“AND again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

The King James Bible is an inexhaustibly rich fount of profoundly ideological thought, and this passage (Matthew 19:24) points us towards the many contradictions that the Good Book reveals.

The proposal from International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt that Britain’s foreign aid commitments be opened up to private investment would be one test of the truthfulness of the Biblical injunction.

It is improbable that, bound to this Earth, we will see many rich people overcome the barrier set by divine authority, but we have a goodly body of evidence that it would be very difficult.

Adam Smith International, which proudly asserts the “free market” foundations of its ideology, is a pioneer in this field, having, by 2014, already harvested up to £450 million in state aid-funded contracts.

How profitable this activity was is difficult to discern. Accounting for foreign aid is a notoriously opaque business. Considerations of foreign policy, the prospects of a profitable return on capital export, the framework of global and regional alliances and the always present and well-grounded suspicion that aid comes with strings mean that such government spending is rarely seen as driven purely by humanitarian and charitable impulses.

If it were it is unlikely that Adam Smith International — whose unofficial motto might be “greed is good” — would be so active in the field.

Today the Department for International Development (DfID) starts from the premise that the private sector should be involved in all aspects of overseas development.

The practical expression of this is that schemes for private education and healthcare are favoured while deregulated agricultural development which privileges multinational business over indigenous or co-operative models are foisted on states that have limited power to resist even if the local elites were so minded.

We should be on guard against criticisms of Mordaunt’s proposal that it is “ideological” in inspiration.

Of course it is, and opposition to the privatisation of aid is equally “ideological” in the sense that it rests on a fundamental opposition to the idea that aid should be dependent on a profitable return.

The money involved in these changes is marginal to overall spending. But tucked away in this policy launch is a proposal to rejig internationally agreed rules on what constitutes aid so that the returns accrued through the long-standing financial machinery which shapes such state-aided investment counts towards the aid target.

The invisible hand of the Chancellor might well be at work here but the significance of the enterprise could be that Mordaunt is being prepped as candidate for leader should a vacancy arise.

Postwar British governments have, without exception — including that of Clement Attlee — grounded international aid in considerations of imperial interest.

Sometimes dressed up as charity, or in notions of national interest, today more overtly in the dogma that free markets and transnational monopolies are the key instruments for progress, aid it is never what it appears to be.

As the much misrepresented Adam Smith himself said: “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”

A new kind of British government would base its foreign aid policy in human solidarity, social justice and recompense for the crimes of an empire on which the sun never set and the blood never dried.