Foreign Aid Set To Hit £1 Billion

[ChillDoubt]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2861527/Why-Britain-s-bill-foreign-aid-set-rise-1bn-Cost-taxpayers-set-national-income-risen.html

What? Why? How?
Why does this government and those before it have a propensity for giving away our money on a regular basis, but with eye-watering increases during times of austerity?
Apologies for harping on and I won't post the UKIP Policy link again but this is from it:

Foreign Aid

– UKIP will target foreign aid at healthcare initiatives, inoculations against preventable diseases and clean water programmes with a much-reduced aid budget administered by the Foreign Office.

– British organisations will be offered the contracts to deliver the remaining aid following removal of the EU Procurement Directive.

Again, sounds like common sense to me! Anyone daft enough to disagree?

[BlackadderV]

Well said, Baza.

[Gromit]

Baza,
We have had the debt for over 400 years. We do not pay off the loan because we don't want to. Farage isn't going to pay it off. Reducing the supply of cheap labour from eastern Europe will put up our costs and make our goods more difficult to sell. Making everyone poorer, and increasing the debt further.

[birdie1971]

I've always considered foreign "aid" money to mean 'intelligence sharing' money. If you'll pardon the expression, "You show me yours, I'll show you mine". The word "Aid" (with the obligatory capital 'A') is a cosy word to disguise the true intent of the nature of the financial donation. We're 'buying' good will; ergo intelligence sharing.

If you doubt this, what else explains our Aid to India? A country that has more millionaires than the UK and that has a space programme that is actively working to send a man to Mars. It also happens to be conveniently (or inconveniently, depending on your world-view) sitting right next door to Pakistan - a country with a direct border link to the Middle East and that is widely considered to be a breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalism and a source of a great many Islamic fundamentalist Jihadists.

[Svejk]

Thanks Gromit, for enlightening us 'idiots' who haven't got your vast experience of the commercial environment.
If we stopped to think about it, what's not to like about paying a billion pound a week in interest repayments.
Or to put it another way, the same amount we spend on education and the police combined.
You need to send an urgent note to the treasury, gromit, because all those 'idiot' politicians keep talking about, and you'll find this laughable, reducing our national debt.

[Svejk]

And if, as plenty are suggesting, there's some hidden agenda behind our Aid payments, then all the more reason to stop them immediately.

[TTG]

I doubt the aid money reaches those that need it. You'd be suprised how uncaring people can be when there is a million pounds on their desk waiting to be distributed. Children in Need? Gone a bit quiet. Enough said.

[TWR]

I think there would be more use sending Durex there, if they were not sh@ging like rabbits, the population would be half the size it is.

[New Judge]

Yes of course nations have always borrowed, Gromit, in the same way as companies and individuals always have. Companies and individuals use the facility to fund capital projects such as investing in new plant to enable expansion or buying a house or car. What they should not use borrowing for is to pay current wages, or the gas bill, to go shopping in Tescos or (most pertinently as far as this question goes) to give money to strangers for no good reason. Companies and individuals should also make sure that they can service the debt without jeopardising their viability, that the cost of the debt does not make unreasonable demands on their funds, and that the sum borrowed will eventually be repaid.

This, I think, is where I and "the idiots in Osborne's department" part company with you. Since 2008 government debt has risen from around 40% of GDP to near enough 100% today - a level unseen since the 1950s when the country was recovering from WW2 and a rate of increase unparalleled outside the war years. The current deficit is still around £100bn pa so that percentage, despite "...the most savage cuts the world has ever known which will lead to levels of abject poverty unseen since the 1930s" (© BBC) continues to rise. As has been mentioned, the cost of servicing that debt is greater than the country's defence budget. Government debt at the start of the 20th Century was about 30% of GDP. Obviously this increased enormously with WW1 and did not fully recover before WW2. Only in in the 1970s, following a long and steady decline, did it get back to 50% and then further declined to around 25% in the 1990s. The government is using borrowed money (and as cheap as that is, the sums involved are enormous) to pay current account costs such as benefits, pensions and, dare I say it, overseas aid. The key phrase in your assertion is "As long as we are able to function and pay back our debts". If things continue as they are we will no longer be able to function (and there are some who would argue that we are beginning to see that even now in some areas). Paying back our debts, with tax revenues stagnant, will eat increasingly into government funds. Ways need to be found to wean the nation from its obsession with living on such vast sums of borrowed money and despite the best efforts of the idiots at the Treasury there seems to be no sign of that happening.

[baza]

Very well put N.J. we cannot keep borrowing.