Taxpayers’ pain is wasted as loans and aid drain savings

The extreme pain of consumers, householders and taxpayers over the next few years will be largely in vain since Nick Clegg and David Cameron are going to give away, in one form or another, most of the savings extracted from the electorate.

The Government has underwritten or lent up to £12bn to countries in danger in the eurozone (which we avoided joining and predicted the disaster we are now financing). Over the next four years the aid budget (usually spent by corrupt Third World governments on sumptuous palaces, luxury goods and trips to London and Paris by sundry dictators) will rise to £11.4bn per year.

That makes a total liability out of our bankrupt finances of £23bn – roughly the annual amount we are planning to “save” from the extreme suffering our Government is inflicting on us.

The biggest recipient of our foreign aid is Pakistan, getting £1.4bn over four years, roughly the same amount that country has spent on buying a fleet of Chinese-made submarines. Pakistan spent a similar sum on two squadrons of Chinese J-10 fighter aircraft.

We give hundreds of millions to India – one of whose companies has just bought Jaguar-Landrover

There is apparently no end to the idiocy of this Government. As the development aid expert Professor Bauer described it, aid is the transfer of wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

From: David W Wright, Uppleby, Easingwold.

THE latest Blair-like pontification from David Cameron about making foreign aid legally binding beggars belief (Yorkshire Post, May 17) particularly at a time when the UK is broke and in the light of this Government’s propensity to meddle in everybody else’s internal conflicts and disputes, particularly in Libya and the Middle East.

Mr Cameron is still talking about cutting our Armed Forces while he is poking his nose in other countries’ affairs which are of no concern to us. He should withdraw our forces from Afghanistan immediately and simultaneously end our involvement with Nato in Libya, and concentrate on getting the ailing UK back on course after the disastrous years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.