Going the wrong way with our overseas aid policy

And I have found many other people who also think that taxes raised in the island should be spent in the island, and that frittering away around £3m. on some vague organisations we know little of, and not necessarily the charity we would choose to give money to, is fundamentally wrong. So I cannot support the Gavin St Pier proposal to increase this budget, or in fact have a budget for it at all.

There is some strange idea that we have an international obligation to make these payments, but I would challenge that this is so as I am not aware that the population of the island was given the option.

Islanders are very good individually at supporting charities, both on the island and elsewhere, but they are the charities of our choice that we believe we should give money to and in my own case ones where I think that the money will be well spent and on people I care for.

If you want to make some sort of government recognition of this then perhaps the best thing is that payments to authorised charities would be recorded on tax returns and would be allowed against tax and the present system abandoned.

If there is a belief that we should involve the island in international aid then perhaps it would also be better achieved by sending a few dozen of the States Works Department employees to places such as Jordan to construct accommodation for refugees or to build water pumping and purification stations in other parts of the world. These would be useful projects and we may feel that islanders would see the direct benefits of their money and the effort of the people to do it.

I am not suggesting that the organisations the island has supported do, but chucking money at many of these overseas charities in the past internationally has just seen it go to the wrong people and used for the wrong purpose.

Much charity work internationally has also had unintended consequences.

Take Bob Geldof’s ‘Feed the World’ in the 1980s. The operation set up in Ethiopia has been one of the most stupid and disastrous charity events ever to have been seen.

The population of Ethiopia at the time of the famine was about 34 million. Within months of the aid (free food) arriving the birth rate trebled and now the population is over 109 million, most of them living again in squalor, creating a bigger problem than they started with, and which is spreading to other countries.

Professor Stephen Hawkin said recently we should look to develop space flight so that we can find a new world to live on because we have made such a mess of planet Earth, caused in the main by uncontrolled population growth (world population was 1 billion 150 years ago, 3.5 billion when I was born and now 7 billion).

Humans have infested the world and are destroying it, so any organisation trying to reverse this would have my support.

G. M. OLDROYD,

St Martin’s.