Here are some interesting arguments for and against:
A stitch in time saves nine

It seems to be a cheaper alternative to the "War on Terror" and similar exercises.

A Moss

Everyone that I know personally agrees. Almost everybody that posts here disagrees.

Odd.

Rose

I agree with your sentiments.

To give the Devil his due, Cameron, as part of the pact with the Lib-Dems, has forced his fellow Tories to keep UK foreign aid at 0.7 per cent of GDP when the (even more) bigoted and half-witted among them want to cut it completely.

There are moves to count "security assistance" as aid.

There are currently British and Irish military trainers in Chad, helping the locals learn to defend themselves against Al Qaeda. You may recall news items of French troops being hailed as liberators for chasing the Islamist extremists out of Timbuktu where they had been setting fire to the oldest library in Sub Saharan Africa while enforcing their misogynistic beliefs. So far, so good: but the Islamists had only come to power because Colonel Gadaffi was overthrown by the British and French aid to the Arab Spring. Gadaffi had kept the (even more) savage Islamists from receiving arms. Also, he had paid for anti locust campaigns to ensure the Chadians and other neighbours did not suffer the disruption caused by crop failure. The new government in Libya does none of these things.

So the "security assistance" is necessary because either the British and French should have left Gadaffi alone as the lesser evil, or, they should have realised the likely consequences of helping one lot of nutters over another and planned to deal with it.

American aid is denied to any body involved in birth control or sex education other than the fatuous "abstain" variety. Since over population is one of the worst causes of the world's problems this is insane - or Evangelical Christian if you want to be polite about it.

The religious maniacs screw up everything. In northern Nigeria, the Muslims murder medical teams trying to give polio jabs because, they believe, the jabs are a secret Christian plot to sterilise Muslims. Completely insane you think. Then you discover that the CIA used a genuine immunisation campaign in Pakistan as a cover for their agents searching for Bin Laden. Since then health workers in Pakistan have been murdered with monotonous regularity.

I have forgotten where I was going with this :-)

How do you stop people supporting fascism whether the Islamic or the CIA variety? How do you make people learn to love reason and loathe religion?

I'm happy for us to give aid to countries that genuinely need it. Even the poor in the UK have a lifestyle that's better than the great majority of the third world.

Not so happy for us to be giving it to China or India, both more than rich enough to fund their own programmes. I think we're trying to buy influence rather than to fund genuine aid in those cases. Neither am I sure that we should have a fixed percentage allocated to aid. Makes more sense (to me) that we allocate what we can.

On the larger scale, I think we'd do well to stay out of all conflicts. No matter how well intentioned Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria (next ?) might have been, it generally leads to a bigger mess. Much as we all dislike to watch suffering, I'm not at all convinced that getting involved in foreign conflicts does any good.

As to the French in Chad, time will tell whether they live to regret their involvement.

I agree it seems ridiculous to provide India or China with foreign aid when their govt actually have nuclear programmes; however, this does not provide any assistance to those who would starve or those who need education; unfortunately, corruption among politicians in both these countries is the norm, not the exception!

I believe that it is our duty to try to assist where we can: foreign aid helps people to overcome difficulties that govt agencies are not interested in. We are happy to accept their investments; we invest in their country (while exploiting the workers, who have very little in the way of H&S laws to protect them; no union representation to support them etc) so, we do have a duty to other people from abroad. I also believe that providing foreign aid to the countries may prevent some people taking enormous risks with traffickers in trying to get to European countries for work. Aid to help with getting clean drinking water, basic education & other worthwhile projects are far better than going in with guns blazing our going in with portfolios to sell arms & ammunition to poor countries.