Philip Davies: Savage cuts at home contrast huge hand-outs abroad

Giving aid to India and Pakistan would be unacceptable at the best of times. Given our financial straits, it beggars belief – even more so with moves to commit, in law, plans to spend 0.7 per cent of GNP each year on foreign aid.

The UK Government is borrowing over £400m a day and is paying £120m a day in debt interest payments. Why on earth should we borrow even more money to hand over to India and Pakistan?

India has the 11th largest economy in the world, with GDP set to grow by nine per cent this year – roughly five times the expected growth rate of the UK economy.

On top of this, India spends $36bn a year on defence and $750m on a space programme and has also established its own overseas aid programme to assist poorer nations in Africa.

If that wasn’t enough, India also has 69 billionaires. They include Vijay Mallya, the 55-year-old owner of the United Breweries Group that produces Kingfisher beer and is behind Kingfisher Airlines. He also owns a Formula One team, and one of the world’s biggest private yachts – the 312ft Indian Empress.

Similarly, the 2011 budget estimate for the Pakistani Ministry of Defence is nearly £3.4bn and includes contracts to buy 36 Chinese J-10 fighter jets worth £860m and six submarines from Beijing at a cost of £140m each.

Pakistan is spending over 15 per cent of its annual budget on defence, while the UK is cutting its defence budget by 8 per cent.

Military analysts have suggested that £650m could keep the RAF’s Harrier jump jets flying for another four years, fund 4,000 British infantry privates for a further five years or pay for 25 Apache attack helicopters and train the pilots to fly them.

At the opposite end of the economic spectrum, there are millions of people living in poverty in both India and Pakistan. ,

However, this is not a justification for the UK to increase its international aid levels. This should be a wake-up call to both India and Pakistan to spend less on space programmes and defence, and divert those funds to the alleviation of poverty amongst their people.

Our overseas aid programme should be targeted at the world’s poorest countries, not on those countries which are rich enough to look after themselves.

Interestingly, a senior Indian diplomat suggested that the Indian Government would not object if British aid ended, stating “we will help if you want to withdraw”. Nevertheless, the agreement still stands.

At a time when UK statistics show that over 2.8 million children are living in poverty in the UK, surely charity should begin at home?

It should also be remembered that there are the unquantifiable levels of corruption in both India and Pakistan. Although India is a functioning democracy, levels of corruption are rife.

In 2010, India was ranked 87th out of 178th countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index and a 2005 study – conducted by the same organisation – found that more than 15 per cent of Indians had first-hand experience of paying bribes or influence peddling to successfully complete jobs in public office.

Last week, the Delhi Commonwealth Games 2010 chairman Suresh Kalmadi was arrested following an investigation into allegations of corruption linked to last year’s event. How can the UK be certain that its £280m a year in aid will fall into decent, honest, law-abiding hands?

Similarly, Britain is now facing the shocking possibility that Pakistan has been harbouring the world’s worst terrorist for almost half a decade. Only last year the Prime Minister knowingly referred to Pakistan as promoting the “export of terror” and criticised them for “looking both ways” when it came to fighting terrorism.

This view was reiterated in an independent report produced by the London School of Economics in 2010 which concluded that “Pakistan appears to be playing a double-game of astonishing magnitude”.

The welcome death of Osama bin Laden this month seems to have reopened the debate as to whether Pakistan is fully committed to the West’s war on terror.

In an era of economic difficulty and global uncertainty, I would urge the Prime Minister to remain particularly vigilant and rethink this unjustified largesse which the UK cannot afford.

Philip Davies is the Conservative MP for Shipley