A few weeks ago i read a story in in everyone’s favorite  free daily paper, reporting on a Metro Harris poll around the governments decision to increase overseas aid by £2.3bn. The poll showed

50% think the UK government is giving too much in overseas aid

49% think foreign aid for developing countries is a a bad idea as it can be misused or diverted

58% want the extra money spent at home (eg on improving public services)

62% want the money spent at home to relieve poverty

I can understand people polled – presumably at random – not giving much thought to spending on overseas aid but why is the media not joining the dots for those people? The public as a whole should be led into understanding that the worse conditions are in other countries the more likely people are to become refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants etc. And one can’t help but suspect that those who are most opposed to increasing aid are also the ones most vociferous in crtitcising the immigrants who come here for either ’stealing our jobs’  or not stealing our jobs but ’scrounging off the state’.

So as well as being generous with aid (albeit careful in ensuring & monitoring it is used for legitimate purposes) why don’t we

 stop allowing/encouraging western multinationals from exploiting and abusing & polluting other countries (Shell & Haliburton, anyone?),

stop allowing unfair farming and import tariffs to be set preventing other countries from trading equably with the west – oh and stopping subsidies for western farmers would help too

stop insisting on social engineering (eg welfare cuts and privatisation) as a condition for IMF loans

stop expecting other countries  to do things we choose not too eg the impoverishment (regularly leading to suicide) of Indian farmers who have been conned into growing GM crops and then can’t afford to buy all the fertilisers etc which have to be used and new seeds every year

stop waging wars for spurious human rights reasons when actually we just want to steal and/or control resources of other countries

So few people would leave their home, family,  friends to come here if they could live a decent life in their home country. So the man & woman on the Clapham omnibus need telling – if ytou don’t want ‘them’ here, we must to eveything we can to keep ‘them’ over there.

Question is, how can charities get that story into the press?

(ps – thanks be that government money is never diverted or misused in the UK, eg to pay for duck houses r bankers bonuses…)

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