http://conservativehome.blogs.com/theto ... tates.htmlQuote:
The FT reports this morning that Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development, is to freeze Britain's annual £280 million aid budget for India*. All of the budget will be focused on India's poorest regions and Mr Mitchell will divert half of UK spending into pro-poor private investment, rather than traditional development assistance.
Mr Mitchell had been under pressure to scrap all aid for India for reasons listed by the FT:
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Key to this issue is whether British aid should be about helping people or countries. If your focus is simply on countries then helping India looks harder to justify. If, however, your concern is people then India does contain huge numbers of people in desperate need of help. Andrew Mitchell notes that "India has more poor people in it than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa."
Mr Mitchell does not expect aid to India to last for more than a few more years but has decided that the Indians within the 456 million living on less than $1.25 a day - and that Britain can reach - shouldn't be penalised because of their government and its questionable spending priorities.
Clearly, Andrew Mitchel is smarting a little at the story in today's Telegraph. However, he insists on sending money extracted from hard-pressed UK taxpayers' 'directly' to India's poor and by-passing the Indian Government. That sounds like the UK Government is now directly interfering in the affairs of a sovereign foreign state.
I wonder how Cameron's Government would react to the Chinese Government, or any other government, 'giving aid directly' to any section of the UK population? For a start, HMRC would want to take a huge slice of the unearned income in tax. Also, any aid income would be accounted by Government to reduce any UK State benefits, with the net outcome being of little benefit to the recipients of foreign aid. The overall effect would be that any 'direct aid' would effectively become aid paid to the UK State.
The fundamental point that Andrew Mitchell and the whole of the UK Government fail to grasp is. The Indian people are the primary responsibility of the Indian Government – not the UK Government. If the Indian Government has large numbers of genuinely 'poor' people under its jurisdiction, then the Indian Government should organise its expenditure to meets the needs of its own people BEFORE engaging in space adventures and building nuclear weapons.
It does appear that UK politicians only have an eye for poverty and deprivation in foreign lands, and give every impression of being blind to the suffering their own actions are causing UK nationals in Britain.