With less than a month to go before the biggest-ever spending cut in the history of Britain, the anger it is sure to provoke will be increased by the fact that the wrong programmes are going to be protected and the wrong people are going to be written cheques.I do not believe that charity should begin at home. I believe that the plight of sub-Saharan Africa is an affront. What I say is that the kind of charity doled out by the overseas aid budget is often fundamentally ill-directed, or worse.
Looking at the figures I discover that, over the last five years for which data are available, Britain has given £8.7 million in development aid to Singapore, whose gross domestic product per capita is the fourth highest in the world, and 46 per cent higher than our own. Full Story
