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AHILL

AHILL

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I received this email today and whilst it appears to hit all the right notes etc with current affairs I wondered what the TP opinion is to the subject matter and the rights and wrongs of this type of spamming.



Someone please tell me what the Hell is wrong with all of the people that are running this country!!!

LABOUR, CONSERVATIVES & LIBERALS, ALL say We're "broke" and can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, orphans, Homeless, etc.,

In the past few years we have provided direct cash [£] aid to:

Haiti - £1.4 B,
Hamas - £351 M,
Pakistan - £2 B,
Libya - £1.45 B,
Egypt - £397 M,
Mexico - £622 M,
Russia - £380 M,
Jordan - £463 M,
Kenya - £816 M,
Sudan - £870 M,
Nigeria - £456 M,
Uganda - £451 M,
Congo - £359 M,
Ethiopia - £981 M,
South Africa - £566 M,
Senegal - £698 M,
Mozambique - £404 M,
Zambia - £331 M,
Kazakhstan - £304 M,
Iraq - £1.08 B,
Tanzania - £554 M,

Giving them a total of literally Billions of Pounds- and the majority of them Still hate us !!!

Our retired seniors -living on a 'fixed income' Do they get any breaks ???


While our government and religious organisations pour Hundreds of Billions of Pounds and Tons of Food to a vast list of Foreign Countries! We have hundreds of adoptable children who are shoved aside to make room for the adoption of foreign orphans.

In the UK where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed hungry, elderly going without needed medication or fuel to heat their homes and mentally ill without treatment... Etc.
YET........We still allow illegal "Deprived People" & other free loaders on our shores. While we are lining up to give them food, clothes, bedding, doctors, medical supplies and whatever else they need.


Can you Imagine what it would be like if "OUR GOVERNMENT" gave 'US' the same support they give to other countries.

Sad isn't it? This money could have been used to fund the NHS to pay doctors and nurses, so that we don't have queues of ambulances outside hospitals.
 
I would have lost the will to live a few lines in.
 
It is quite alarming really and I personally find it disgusting. I regularly contribute to charities. There's no 100% guarantees where the money goes but I only donate and subscribe to home grown ones.

Governments will always use our money to do what they want. Not a lot we can do. Vote them out? The replacements will continue to honour their 'commitments':rolleyes:
 
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Personally I don't mind that we have donated these funds on the whole, there however exceptions to those cases, I object to giving money to contries that have developed economies etc or more over to contries that are working on space projects etc a la India though I do appreciate that the funds are targeted towards the extreme poverty that is very real in those counties
 
archangel said:
We need to get our own house in order first..... before we go sorting out other problem countries....
Click to expand...

Really what problems do we actually have in this country...

Completely free medical care
Welfare system that on the whole is there to support anyone that needs it
Police Force that on the whole will do its very best to support you and catch anyone who does you harm..
Modern fairly well maintained infrastructure (road/rail)

Yep all of the above has its failings but as the saying goes "you can please all the peoples some of the time but you cannot please all the people all of the times" or something along those lines...

Also if we look at proverty in this country it's in reality very different to that of pretty much every country we support with aid, poverty in this country is in a lot of cases not the result of poor income, but as a result of poor money management / personal budgeting skills that's where we as a country need to work on...
 
I think we should help those in great need, and in some of the countries mentioned above the need is huge and far in excess of what we see here. I don't think we have communities in the UK who live in shanty towns with water via a few public taps or even worst a contaminated stream.

However, I do object to helping countries that in my opinion are using their own funds inappropriately and India is an example. It has a high proportion of its population living in poverty (even India's own estimate is 21%; the World Bank and UN estimates are higher) yet it has a large satellite programme which started in 1975 and has launched nine in the last two years.

I'd like to know the source of the figures and must say I have not heard of -

AHILL said:
We have hundreds of adoptable children who are shoved aside to make room for the adoption of foreign orphans.
Click to expand...

Dave
 
MWHCVT said:
Really what problems do we actually have in this country...

