Why Is Theresa May Still Pledging Anything?

This all seems rather ridiculous. If not in fact absurd:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Theresa May is to commit Britain to spending the £14 billion foreign aid budget only on environmentally friendly schemes. Downing Street said that the promise would mean that “every penny” of UK support for developing countries will be in line with “climate change goals”. The commitment to “greener aid” suggests that new projects could be rejected for funding if they could contribute to carbon emissions. “When building roads or developing energy infrastructure, we will consider the greenest way to do this and use the best materials and design to manage the impacts of climate change that people are already feeling,” Downing Street said. Officials said Mrs May’s pledge would make the UK the first major economy to spend all of its legally binding aid quota in line with the sweeping climate commitments agreed by world leaders in Paris in 2015. [/perfectpullquote]

Why is Theresa May pledging anything about anything? She’s on the way out, we even know the departure date – at least, the latest it will be. She should be having no influence at all on what future policy is to be.

That’s before we even consider the entire fatuity of the pledge itself. Rather the point of foreign aid is that we’re aiding people in not dying this week. What happens a century hence is completely trivial by comparison and thus shouldn’t be coming into our calculations.