Foreign Aid

I read that we are giving India £280 million in ‘aid’ this year, and that, to quote Tory MP Patrick Mercer “Such aid is not given willy-nilly. The expectation is that it will generate better conditions for the country......and help expand trade”

Yeah right!

But that expansion of trade does not seem to include India buying our Eurofighter jet as they now look set to spend £7 billion buying a French jet fighter instead, the Dassaut Rafale

As an aside, if India can afford to spend £7 billion on jet fighters why on earth do they need our £280 million? It’s time this whole question of ‘aid’ was looked at more realistically so that aid is directed at those countries least able to help themselves, not those with £7 billion in their back pockets to spend on military hardware rather than on the advancement of its people.

I’m reminded of a quotation by Dwight D. Eisenhower, no stranger to such things:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."