Completely free medical care
Welfare system that on the whole is there to support anyone that needs it
Police Force that on the whole will do its very best to support you and catch anyone who does you harm..
Modern fairly well maintained infrastructure (road/rail)

Yep all of the above has its failings but as the saying goes "you can please all the peoples some of the time but you cannot please all the people all of the times" or something along those lines...

Also if we look at proverty in this country it's in reality very different to that of pretty much every country we support with aid, poverty in this country is in a lot of cases not the result of poor income, but as a result of poor money management / personal budgeting skills that's where we as a country need to work on...
Click to expand...


We are truly lucky as you state but we still need to sort our own problems first. For example the NHS.....or the pensioners......not some country that has a space program or a country that actually despise us.......
 
archangel said:
We are truly lucky as you state but we still need to sort our own problems first. For example the NHS.....or the pensioners......not some country that has a space program or a country that actually despise us.......
Click to expand...

Exactly, "issues" experienced from country to country are relative to those countries. The term "first World problem" is used as a bit of a joke but just because some of the problem we're experiencing in the UK don't seem as bad compared to say famines in Africa, the UK still has problems and to the population of the UK they still need fixing.

The NHS is in dire need of a large cash injection (although I know that's partly because of poor management)

The Police force is being cut to levels that I believe just can't cope with demand.

Pensioners are being forced to live in poverty

Young working families hardly get any help whatsoever

These are just a few issues off the top of my head. I heard a story the other day about an ex-RAF pilot who shot down 20 odd Nazi planes during one mission. He's now having to sell his medals to make money to survive.

I'm not saying stick two fingers up at the rest of the World and say "We're OK Jack!" but help should only be given to countries who are in dire straights through no fault of their own rather than poor administration/government/choosing to live in a desert.

I wonder how much aid the UK receives from countries around the World?
 
MWHCVT said:
Really what problems do we actually have in this country...

Completely free medical care
Welfare system that on the whole is there to support anyone that needs it
Police Force that on the whole will do its very best to support you and catch anyone who does you harm..
Modern fairly well maintained infrastructure (road/rail)

Yep all of the above has its failings but as the saying goes "you can please all the peoples some of the time but you cannot please all the people all of the times" or something along those lines...

Also if we look at proverty in this country it's in reality very different to that of pretty much every country we support with aid, poverty in this country is in a lot of cases not the result of poor income, but as a result of poor money management / personal budgeting skills that's where we as a country need to work on...
Click to expand...
Are you serious?

The NHS is a crumbling mess due to lack of investment, yeh they do their best at grass roots level but people are dying.

The Police have had their terms and conditions truely raped and staffing and budgets cut. The same applies to the Fire Service, Ambo and other Public Services. Go speak to these people and get their views. I have.

Many areas of infrastructure are a joke again through lack of investment in the right areas.

Look at the finacial situation we've been in for that past decade or so and we still send hundreds of millions of pounds abroad every year. Joke!!!
 
archangel said:
We are truly lucky as you state but we still need to sort our own problems first. For example the NHS.....or the pensioners......not some country that has a space program or a country that actually despise us.......
Click to expand...

You'll note I mentioned that there are some failings in who aid is given to but I covered that in my first post, what are the problems in the NHS exactly? There are issues I'm not saying there isn't, but in reality the problems are routed mostly in failings in social care away from hospitals and poor management, those are being worked on not that some within the system want it worked on as it might just shine a light on their own incompetence (talking senior management here not front line staff

BRASH said:
Are you serious?

The NHS is a crumbling mess due to lack of investment, yeh they do their best at grass roots level but people are dying.

The Police have had their terms and conditions truely raped and staffing and budgets cut. The same applies to the Fire Service, Ambo and other Public Services. Go speak to these people and get their views. I have.

Many areas of infrastructure are a joke again through lack of investment in the right areas.

Look at the finacial situation we've been in for that past decade or so and we still send hundreds of millions of pounds abroad every year. Joke!!!
Click to expand...

