Chie wrote:Well this is what the UN is for. We ask the UN to tell Russia what to do and Russia does it. We shouldn't have to bribe them.
I bribed Tesco to give me some milk earlier.
tbh I'm not sure whether this counts as international aid given that its essentially investing in a project that has your own interests as its job.
Course Russia is also of the "rich but its people aren't" category that India is in which is why i find India such an unpleasant country. The concept of someone
building a billion dollar home for themselves when people are staving in the same city is frankly disgusting.
But then it also highlights the difference between our country and theirs, and not in a "tsk @ the selfish rich" manner.
I was ranting and raving and kicked a chair the other day because I "ran out of money." Course I hadn't really. I had £4 in my current account due to various reasons but I by no means had run out of money, I have a thousand or so hidden away, my mother has thousands and I'm still in a house with water, electric, heating and all that guff.
If someone is "poor" in this country it is not the same as being poor elsewhere. Indeed "poverty" in Britain is measured on
a moveable target of 60% of median income therefore the richer the rich get the more people are "poor."
I am therefore poor according to statistics (although despite being poor,
I am not common which means I shall not be mocked by Harry Hill).
However this isn't the same as being poor in the sense of having less than $2 a day to live on, and this is what my general view of International aid boils down to.
In this country, if you are poor, and if the govt makes some cuts, you might have to buy slightly less posh things or cancel your Sky subscription. In other countries, if you are poor, you die by starving to death or drinking filthy rancid water. This does not happen in this country, least when it does it only happens to the odd person and its a very strange occurrence. In India its one in three of the population.
So I have no concerns whatsoever about spending a general pittance in terms of overall govt expenditure to attempt to make shit countries nicer. For all the good the European empires might have done it did a load of shite too, mainly to do with careless borders being drawn on paper without taking into account that there were infact people in the areas beforehand.
And while we're in it, many of those who moan on about int aid are those who moan on about immigration. If you make a country less crap to live in, people are less likely to leave and come to countries where they think they can do better.
For example, you'll recall a few years back we were "swamped" with Polish people. Our bus company employed a load of cheap Polish drivers as they thought they could get away with more. Except they've mostly left, why is this? Because since joining the EU there has been money flowing into Poland, and there are much better jobs and much better pay available in their own country. Why would they then live over here, away from their families and in a strange country when they can get decent enough pay back home?
Not that you'd know that of course, because newspapers such as the Daily Mail include ex-pats returning home as "evil immigrunts" to skew the stats [and I will find a link for this if you give me time]
Course if poor white folk weren't too good to pick berries in fields you wouldn't need to import people but then that's another issue altogether.
So yes this is more of an answer to Gav's page 1 question but never mind.
) in terms of exports from these countries, and the fact that those growing economies may have positive knock on for ours; but aside from that I'm confused why the tories see this is as something to fanfare given their massively over-egged cuts to our own economy.
