Our wonderful government is to hand out £1.2billion in aid over the next five years to India which has more billionaires than Britain!! And we now discover that thousands of British jobs could be at risk after a French aircraft company snatched a deal worth up to £13billion to supply French fighter jets to India instead of them buying the Euro-fighter Typhoon! This funding of everyone else's problems has to stop! http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4100882/Brit-jobs-hit-by-French-jets-deal.html
Always you with these type of threads... What would you have us do with a £1.2Bn pittance saved instead Dwarfer? India is a developing nation with a growing economy. For every Briton there are 19 Indians. You do the math: An underdeveloped, high population nation with a burgeoning economy... - of course they're going to have more billionaires than the UK, and of course France won the contract - they were able to undercut/counteroffer significantly. That's how competition works. Consider this; if you were to hop on a plane and head to India now, you could be earning double what you are now, doing something similar just because you're white. No matter the fact that every other person in metropolitan India has a degree and masters they worked very hard for. I've been out to India on business a lot - do you know what my Indian Deloitte (far better than where I work) counterpart makes? 4 Lakh Rupees a year. Dogs**t money. Stop complaining about your home because you're miserable, and do something to improve your quality of life, I promise you'll feel less grumpy! TSB
GDP per capita of India: $3,703 GDP per capita of the UK: $39,459 Poverty in India: 42% of the population living on less than 80 pence a day. Poverty in the UK: 21% of the population living on less than £14.30 a day. We give India aid for a variety of reasons. Partially because it costs us very little and enables us to invest in say, English teaching, or programs which will enhance both our diplomatic and trade relationship with a growing power over the next 50 years. Partially just because there are a lot of starving Indians. They didn't "snatch" the deal away. There was a competition (initially) between the Eurofighter (EU), the Saab Griffin (Sweden), and the Dassault Rafale (France). The Rafale won because it suited the needs of the Indian air force. Saying that the French "snatched" this would be a bit like Nissan saying that Mercedes had endangered their workforces jobs because a customer had decided to buy a Merc. India is "everyone else"? Also, why should foreign aid stop? I find this whole issue particularly revolting from the Daily Mail and The Sun. They are specifically objecting to the fact that India chose to buy the Rafale over the Eurofighter on the basis that the UK gives India aid, and that the aid we give to India is greater in number than that of France. Essentially they're complaining that we tried to make a legal sweetener/bribe to India, and that the Indians went ahead and bought the product which suited them best. But how dare they pursue an independent military procurement policy when we're tossing them a few coins every few years?!? Stop reading The Sun Dwarfer, it distorts the truth lies, and makes you stupider
Daily Mail ranting aside, I do have an issue with sending aid money to a government that then spends ten times that on a military contract. I'm more in favour of sending it to countries that can't afford/isnt interested in military contracts and is more keen on spending its own money on improving its workers life
It's not like we just hand over a billion quid and say "Don't spend it all at once". Generally with aid programs there's either strict oversight, or we spend the money there, paying for English language programs, food programs, vaccinating kids, that sort of thing.
India is far richer than the UK so why are we giving them cash that could be spent in our own country and help to boost the economy. Who is getting backhanders ? Britain IS NOT a charity. The Foreign Aid budget should be cut drastically so that the British people can benefit from no more spending cuts. Let's stop pensioners deaths from hypothermia (because they're too afraid to use their heating) completely and let charity begin at home first!
Specs figures on the GDP of Britain vs India demonstrates that the UK is more than ten times richer than India. As a percentage of the population, Britain also has ten times more billionaires than India. Furthermore, the UK used to occupy India and did very well out of it for a good century, thank you very much. Think of it as karma.
but does us strictly monitoring how that money is used, encourage their government to start correcting their own spending to combat the inadequacies across the country or does it lead to a complacency of "why should we look after them the aid costs will help, and that means we can afford the Missiles with go faster stripes." India as a country has quite a lot of cash, but its class inequality is huge. I'm thinking the aid could be better spent in countries where they don't have this expendable income.