Am I being serious, I wouldn't have typed it if I wasn't being serious...p

The NHS is a crumbling mess? Erm I don't really think that's quite right, in fact it sounds like a headline from one of the usual tabloids...the reality actually is the on the whole the NHS has ether highest level of new/recently constructed/renovated hospitals it's ever had in its history unfortunately all too many of these have been funded by PFI and as a result of this those hospitals are spending a disproportionate amount of their budgets on property compared to if new hospitals had been directly funded...but PFI is effectively an off balance liability...the NHS also has increased levels of medical personal also, are there things that could be better, yes of course but just throwing money at resolving those issue is pointless and will likely not resolve the issues

Public sector terms changes...yep there's been a lot of changes to the terms of employment and that is partially down to the fact the country as a whole has had to economise, but also down to the fact that some things were simply not affordable in the long term...it used to be that those in public services had excellent in work benefits because there take home pay was on the whole lower than working in the private sector, however over time it became the case that pay gaps were closed or in some cases reversed, but the excellent benefits were still in place, that was not exactly fair to those private sector emoloyees who through tax were funding those benefits...would I be p***ed if I was a public sector employee, you bet I would but it's still better working in the public vs private sector on the whole...especially at lower levels....oh and go talk to people in these sectors? Erm I have I've many friends and family who work for the NHS, Police, Armed forces, Civil Service, Local authority

What areas are infrastructure a joke exactly? In my experience most infrastructure is in a resonable/serviceable condition...do the roads need work, yeah of course they do, but no matter how much you spend there will always be roads that need repairs it's a rolling process as one is fixed somewhere else will need fixing, in reality I dont think its any worse now that it ever has been at least in my 15 years of driving experience...

I agree the finances of this country are a joke, but then the reality is cutting all the aid will reduce likely less than one percent of what actually needs to be cut in order to get the finances under control...
 
Yeh, the finances are an effin joke and yet we send the below list abroad every year, which could be used to address the issues you freely admit exist. It's embarrasing.

Haiti - £1.4 B,
Hamas - £351 M,
Pakistan - £2 B,
Libya - £1.45 B,
Egypt - £397 M,
Mexico - £622 M,
Russia - £380 M,
Jordan - £463 M,
Kenya - £816 M,
Sudan - £870 M,
Nigeria - £456 M,
Uganda - £451 M,
Congo - £359 M,
Ethiopia - £981 M,
South Africa - £566 M,
Senegal - £698 M,
Mozambique - £404 M,
Zambia - £331 M,
Kazakhstan - £304 M,
Iraq - £1.08 B,
Tanzania - £554 M,
 
BRASH said:
Yeh, the finances are an effin joke and yet we send the below list abroad every year, which could be used to address the issues you freely admit exist. It's embarrasing.

Haiti - £1.4 B,
Hamas - £351 M,
Pakistan - £2 B,
Libya - £1.45 B,
Egypt - £397 M,
Mexico - £622 M,
Russia - £380 M,
Jordan - £463 M,
Kenya - £816 M,
Sudan - £870 M,
Nigeria - £456 M,
Uganda - £451 M,
Congo - £359 M,
Ethiopia - £981 M,
South Africa - £566 M,
Senegal - £698 M,
Mozambique - £404 M,
Zambia - £331 M,
Kazakhstan - £304 M,
Iraq - £1.08 B,
Tanzania - £554 M,
Click to expand...

I make that little lot £14,933,000,000 so nigh on 15 BILLION quid. More than significant and I'm sure would do wonders for the NHS, Police force and Fire service.
 
Does anyone have a source for the figures given in the email? All I can find is this Grauniad study from 2011 which shows the UK annual aid figures over the period 2011-2015. For 2015, that includes £18.8m for Latin America and the Caribbean (all of which is assigned to the Caribbean, which includes Haiti), £88.4m to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (of which only £19.6m is earmarked for Governance and Security, which is as close to "Hamas" as I can find) and £446m for Pakistan.

