Unbelievable!

[Ann]

This government is giving India £1billion aid but they don't want it! We are BEGGING them to take it........ they are describing it as "peanuts" - what IS this country coming to? Charity begins at home!
http://www.dailymail....tml?ito=feeds-newsxml

Does anyone support what the government are doing - I would be interested to hear your views!

[hc4361]

No, all the parties pledged to adhere to the planned increase before the general election. Bear in mind this has been the target since 1970.

In real terms we are giving less because of the drop in GDP.

[Ellipsis]

As I said in the other thread, there's no problem with giving 0.7% of GDP in aid to deserving countries. But there's a big problem giving hundreds of millions of pounds to a country that doesn't want it, for the sake of our own politicians' political capital.

I cannot fathom what this political capital might be. Could it be that our politicians did not want to find themselves in a position where we lost an arms contract from India a year after withdrawing aid to India, thus laying them open to a charge from the Opposition that the withdrawal of aid was (at least partly) to blame for the loss of the contract? If so, that would be an appalling waste of our aid money, to spend hundreds of millions on a cover-your-backside position to remove an embarrassing but inaccurate reason for the loss of a major contract.

But other than that I can't see what "loss of political capital" might be suffered as a result of withdrawing aid from a country that didn't want it, and providing it instead to a country that both wanted and needed it - such a move would be clearly expedient and should result in MORE political capital, not less ...