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.