Those figures are significantly lower than the numbers stated in the email but they do have the distinction of having been sourced from the Department for International Development. The Haiti figure may be influenced by debt write-offs or other financial vehicles intended to provide relief following the devastating earthquake in 2010 but I'm struggling to see where the rest of the "nigh on 15 BILLION quid" comes from.
 
The list is incomplete:-

India £196M
Bangladesh £186M
Afghanistan £182M
Malawi £121M

I would be fair about it. No aid.
 
BRASH said:
Yeh, the finances are an effin joke and yet we send the below list abroad every year, which could be used to address the issues you freely admit exist. It's embarrasing.

Haiti - £1.4 B,
Hamas - £351 M,
Pakistan - £2 B,
Libya - £1.45 B,
Egypt - £397 M,
Mexico - £622 M,
Russia - £380 M,
Jordan - £463 M,
Kenya - £816 M,
Sudan - £870 M,
Nigeria - £456 M,
Uganda - £451 M,
Congo - £359 M,
Ethiopia - £981 M,
South Africa - £566 M,
Senegal - £698 M,
Mozambique - £404 M,
Zambia - £331 M,
Kazakhstan - £304 M,
Iraq - £1.08 B,
Tanzania - £554 M,
Click to expand...

No we don't send that to each of those every year, that's a list of what we've sent in previous years...be better if there was a breakdown on why we have sent that money, such as couple of the biggies on that list Libya and Iraq well both of which we have bombed in the name of the war on terror...and in the case of Iraq bombed the hell out of it, I suspect in the case of Libya it's likely most of the value has been sent out in the form of Arms to fight of Islamic extremist fighters...

The other big on there is Haiti, of which I'm fairly sure is because of the devastating effects of the earth quake there a few years ago....

You do realise that the systems you decry as being in terrible state are actually the envy of the majority of the world, we are one of the top economies of world and that puts us in the position that we should try and help out on the world stage as we have the need to

At the end of the day there is always going to be things wrong in this country, things that could be improved but the reality is that should not stop us also trying to help those less fortunate, both foreign and domestic
 
No issue with helping other areas just not before we have out house in order.
 
BRASH said:
No issue with helping other areas just not before we have out house in order.
Click to expand...

But as I said out house will never be fully in order, just like we will never not have poor people it's a simple fact of life, bit like owning a house there's always going to be some maintenance of some sort needed...and yeah I know that's very simplistic as ab example
 
Whenever I see threads like this, I cannot help but be reminded of:

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
 
MWHCVT said:
But as I said out house will never be fully in order, just like we will never not have poor people it's a simple fact of life, bit like owning a house there's always going to be some maintenance of some sort needed...and yeah I know that's very simplistic as ab example
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Well I'd be fixing and maintaining my house before squanderring money on anybody else.
 
Ricardodaforce said:
Whenever I see threads like this, I cannot help but be reminded of:

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Click to expand...
Really? What's wrong with wanting to look after your own as a priority in preference to the other options presented? Everybody that thinks along that lines reminds you of a fascist dictators comments is that seriously what you are suggesting?? I took you to be a bit above that sort of narrow minded opinion.
 
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BRASH said:
Really? What's wrong with wanting to look after your own as a priority in preference to the other options presented? Everybody that thinks along that lines reminds you of a fascist dictators comments is that seriously what you are suggesting?? I took you to be a bit above that sort of narrow minded opinion.
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I don't care what you think about me. However only a willfully ignorant fool couldn't see the similarity between the sentiments of this thread and what I quoted.
 
Ricardodaforce said:
I don't care what you think about me. However only a willfully ignorant fool couldn't see the similarity between the sentiments of this thread and what I quoted.
Click to expand...
Maybe a contrived blinkered clown would have the arrogance to assume a certain leaning when none exists.

I've long since given up caring what faceless wonder, keyboard warriors on the internet opine of my personality. Lifes to short to get overly worked up over such inane drivvel.
 
Of course there's a good human argument for aid.

