start with the winner-takes-all tribal culture of third world politics, where nothing short of a civilising neo-colonial would work – which we are not in the business of doing. We might also venture that with an imminent energy emergency on our own doorsteps, we’re not really in a position to be telling anyone how they should manage their national infrastructure.

For all that it’s supposedly us brexiteers who were “pining for empire”, it would seem the foreign adventurers who want us to maintain our overseas aid missions and soft occupation forces are those who viscerally opposed Brexit. It turns out that they don’t mind technocratic and regulatory colonialism, just so long as it isn’t waving a Union Jack and advances the new religion of the progressives left. Climatism.

As it happens, Brexit doesn’t meaningfully disrupt their agenda and Johnson’s Tories are set to restore the aid spending target, and while Carrie Johnson is running the show, the NGOcray is spared from any serious accountability. The marginal tinkering of Dominic Cummings made very little difference to the functioning of the civil service and MPs still take their policy cues from NGOcrats in the Wesminster bubble. The Tories were never going to implement the reforms demanded by the Brexit vote and any hope of a Brexit revolution died the moment Johnson took the leadership of Vote Leave.

It is my view that Vote Leave was set up to snatch the initiative away from the Brexit insurgency and bring it back under Westminster control. Johnson is the face of a bait and switch operation and now we see the establishment gradually reverting to its same old habits. We may have left the EU in an administrative sense, but it seemingly has had no impact on the political culture of Westminster and Whitehall, and the establishment’s grip on the levers of power is as strong as ever it was. Brexiteers were foolish to trust the Tories, an establishment party, to deliver the revolution. Now we find ourselves back at square one, which is why we have to rebuild UKIP.