Should the UK stop foreign Aid?

In the face of massive budget cuts should the UK stop sending over 7 billion pounds overseas in the form of foreign aid?

Yes and no. Money/food/medical support should always be given to those in need. Money for infrastructure or other like projects should stop for the time being.

I wish the United States would do this.

I don't think you should stop it if you truly are feeding a nation and they depend on you for survival. At the same time you have to help your own people as well. The US and other countries that are able should help these people if they request it but at the same time we might need to get some folks to move out of uninhabitable places and look for greener pastures. I never could understand why millions of people live in places where you can;t grow food or much of anything at all. These same places have problems with water as well.

To me it is an insanely difficult question to answer. I don't think many want to see people just die from starvation, malnutrition and common diseases that can literally be eradicated from the planet with vaccinations and such.

As a brit i say yes stop giving away our money willy nilly.
We pay something like 150 taxes here...most people believe the government do a good job at spending our taxes....i on the other hand disagree.
Why should we keep bailing out countries year in year out??? Isnt it about time someone else took the expense for a bit?
How can they justify giving away so much of our money each year??
Im disgusted with the whole thing to be honest...the disabled and vunerable are gonna be a whole lot more vunerable now. Im pretty sure the suicide rate will increase as a direct result of this. People are losing everything and we just sit back and let them take it.

Hell yes. This should have been the first departmental budget to be cut 100%. I am sure all of us who are going to have less services are delighted that our Government think that £7bn to foreigners is more important that the thousands of people in the UK who are under threat of losing their job.

And what about looking after your own first. I refuse to give me to charities that spend the money outside of the UK. We have enough people that need our help in our own country yet our Government thinks in their hard times that £7bn spent outside of the UK is a good thing. NO!

You can help countries without giving them money! What about getting people in the UK to put all their unwanted items into boxes and charitys distribute them abroad, things such as clothes and tools or even canned and long lasting foods. We used to do this in school, so what about adults doing it at collection points throughout the UK.

Alot of that 7,000,000,000,000 will be lining the pockets of the rich in those "needy" countries!

Charity isnt just about money...when will people realise this, the world does not revolve around money!

No we shouldn't stop foreign aid. I am very proud of the fact that we help other countries and I hope that we continue to do so. It's a responsible way to act in this day and age. We might think our cuts are huge (and they are), but other people are FAR worse off than us and we should help them.

Get the rich tax dodgers to pay their share and that 7 billion wouldn't seem so much.

reply to post by qualitygossip


So the rich should pay for it? Why? Because they have more money than others? Well if i worked hard all my life and built up an empire then that empire should be mine, not anyone elses and i would give away money when it suited me, not the government.

This country is in a mess. There are 60million citizens here that need help in sme shape or form. 7 Billion is a lot of moey. There are areas so rough and in poverty here in the UK that need help. Charity begins at home and people should remember that!

For all those that are deeply religious, the bilble even makes reference to it.

"why remove a splinter from someone elses eye when you have a plank in your own?"

There are children being abused, foster children with no parents, homeless people, poor elderly people, disabled people, unemployed people...the list goes on. They need help too, it was their parents and grandparents who built this country, they deserve the help from our government first.

reply to post by jrmcleod


When you talk about Empires, please remember how the UK came to be as rich as we are today - by pillaging and forcibly ruling other countries against their will. Now we are no longer an Empire, and rightly so!

Anyway, back to the point. £7 billion is a lot of money relative to people on benefits, homeless people, people on minimum wage etc, etc, etc. By stark contrast, £7 billion is NOT a lot of money when you consider how the 'rich' in our country evade taxes. On that basis, £7 billion is a mere drop in the ocean. It's all relative and we CAN afford it.

Our country is not in a mess at all. We live in a very prosperous environment and should consider ourselves lucky that we don't live in a dictatorship, or in a country which has no food, or lots of preventable disease where children die everyday due to nothing more than poverty. We are not poor in this country by a long shot. Less fortunate people here have government benefits and they have free healthcare as well as other benefits.

We are all human and should help each other out as much as we can. I sincerely hope the UK doesn't stop having a heart and helping others. We are a bit of a beacon when it comes to showing an example of how we help others and we should be really proud of that fact. I hope we never fall into the trap of being so selfish and greedy to think that we ourselves are poor, or hard done by in the UK - because we are not.