This is not philanthropy. All aid money serves a political or economic cause for the donor. The UK (and other countries in the West), right now are very keen that India does not go the way of Pakistan (which is ironic, because that problem is the result of Western aid as well. Have a look at that history, and you'll understand more about how such aid works and why it is given). Of course that aid is also expected to generate a return in the shape of government contracts --some of those explicitly in the military that we would consider a waste of money. Give with one hand, take back with the other.
Absolutely, but that would require the donation of aid to be apolitical woudln't it? The mere fact that we keep giving to who we give to, exposes the obvious truth that we do not give just from altruism but also to maintain a friendly quid pro quo relationship. The Daily Hate et. al. were just angered here (or at least, feigning anger to sell papers) because they supposedly expected that the quid pro quo relationship extended to India having to favour us in all its military purchases, even if it was a bad thing from India's perspective.
As an Indian who lives in India, I think any aid coming in should be conditional. Fix the corruption, or the poor and starving will remain as they are and bulging pockets will only get heavier. I'm not sure how well-versed people outside the subcontinent are with the situation around here but it is quite simply ridiculous.
As I said stonedsurd, it is conditional. It's not that the UK just hands over lots of money. It goes out there and spends the money. All the details here - if anyone is actually interested in finding out the sort of thing that DFID does.
Okay, so their country is much larger than ours. They have a problem with poverty and what do they do to correct this? They build a military and have a space program! Then, they have no money left over so they come to our door ask for some cash and we give them it, over & over!! THIS is why me and many others do not want to give countries like India anymore of TAX PAYERS money!! If India wants to spend it's cash on a space program and a military & forget about it's own people, then that's India's problem! Where are our handouts that we are in a recession, people struggling to pay gas & elec bills, pensions have no wealth to afford care home staff, heating! WHERE IS OUR HELP?
You have me wondering whether you're a troll or just a moron Dwarfer. But i'll humour you under the assumption you aren't a troll. It's good that you take an interest in current affairs enough to pick up a paper, but if you want to read about politics without being stirred into a blind fury as you seem to be then you're reading the wrong papers. If your reading level can handle it, try the guardian or the independent, you may get something much closer to a truth that hasn't been run through a chaos thirsty industrial mixer. As stated above, there is a great deal of corruption in India. For this reason, the UK is spending money on aid for the poor in India to make some attempt to balance the scales and also as a friendly token for diplomatic reasons. They aren't just handing the Indian government a cheque and naively telling them to spend it on their country's poor.
You put your finger right on the button. The West wants India to spend all that money on the military. That's the whole idea! Because right next door is Pakistan, which is gearing up to be the next Fundamentalist Muslim regime, and it has nukes already. If you think Afghanistan is a problem, which military basically consists of a bunch of inurgents with IED's and clapped out AK-47s, or Iran, which is trying to get nukes, you can imagine the potential headache that Pakistan will be. The West is pouring a lot of aid money in there too, to try and keep its highly unstable secular government from toppling over. But everybody worries, and rightly so, that it is only a matter of time before the Fundies take over. Major ****-storm. A well-armed India will be essential to some semblance of stability in the region.
The Guardian is a pathetic paper. It basically works from the polar opposite position of the Mail. If you are White and middle class you are in the wrong and must publically apologise, prefereably in their letter section, with reference to the Empire.
Definitely. They regularly come out with Daily Mail style (or worse) quotes. Comparing Tory welfare changes to the Nazi's "final solution" (in all but name) springs to mind. There are better examples, but my brain's turned to mush today! The Guardian is IMO one of the most dangerous papers around purely because some people mistakenly believe it's high quality. And thus some people will slowly start to believe their distorted propaganda (In the interests of balance, The Telegraph can be similar, granted not on the same scale - they do also come out with some distorted/manipulative stuff). I quite like The Times since they don't seem to go over-the-top often, or be too hyperbolic. No paper's perfect though.
Strange... I've always been led to believe that the Guardian is THE most politcally unbias paper available where as the The Times is a Tory stronghold.
