Here is some warped logic for you. India, which by some measures is now the fourth largest economy in the world, is going to be given £825 million in aid by Britain, which by the same measure is the 7th largest economy in the world.
The next time someone asks why they have to wait for an operation, why they can't get a certain drug on the NHS, why there are no police in their street, why their village cannot get a bypass, indeed, why we in the UK have to wait for anything when the country pays £825 million to India, I would refer them to the ballot box.
12 comments:
Look at the GDP per capita. India has some 46 million child workers. We are much richer individually than India and it is a very good thing that we are helping the poorest region of India where people live in abject poverty. Don't be so heartless. Just because India and China are rising it doesn't mean that they don't have unthinkable poverty in vast swathes of the country and do need aid, compassion, and help.
I really hope you haven't thought this through.
India has a larger economy because it has an incomparably larger population than ours. If you put that on a per capita basis, you might start to think there was a case for development funding?
To vote against that, you would have to vote Tory - if not for an even more bizarre right-wing fringe party.
A more constructive answer to your questions would be to do what (in fairness) Brown appears to be doing - work to build links with the huge markets he's visiting.
Surely we are giving to India because that country has one quarter of all the world's poorest people.Millions live on the equivalent of less than 50p a day. Do you want the British Government to take "make poverty history" seriously or not?
India has much of the worlds most desperate poverty, and its wealth per head of population obviously doesn't compare to China, nevermind the UK.
Surely aid money is likely to be better allocated in well run countries that are on the road out of poverty than in banana republics anyway? Simply giving to the worst around is no ticket to efficent spending of aid money.
Believe it or not, India is actually a poor country as the wealth generation only operates in small parts of the country.
Having said that, I have no idea why Brown thinks it's our job to sort it out.
I've also added you to my blogroll over the weekend, keep up the good work.
Dimmest blog of the year so far? Maybe.
We are giving money to India because of our long involvement in that country when it was part of the British Empire. We have a certain moral obligation to them to see that they can achieve everything they want to, which they are making great strides in doing. Contrast India's success to Pakistan's near total collapse. There are more muslims in India than there are in Pakistan and I'd say their life chances in India are far, far higher.
India has a population of over 1bn people but around 800m remain in poverty. India is a huge, sprawling country (one might say 'collection of countries') with a relatively weak central government. Even if they had the best government possible - which they don't - it would take centuries to drag 800m people out of poverty. Hence we need to give them a bit of a hand and then, perhaps, when India becomes pre-eminent in the world as it surely must at some point along with China and God-knows-who-else, they might look favourably on us.
India matters to Britain and hopefully always will.
On letting the government off the hook I wonder what you make of the PR deal being hatched ( see Independent ) and supporting the government in effect on denying the promised(by you) referendum.
This an amusing post actually ...why do we give the Unions £10,000,000 to be retunred to the Labour Party?
There are more questions than answers
Whilst Indai has super rich people (Tata, Mittal) who pay little tax in India and the Indians take the view that they shouldn't really pay income tax.
So that is why "we" have to fund them.
I wonder how much their Nuclear Weapons programme cost ? Much more than the £825m we are giving them I bet.
it seems an odd priority for a so called "poor" country that we fund their drive to get free of poverty whilst their own government pay's for a weapons programme.
Nich, it's almost unbelievable. Last year the Treasury gave an obsene amount to Pakistan. And yet the Government are supposed to be representing the good of the British people.
How can we even think about giving aid when so much here at home needs looking after.. especially the National Health and policing.
The Treasury seems to have carte blanche to throw money away.
There really should be an outside body of people watching over the them, some sort of department where such big loans would have to be sanctioned, perhaps in the same way that Bush has to go to Congress every time he wants to throw more money into Iraq or some other cause.
The Treasury should not have such financial freedom to flush UK plc down the plughole.
I wonder what the Tories angle on this is.
Why is Britain the Charity giveaway champion of the world?
David.
I do find it incredible the people who take my comments that India does not deserve aid, and assume I apply this to the whole third world.
I support aid, but only to those who need it.
We are giving this huge sum to India because our rulers, and our entire political class actually, are internationalists whose purpose is to "free" peoples everywhere into the Western economic and social democratic model. It's global politics, not Christian universalism, and the posters here who think it is "good" to help "India's poor" somply misunderstand globalisation.
Reserve your compassion for theose who bear the true costs of that globalisation: the European peoples in all their homelands who are being displaced, dispossessed and deracinated by the sea of Third World labour whom these same internationalists invite.
Reserve your compassion for our English children. They will not be the owners of England.
Wake up.
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