Gordon Brown, at a charity poetry reading for Haiti in London on Saturday, said: "Helping Haiti was the test of our humanity."
I completely agree but I'm somewhat concerned about the proportion of monetary aid to be given to help the battered Hiati compared with aid given to certain other countries.
The UK is sending 5,700 corrugated iron sheets to provide shelters for victims of the earthquake. The £35,000 cost will be taken from the £20m the UK government has allocated to the relief effort.
The UK Disasters Emergency Committee's appeal has raised £60m from the public.
Gerald Warner asks: 'Why are we giving India £1 billion in aid if it can afford Moon missions?' He continues: 'What on earth are we doing pouring UK taxpayers' money into the maw of a nation that can afford to send rockets to the Moon?'
'India is engaging in a space race with China that could turn into something nastier, its eventual objective being to corner supplies of helium 3 by claiming tracts of the Moon’s surface, like terrestrial colonisers centuries ago. It goes without saying there will also be a military dimension to the project. Probably more reprehensible than the financial cost to date is the ISRO’s monopolising of 1,000 scientists who could be engaged on work of more service to humanity'.
The UK government can only give £20m to a country ravaged by earthquakes and where thousands of lives are at risk, yet it gifts our money to wealthy countries under the label of 'development aid.'
To quote Mr Warner again : 'The international aid scam is becoming an indefensible caricature. Britain gives £38 million a year to China, which has just spent £20 billion on the Olympics. As in Europe, so everywhere else: the rosbifs are relished as a dripping roast.
Why is donating a relatively small amount to Hiati a 'test of our humanity' when the government is handing massive sums of money to rich countries?
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6 comments:
'India is engaging in a space race with China that could turn into something nastier, its eventual objective being to corner supplies of helium 3 by claiming tracts of the Moon’s surface, like terrestrial colonisers centuries ago'
We hear that Obama has ended NASA's plans to return people to the moon.
And India is a nuclear power.
Yes Jim, I heard that after I wrote this post.
The balance of power is changing. We should get used to the fact that we are losing the upper hand.
As you say SR, we should surely be redirecting our aid money to a poor country which has been completely and utterly devistated.
Nothing is left standing. It has no prisons, no government offices, no courts. They are all rubble.
If India is rich enough to have nuclear weapons and to send moonshots, then it needs no help from us. It is clearly richer than we are.
I don't see any good reason to be supporting it financially while it has WMDs. We killed and mamed a million people in another country for having them, even though in fact they only had a pea shoots and 2 small catapults. Oops, anyone can make a mistake!
Why are we giving money to China too Tris? Then begging them for loans?
The US seem to be doing that too. Must look into it further.
We give money to China, too, whose GDP/head is double that of India.
Time to scrap DfID entirely, give the money back to the taxpayers they stole it from, and let them decide themselves who to give it to.
Exactly IPP and that would make some of these charities waken up too.
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