The Issue - After the devastating earthquake in Nepal, should we slash foreign aid?

There is a good reason why aeroplane safety requires you to put on your own oxygen mask before those of your children.

You’re no help to the vulnerable if your own capacity is compromised.

Right now, vulnerable British people are, right now, suffering and dying because politicians have frittered away the funds intended to provide the health and care safety net needed by the very people who paid for it.

We need more teachers but cannot afford the numbers required. We need more nurses but cannot afford to train even the thousands of British youngsters applying.

British people are generous, not stupid. It’s very easy to be generous with other people’s money, but politicians have no mandate to big-up themselves with tax revenues. Politicians’ “generosity” causing harm to those funding it is not generosity at all but fiscally-illiterate, sanctimonious arrogance.

Yet these same politicians now borrow money from foreign sources to give away arbitrary amounts of aid to foreign recipients, often unrelated to actual need. Some of the recipients even have their own foreign aid programmes.

So we (yes we, the taxpayers) borrow money from foreign sources to send it to other foreign recipients so they can give it to third-party recipients without any scrutiny on our part of where it actually ends up.

We borrow money to send to countries that have failed to look after their own people but magically have the spare cash for nuclear weapons or even space programmes. Once politicians have squandered our arbitrary aid budget on their own pet projects, should we then borrow more when faced with real disasters like the current Nepalese tragedy?

Foreign aid should be only for real emergencies and mainly as human resources for projects rigorously scrutinised by British expertise. Other aid should be British-made consumables or construction components.

Aid should be needs-responsive, non-arbitrary, rigorously scrutinised and never at the expense of an equivalent need by our own vulnerable.Foreign aid should no more be arbitrarily “cut” than it should ever have been arbitrarily endorsed in the first place. Aid should be driven by need and affordability, not the vacuous posturing of politicians.

When we do impose moral and responsible criteria upon foreign aid we find, as explained in the UKIP manifesto, that aid will be substantially reduced, better targeting appropriate beneficiaries who actually need our help.

NO

David Thomas, Green Party city councillor and international development worker

Crippling inequality not only exists here at home in the UK, but abroad too.

Some argue we should stop international aid until we have sorted out our problems at home.

This is an insidious argument, because it sets out to imply helping those abroad materially prevents us from helping those at home.

But that is not true: poverty in the UK has increased not due to a lack of resources, but due to the pursuit of market-led priorities that has seen money taken away from those at the bottom and at the same time vast accumulation of wealth by those at the top. One in four children live in poverty and a million citizens rely on food aid. Their plight has nothing whatsoever to do with the UK’s commitment to international aid, but everything to do with a political system that punishes those who find themselves in financial difficulties.

By switching political priorities at home, the UK is perfectly able to tackle its own inequality while playing a vital and much-needed role on the international stage.

This is vital because there is another worrying assumption hidden in the argument that we should sort out our problems at home before we sort out those abroad – namely problems abroad don’t affect the UK. This is not true.

We are deeply affected by the consequences of global poverty, inequality and environmental damage through issues such as political instability, war, climate change, displaced people, and market volatility.

At the very least, any investment abroad that aims to reduce global inequality can only ever be in the UK’s best interest.

But, of course, the reason for investing in overseas aid is not simply to benefit the UK, but rather that the aid itself has the potential to lift millions out of poverty.

That is not to say international aid is without its own issues and should be blindly funded.

The Greens do have serious concerns about the way aid has historically been provided, particularly around the conditions forced upon beneficiaries, the lack of involvement of those in ultimate receipt of aid in deciding how best to spend aid, the use of aid to enforce Western values.

We also fully recognise that in many instances, better trade deals would do far more to lift countries out of poverty than simply providing aid.

No-one can argue for a second that international aid is not without its challenges and problems, but this is not a reason to stop aid.

The Green Party believes so strongly in the need and potential of international aid that we want to increase the UK’s spending on it from 0.7 per cent to one per cent of GDP.