Yes, we should stop. If people want to help the worlds poor, great. Give to charity. Thats optional and its laudable.

Extorting money from me in the form of taxation to give it away around the world is not ok. Borrowing money from the international money markets (at interest) to give it away around the world is even less ok.

Top cap it all the countries that have received multi millions in aid include China (totalitarian rising superpower) and India (rising democratic superpower). Eh?

We're too broke to defend ourselves and maintain our services but we can give money to countries with space programs and massive military buildups. I say again, eh? what ?

Lunacy.

I think the foreign aid we give each year has cock all to do with helping the poor around the world.
Its all to do with the political machinations of world governments.
If China owns most of the U.S debt then why are we giving them aid?
Find the answer to that question and you will know the truth behind "foreign aid"

reply to post by qualitygossip


Of course there are many people in the UK who are not struggling to survive day to day, but the fact is that despite our comment that the UK is a rich country, we still have people living on the streets, elderly people dieing in their homes. I can go on with what needs to be done in our own country.

And as some other posters have commented. Why do we give aid to countries with nuclear weapons projects. China, India, Russia and Pakistan have confirmed nuclear weapons. If they can afford to spend the billions of USD on nuclear weapons research, why should my taxes be used to support anyone in their country.

reply to post by Freedom ERP


So make the super rich pay the appropriate taxes, instead of robbing the vulnerable with all of the current cuts?

Does anyone think that if we did not give away £7 billion in aid, that that money instead would be used to take homeless people off of the streets? I don't think so.

reply to post by qualitygossip


Missing the point. If China, India, Pakistan and Russia can afford nuclear weapons, then they can pay for support then own people.

Let us hassle our own Government to support our people. Our own people are more important. Just when will people stop wanting to change the world and focus their attention at home first. When this country is fine, then we can start to look after the rest of the world.

And even if this was the richest country in the world, I would not spare a penny for overseas aid.

Who is taxed what in the UK is off topic. Worthy of discussion but separate.

The point is, its the job of the UK government to look after the interests of the UK. Thats it. I can stomach being taxed for providing essential services in the UK (Health, Education, Law and Order, Defence). I cant stomach being taxed to spend it elsewhere in the wider world.

Thats not to say i don't care. I do, i've given to charity. But it needs to be an individual choice. Charitable donations extracted under duress is not charity, its extortion.

But thats not the worst of it. We've been running a deficit. What that means is our national taxation has not been covering our national costs. So the govt is taking a loan in order to be able to give it away....I don't understand how this can be defensible.

When was the last time you got bank loan in order to give it away to charity? If you do that for a while you'll soon be the one needing charity.

If I believed this money genuinely helped starving people I would say no, aid should not be stopped.

But I believe all this aid is just another means of siphoning off tax payers money into the hands of elites across the world. And this should stop.

Why, for example, is US giving Israel billions of 'aid' every year? So they can purchase weapons and kill the Palestinians and have undeclared, unsupervised nuclear weapons.

The poor countries in the world are poor because we keep them poor.

The solution is to get rid of the monarchy and the government, dismantle the Bank of England's power to print money. Give it back to the people and create a world where the rich West stops exploiting the other two thirds of the world.

Or maybe the Queen will step up to the plate and use some of her billions? Oh no, she is asking for a heating allowance from the tax payers.

As a poor brit living on benifits because of illness i'm all for stopping overseas aid, if we cant take care of our own then why should we be helping others?. I am all for charity but i believe it begins at home.

"Forced Charity" is not charity, it’s a form of corruption, close to stealing. No doubt the only (real) reason why our politicians sponsor it, is because they receive corrupt payments (from countries poor partly because of their corruption) for giving away U.K cash.

But if Big Nanny Government is to “give away”-steal taxpayers money, then it should be doing it through “gift aid” towards our citizens donations (i.e. those who already donate out of the goodness of their hearts). It should not take an expensive, bureaucratic department employing more than 17 people, on salaries of over 90k a year, for the “back breaking task” of deciding where your money should be donated…
www.dailymail.co.uk...
Really all 17 of these people are evil, for the fact they are parasiting of charity cash, when they know full well that better recruiting would find people willing to do their job for little (or even literally nothing). Anyone taking 90k a year, from such a department is surely open to e.g. 10-15 times this sum in corruption?

reply to post by danwild6


Yes. The thought should be country first world second.