Richard Hopwood: Cameron's Live Aid generation still wants to feed the world

The jury is still out on how effective the Band Aid charity was at getting aid to Ethiopia's starving during that terrible famine of 1984-85 that so pricked Bob Geldof's conscience. But one

thing that changed without doubt that day was the politics of overseas aid.

Quite simply, Live Aid made aid fashionable. It galvanised the generation that grew up during the so-called selfish 1980s and made them aware of the "the world outside your window" as Geldof and Midge Ure put it.

Once the last act had left the stage at Wembley Stadium that day, it was never going to be quite as easy again for governments to conceal the way in which overseas aid was too often a mere tool of realpolitik, a means of making friends and influencing people rather than actually helping the world's needy. It also meant that too many politicians would fall over themselves in their attempts to appear fashionable and in tune with the world's youth when it came to charitable giving.

Live Aid's legacy was, of course, particularly noticeable during the G8 gathering at Gleneagles in 2005 when Tony Blair tried his hardest to align his government with the aims of the Make Poverty History campaign.

But it lives on, too, in David Cameron's astonishing decision, bearing in mind the financial crisis being faced by Britain, to declare the Department for International Development (DfID) the only Ministry – apart from Health – to have its budget protected at a time of swingeing cuts.

Indeed, it appears to beggar belief that, at a time when Britain is facing a huge fiscal deficit and Ministries are being asked to plan for cuts up to an eye-watering 40 per cent, there will be no reduction at all in the sums being sent abroad to other governments.

This, however, is a Tory policy that long pre-dates the General Election and the explanation lies with Cameron and the fact that this self-confessed music fan, who came of age during the 1980s, believes it integral to his re-modelling of the party that the Tories are seen to care about the world's disadvantaged and to demonstrate that charity does not begin, or end, at home.

It is one thing, however, to want to show that the Tories are not the mean-spirited xenophobes of Left-wing legend and quite another to protect a department that is still grossly inefficient at getting aid to where it is most needed.

In truth, the aid budget is a very small percentage of the Government's overall spending. Yet only this month, a report has shown that too much of the department's 7.6bn annual budget is being stolen, wasted, or poorly targeted.

For example, according to the investigation by the International Policy Network think-tank, a large portion of the 55m supposedly spent on improved classrooms and new text books for schools in Kenya has been siphoned off by fraud, while in Malawi the DfID has helped to fund 700 non-existent teachers, in Ukraine nearly 200,000 went into a vague scheme to "strengthen the voices of older people" and 1.49m was spent on a wind-turbine scheme for an Indian Ocean island with a population of only 50 people.

Then there is the surprising fact that much aid still goes to India and China, countries whose economies are booming, while Britain is in the throes of a fiscal crisis. In other words, in spite of the increased public attention given to foreign aid over the past 25 years, DfID still shows no signs of having learned some basic lessons – that aid given to dictatorial governments riddled with corruption will inevitably

go almost anywhere other than where it is intended, that money ploughed into overseas schemes has to be accompanied by strict methods of measuring its effectiveness, and that so-called aid given to foreign governments in the hope of gaining favours for Britain is unacceptable to a cash-strapped electorate which now demands accountability and transparency for every penny of public money.

As it happens, accountability and transparency are precisely what the new International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, is promising. Whether he can deliver, of course, is another matter. But, if anything is certain, it is that the public will be watching closely and – if the Prime Minister is to be believed – sympathetically.

Indeed, last year Cameron defended his decision to protect the aid budget by citing public support: "I think that the British people want this to be something that the whole of the country is signed up to. If you look to the response to Live Aid, if you look at the response to Comic Relief, even in recession, even in difficult times, they are raising record sums of money."

But if opinion polls suggest that many voters, even now, do not begrudge foreign aid, the Government must remember

that one thing the public will definitely not tolerate is waste – and the idealism of Cameron and his Live Aid generation cannot change that.