However, those of a more selfish, "let's look after our own first", bent should maybe consider that one of the reasons we spend so much on aid is to help stabilise countries and economies that we rely on for trade and resources. I'd like to believe we did it altruistically (not least because the British empire is responsible for the state of a lot of these countries); but we're not giving these countries a free lunch. Our economy and standard of living relies on their stability to varying extents.
 
ghoti said:
Of course there's a good human argument for aid.

However, those of a more selfish, "let's look after our own first", bent should maybe consider that one of the reasons we spend so much on aid is to help stabilise countries and economies that we rely on for trade and resources. I'd like to believe we did it altruistically (not least because the British empire is responsible for the state of a lot of these countries); but we're not giving these countries a free lunch. Our economy and standard of living relies on their stability to varying extents.
Click to expand...

I would want to see a cost/benefit analysis. Proof that our investment brings a worthwhile return on the money to be spent. Seems to be a lot of countries that are basket cases with no chance of being stable.
 
My heart says no, we should stop this kind of aid and sort out a few things here. However getting those kind of feelings out of it reasoning it is a lot harder. And it could be one of those good investments. I can't see it, however wouldn't want to dismiss it just yet.
 
According to this we spend just over £10Bn on overseas aid.

Thats 1.4% of Government spending.

In contrast, we spend only 1% of Government spending more on defending ourselves, 2.4%.

Trust me Dave said when the cuts to everything came along that overseas aid was ring fenced, in other words, no cuts to it. The numbers are of no doubt going to be bloated bhy Ebola, and I doubt using UK forces will come out of the aid budget, more likely from an already overstretched defence allocation.

I find this very wrong. The overseas aid could be cut substantially, and the balance used to reduce the cuts to ourselves. Charity is fine, but not as a sop to the left wing liberals of the UK. Sort our own finances out first, then start being charitable.

The more aid we give to other countries the less their own government need to worry about making provision to sorting out their own messes.
 
I must admit its hard to see why some of theses countries are getting aid.

Mexico,Russian,Libya,Sudan,Nigeria :confused:
 
MWHCVT said:
Really what problems do we actually have in this country...

Completely free medical care
Welfare system that on the whole is there to support anyone that needs it
Police Force that on the whole will do its very best to support you and catch anyone who does you harm..
Modern fairly well maintained infrastructure (road/rail)

Yep all of the above has its failings but as the saying goes "you can please all the peoples some of the time but you cannot please all the people all of the times" or something along those lines...

Also if we look at proverty in this country it's in reality very different to that of pretty much every country we support with aid, poverty in this country is in a lot of cases not the result of poor income, but as a result of poor money management / personal budgeting skills that's where we as a country need to work on...
Click to expand...

Free medical care? What does my NI contribution go to each month then?
 
The aid doesnt necessarily go to the governments. It is often to Ngo's who carry out work in those countries.

I never can really understsnd the looking after our own bit. Who are our own? Do you draw the barrier at your continent, country, town? We are all humans and some have a really s***ty existence. Poorest people I know here still have Sky.

Of course with the looking after our own, a lot of my tax goes to people who claim benefit and have no plan to ever work. If I had to choose 'my own' it would be those who lost all in the Haitian earthquake than lazy gits here.
 
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I see TP`s charitable side is alive and well. A bit of human kindness to other less fortunate people does not bother me one jot. If some of my tax money goes to some people who have to walk 5 miles for "fresh" water every day, so be it.

Though I dislike UK tax money going to countries that spend more on military machinary than they do feeding their own people.

How one can quantify exactly where the money goes and what it is spent on should be the discussion, for me anyway.
 
Doesn't this country have a budget deficit, shouldn't it be plugging that before giving British money abroad?

Charity organisations are voluntary, and people can donate to these as they see fit, but tax revenue should only be spent in Britain, for Britons.
 
I thought this topic had been done recently. Giving aid to other countries is good for business apparently, encouraging other nations to buy our goods, or produce them cheaply?
 
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