You'd have thought that Mail readers would be proud to see their country topping a league table for something more positive than teenage pregnancies or obesity. You'd be wrong. Backed up by quotes from rent-a-fuckwits Philip Davies MP and the Taxpayers Alliance, and urged on by Mad Mel Philips, the readers are screaming for the government to scrap foreign aid:


One third of the world's poor people are Indian. Forty per cent of India's population lives on less than $1.25 a day, and on average their life is 15 years shorter than a Brit's. Nearly half of the country's children are malnourished. But yeah, their government invests money and employs people in a high-tech industry, so they deserve it.


jack, I suspect you wouldn't like higher petrol prices.


Bigger premises for bri&mel's 'person', or 250 mosquito nets to protect Africans from malaria? Come on Cameron!!!!

There's a swell of anti-aid propaganda at the moment: where is it coming from? And with the economic crisis hurting poorer countries even more than it affects Mail readers' house prices, what is the justification for cutting off the little aid they currently receive?

*sigh* and the comment are ratherpredictably full of people saying that "charity begins at home" line, a true sign of a cunt because a) you just know that they think charity should end at home too, and b) because they blatently wouldn't be any more inclined to give to a UK-based cause anyway.

They all seem to be under the impression that overseas aid is some kind of purely philanthropic gesture and that the UK gets nothing in return for it. I remember reading somewhere that every pound given in foreign aid brings in two pounds to the UK's economy (I have no link for that and am quite possibly making it up, but I don't think I am). And it still has a value for the UK in terms of the diplomatic influence that they get over recipient countries. The big donor here is Taiwan who, in exchange for buying a load of police cars and ambulances for us, get to use Paraguay like their own seat on the UN.

If you ever remember please post it, it would be very useful as it's an arguement I often seem to find myself having.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

I'm I've seen figures that show we do £4bn worth of trade with India, and on Newsnight it said British universities get £2bn from Chinese students each year so keeping in with these countries clearly brings us benefits.

I'd be interest to know how much we spend each year maintaining a military presence in the Falklands because I've not heard many people complain about that money being wasted.

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Not exactly an answer to the question, but I do recall that at the time of the invasion there, that it was estimated that it would have been a bit cheaper to have given every inhabitant of the island a million pounds to evacuate than actually meet the costs of fighting the war.

The Thatcher government, to be fair, had a go at not wasting any more money on the Falklands and doing a deal with Argentina. A crossparty gang of blimps savaged it.

They should be surcharged.

Is British aid money making standards worse in Indian schools? That's what the Mail wants us to believe.

But the aim of the British programme has nothing to do with standards — it's about getting more children into education. And in that it has succeeded, as the article itself admits:


Is it surprising that admitting two million extra pupils from poor and (presumably) illiterate families has adversely affected school test results (not standards)? And although the Mail admires India for its

could these be part of the problem? According to Business Week,

A related story today, lots of outrage in the comments that we're not spending more on defending the Falklands.

Hard-up Navy rents a ship from Norway: £40m bill to maintain presence in the Falklands


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1NvDYcHRx

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

The scandal of British aid spent on giving Pakistanis online banking

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... nking.html

And Kenyans, but they're generally not Muslims so it's not as much of an OUTRAGE.

This actually makes sense given that many people in the developing world rely on their mobiles not just as phones but also to access the internet etc, and many of them will live miles from the nearest bank and may not have transport to get there. Also the argument that encouraging people to open bank accounts will help economies isn't a bad one (although the main beneficiaries would be the banks...)

From the article:



Yeah, how dare these peasants want to live in the modern world!! Perhaps it hasn't occurred that just because someone lives in a poor country that doesn't mean they don't already have decent water/a food source.

Only 4 comments so far but I reckon this is one to watch, the language is so clearly directing the reader to react a certain way.

Another of Mailland's great generalisations - Abroad is either wonderful (the bits we either ruled or they've moved to) or desperately poor, lacking the basics of life such as running water and electricity, governed by dictators and full of foreigners desperate to come here for our benefits.

