The 2017 UK General Election Thread - Voting open today from 7am - 10pm
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Moggy
- "Special"
- Joined in 2008
- AKA: Moggy
Moggy wrote:Grumpy David wrote:Foreign aid budget.
That's 13 billion a year down the drain. Imagine using that to fund new social housing or fund cancer treatments currently deemed too expensive etc.
Sorry to just facepalm, it summed up my feelings nicely but I should probably post more.
While 13 billion sounds a lot (and is to the likes of us!) it's nothing in the grand scale of things. 0.7% of GDP isn't it?
It's nice that you want to fund social housing and cancer treatment, but there's no reason they can't be funded by cutting things like Trident or HS2. Or by ensuring that companies pay their fair share of tax. Or by not tanking the economy by leaving a massive free trade area....
Foreign aid is important in many ways. It allows the UK to stretch itself across the world in a non military way. It builds up emerging economies allowing British companies to trade with them fairly and profitably. It means we are seen as a decent caring nation rather than the evil colonisers we were in the past. Most importantly, it is just the right thing to do, despite the Tory and UKIP habit of slating the country, we are very very rich compared to most of the world, it's only right that we help out.
There's a good discussion to be had on where and how the government spend the money, there is a lot of waste for instance, but spending 0.7% of GDP on helping other nations is only ever going to be a good thing. Especially when you compare it to our spending of more than 2% of GDP on the military.
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That
- Dr. Nyaaa~!
- Joined in 2008
Grumpy David wrote:Foreign aid budget.
That's 13 billion a year down the drain. Imagine using that to fund new social housing or fund cancer treatments currently deemed too expensive etc.
In 2012, the DfID published statistics on our foreign aid outlining who it has helped, saying the benefits included "vaccinating more than 12 million children against preventable diseases; improving the land and property rights of 1.1 million people; supporting 5.3 million children (2.5 million of them girls) to go to primary school; enabling 11.9 million people to work their way out of poverty by providing access to financial services; preventing 2.7 million children and pregnant women from going hungry; reaching 6 million people with emergency food assistance; supporting freer and fairer elections in five countries and improving hygiene conditions for 7.4 million people." In the same year ONE estimated that between 2012-16, "based on bilateral and multilateral spending plans, the UK will achieve a minimum of the following results: vaccinate more than 80 million children against life-threatening diseases, save at least 1.4 million lives; provide school places for 15.9 million children and help create more than 19 million jobs by fostering economic growth." Save the Children said at the time that "UK aid has helped to reduce child mortality – one of the millennium development goals – with the number of deaths of under-fives falling from 12 million in 1990 to 6.9 million in 2011." [Source -- a little outdated, but the best summary I could find.]
If the funding were rolled back, there are little kids in developing countries who would have to drop out of school; who would get sick; who would die. I would feel pretty bad about that personally. Would you?
