Don't give foreign aid: we need it here at home!

Is one of those hoary old chestnuts that gets trotted out, knee-jerk style, every time there's some sort of crisis on the home front. Housing the homeless, funding small business, and now of course the floods.

We have heard this tired old refrain several times in the last few days coming out of the flooded areas. Even one of the fire fighters, prompted none too subtly by his media interviewer, came out with it. So it feels necessary to nail this once and for all.

Interestingly enough, it's something I myself believed, fifty years ago. I was selected by my school to be one of the pupils to talk to Judith Hart, the eminent left wing minister for overseas development in Harold Wilson's government who was visiting our school, and it was she who first explained to me what was wrong with the argument. First the fact that the countries we give aid to are grindingly poor, poor in a way no-one in Britain could even understand, never mind experience, and the fact that the governments of these countries act in a way we might not necessarily approve is neither here nor there.
Second,  we owe a number of donor-recipient countries an enormous debt which is often conveniently forgotten in debates of this kind. Haven't you ever looked at a map of the world and wondered how a piddling little off-shore island became one of the wealthiest nations in the history of the world? The answer is simple, if not very palatable to us now. We stole it, and in large part from those countries who are now in receipt of our aid. Which is as it should be. You could call it "giving something back" if you like, and what we give back is but a tiny fraction of what we took in the past.

Which brings me to the final point: this nation is so rich we can give a few billion in aid and scarcely notice it in a general budget which stretches to trillions. In other words, enough of the bleating about "charity begins at home". Sure the flooded areas need help and plenty of it, but we can afford that and foreign aid. Let's face it, we're loaded.