Mobile networks et al are far more important for developing nations, as I understand it, than a 'traditional' communications network.

It's hardly promoting clarity to suggest it's just like your normal £20 a month from Orange kinda deal. Whether it's right or not is up to people knowing what they're on about, not the Mail and rent-a-gobs.

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http://redsparrows.tumblr.com

They don't seem to have quite twigged that access to online banking also means access to local "micro-finance" agencies- the ones who lend a women $100 dollars to set up a clothes making business, for example. Things like this enable peeps in 3rd world countries to work themselves out of poverty long term and thus no longer need our help, maybe even buy things off us. Helping them now helps us later. Of course, mailites don't want to help anyone, they probably begrudge their own children their inheritance.

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Please note: this badger is up to date with her vaccinations. She did not give your cows TB, and as such anyone attempting to kill her will be tied to a chair naked, covered in jam and positioned over a nest of very angry ants.

Misleading Mail article on Uganda makes it seem as though British aid directly financed the purchase of a presidential aircraft. It didn't. Britain gave; the president spent; there's no reason to suppose that it's the same money. Otherwise I could claim that Germany (net contributor to EU regional development fund) has been paying for new schools in Northern Ireland (net recipient).

Among the usual comments calling for charity to begin at home, there's one — a mere one — by someone claiming to have been to Uganda, or indeed Africa. And it's full of error and overstatement:


Oh yeah? That must be why 73% of children and 50% of pregnant women have iron deficiency anaemia. Twenty percent of under-fives are moderately or seriously underweight by UNICEF standards.


Parts of the country are fertile, but as Johnny would know from travelling extensively, other parts are arid, there's some savannah, there are concentrations of people in shanty villages around Kampala and in refugee camps on the borders with Rwanda, DRC and Sudan, and a great chunk of the north lives in fear of being kidnapped or having its land and livestock raided by a gang of drugged-up children called the Lord's Resistance Army. Transport links are awful, so some regions have very limited access to food. In addition, this year there has been much less rain than usual.


No idea what the fuck that's supposed to be about. The couple I stayed with grew bananas, pineapples and millet, as well as keeping two goats (they couldn't afford a cow) and some chickens, while both working full-time and looking after four children (no nannies in Uganda). They lived on a steep hill on a very modest patch of land and didn't have a tractor; they rode their produce to the market on a bicycle.


Is that doner as in kebab?
Aid agencies have contributed to impressive reductions in HIV transmission, improving primary school enrolment in a country where 36% of children still work, preserving the national parks, increasing access to clean water, and much more. Currently 10% of Ugandans sleep under a mosquito net, yet malaria infects hundreds of thousands a year, and almost half of cases go untreated for lack of access to medicine. Uganda's infant mortality is 14%. It's one of the poorest countries in the world.

So what do you, Johnny Johnson, propose to do to make it better? It's okay, I think I know the answer: fuck all. Well you're out of order. You should think about travelling less extensively (presumably for some ridiculous business) and giving more generously before you and your 106 buddies shoot your mouths off about stuff you obviously know nothing about.

Agree with you on this, however this analogy doesn't really work:


That is clearly a sensible area for Germans to see their contributions spent on. A brand new plane for the leader of a poor country is however rather more questionable, whoever is paying for it.

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'Because we've reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us'

The point, really, is that Mail readers, and British people in general, believe the UK has a right to vet every item of expenditure by every government to which we're giving aid. Germans could just as well say, "Britain has nuclear weapons, it's pissing money away on useless PFI projects, and it sells arms to the Saudis — why should our money be used to build its schools?"

We have no idea why Museveni wants a new plane. Perhaps it's greed. Perhaps the old one crashed. We don't know. We do know that aid helps poor Ugandans. The right-wing media are trying to sell the idea that aid doesn't work, that it all gets creamed off by pantomime villain dictators. It wants to discourage any serious effort to reduce the income gap between rich and poor countries.