I wrote last December on the subject of International Aid spending after reading news that India and Russia were jointly developing super-sonic cruise missile technology and wondered why the UK spent £6 billion abroad whilst squeezing domestic budgets.

From the last article :

A large sum indeed [£6.1 billion] and, as you can see from the chart below, money that could be used to reduce our overall tax burden in quite a few areas which would only boost domestic spending :

At current rates you could, for example, either abolish Car Tax, cut Council tax by one third, remove all duties on tobacco or virtually remove all duties on alcoholic drink.

Looking at who the largest recipients are (source DFiD) shows an interesting mix of countries spread throughout the word :

The three highlighted in red there (India, Pakistan and China) feature in a Pravda report today on arms spending, which again makes me wonder why the hell we give them anything at all :

Asia arms itself to the teeth

India became the world’s largest importer of arms during 2006-2010, a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said. The share of India‘s world arms shipments made up nine percent. China‘s share was evaluated at six percent. The list of other active arms importers includes South Korea (6%) and Pakistan (5%). The largest exporters of arms in the world are the USA, Russia and Germany.
According to SIPRI experts, Russia remains the primary supplier of arms and military hardware to India. Russia’s share in arms transfers to India during the recent five years was evaluated at 82 percent.

So there we have three countries accounting for 20% of global arms purchases and we give them half a billion pounds per year in “aid”.

I wonder how many rockets, bombs and missiles you can get for half a billion? Maybe we should just cut out the middleman and give them the hardware directly.