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Indeed - but what about British pensioners who cannot afford to pay their heating bills? What about training British people who are unemployed? What about helping the National Health Service to run efficiently by paying staff decent wages? The list goes on.
This £15 million waste on “gender equality in Uganda” is but part of the lavish budget with which successive Tory and Labour governments have played Father Christmas all over the world to ungrateful Third World nations - with British peoples’ money.
The DFID is headed by a Cabinet minister and has two headquarters (in London and East Kilbride, near Glasgow) and 64 offices overseas. It has over 2500 staff, almost half of whom work abroad.
The UK has become the largest contributor to the International Development Association (IDA), which provides credits and grants to around 80 of the poorest countries in the world, committing £2.134 billion for the three years 2008/9 to 2010/11.
In September 2007, the Secretary of State announced a commitment of £1 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria (GFATM). As part of this commitment, the UK will provide £360 million for the period
2008-2010, which is a twenty percent increase on current funding.
British foreign aid (your tax money) to Africa is set to more than double from £1.3 billion in 2004 to over £3
billion by 2010. This has included aid to Zimbabwe, whose elected government hates Britain and blames it for all its
troubles.
The DFID also gives away over £100 million of your tax money every year to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The UK government will provide an additional £100 million of your tax money over the next five years to the United Nations Population Fund to “improve reproductive health and to give women real choices.”
In December 2007, UK taxpayers contributed £417 million to the African Development Fund (AfDF) and became its largest donor.
The DFID’s contribution to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund has helped ensure that 5.4 million Afghan children are now gaining an education, while in Pakistan, a nation which is rich enough to have atom bombs, British taxpayers support seven national priority health and population welfare programme's.
In India, another nation which not only has nuclear weapons but whose industrialists own Jaguar and many other “British” industries, the British taxpayer pays for the Government of India’s universal elementary education programme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), which has put more than 27 million Indian children in school.
The DFID has also spent £30 million of your tax money supporting the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund which “addresses threats in Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Conakry, the Central African Republic and Cote d’Ivoire.”
The DFIF also spent another £200 million on “humanitarian response in Africa: major recipients were Sudan, DRC, Zimbabwe and Uganda.”
British taxpayers are the source of the single largest contribution to the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) which provided nearly $350 million (£174m) to meet “humanitarian needs in 60 countries in 2007.”
Excluding the various handouts which are made over and above the direct aid (such as trade partnership subsidies and the like), the DFID’s budget has been set at £7.9 billion a year.
British people struggle to pay their lights, water and gas, have increasingly Third World healthcare, are suffering the effects of the single greatest financial catastrophe since the great depression, are losing their homes . . . yet the criminal traitors in Westminster, Tory and Labour alike, see fit to dish out untold billions to other nations.
The time has come to put British people first — and the only party which is unequivocally committed to this goal is the British National Party.
Only when the needs of all of our people are met, can thought be given to any sort of foreign aid.
All the statistics in this article can be found in the DFID’s own departmental report, which can be downloaded by clicking here.