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Hello and welcome to The Spectator Podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast and on this week's episode we'll be looking at the aid industry in crisis.

We'll also be debating how to tackle knife crime and finally we'll be discussing and trying

booze-free booze. First up, in this week's issue, Harriet Sargent suggests that the Oxfam

revelations threatened to extinguish the virtuous glow that has protected the aid industry from scrutiny.

I'm now joined by Jonathan Foreman, a senior research fellow at Civitas, and author of

Aiding and Abetting, and Deborah Dohn, who's worked in the international development sector

for 20 years to discuss. So, Deborah, does it seem to you like this Oxham story as one-off,

or do you think this is just the start of a kind of a Me Too moment for the charity sector? I definitely think this is a me-to moment for the sector and it's probably been a long time

coming and lots of stories are now coming out of the woodwork. It's not confined to one organization

or one sector. You know, there's a lot of, there's private sector involved in the aid business,

there's the UN sector.

It's probably systemic.

Jonathan, did the Oxfam story come as a surprise to you?

I didn't know these particular details.

So in that sense it came as a surprise, but the idea of exploitation and very bad behavior being covered up didn't come as a surprise to me at all.

And that's because, you know, someone who's been studying the aid industry for a while and who's also dealt with Oxfam quite a lot. I mean,

I think there's a sort of, there's a long-term pattern of sort of secretiveness and impunity.

I mean, I was shocked, I have to say, by the actual revelations. I mean, it is pretty, I mean, I've seen some bad behaviour. And, you know, like everyone

else, I read Linda Pullman's brilliant book, war games, and I knew that there's prostitution that

pops up in conflict zones and in disaster areas, that pops up, especially when you win the

sort of aid circus turns up. So I knew about that, but the idea of that a senior person would

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