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LADIES and gentlemen, we now have a winner in the contest for the most fatuous official statement of the year.
Last year India received £280million in aid from British taxpayers. On Tuesday it launched its first rocket to Mars at a cost of more than £45million.
Asked why we were handing over money to a country that can afford to send rockets into space, a spokesman for the Department for International Development said: "Not a penny of British taxpayers' aid money has gone on India's space programme."
And with that, the unidentified spokesman should take a bow. He or she is the runaway winner of the contest.
Mind you, fatuous doesn't even come close to describing the deliberate, calculating missing-of-the-point mindset revealed by that statement.
The issue is what are we doing handing over British taxpayers' money to a country wealthy enough to allocate around £750million of its own money for a space programme?
Aid is trumpeted by its advocates as a form of moral duty on the wealthy West - that we have an obligation to do our bit to help those less well off than ourselves. As David Cameron put it: "Even when things are difficult at home we should fulfil our moral obligations to the poorest of the world."
The majority of people would agree with the broad sentiment that the wealthy do indeed have a charitable duty to the poor. But fine as that sentiment is in intention, when applied internationally it can be distorted beyond all sense. For one thing, there's the corruption intrinsically linked to aid.
Study after study reveals the corruption that is endemic in the aid industry - and that's what it is, a multi-billion-pound global industry.
Then there's the fact that much aid ends up making things worse - by subsidising inefficiency and bankrolling societies that are incapable of standing on their own two feet, it can act to prevent poor areas ever adopting the reforms or developing the tools needed to grow and prosper.
As for our "moral obligation to the poorest of the world", if you want to understand how distorted that gets, just look closely at what the Department for International Development spokesman had to say about the Indian space programme.
Yes, India still has grinding poverty of a kind no British welfare recipient ever experiences. But if India chooses to spend its vast resources and growing wealth on rockets, why is it our duty to make up the difference with aid? As if to ram home the madness, India even has its own £328million-a-year overseas aid budget, not to mention a huge defence budget.
Where is the moral duty on us to send taxpayers' money to a nation that has enough of its own wealth for that?
Yet under the last Labour government India was the largest net recipient of British aid, receiving £421million in 2010.
And then when the coalition took over in 2010, far from tightening the purse-strings, David Cameron's obsession with aid meant that the then international development secretary Andrew Mitchell agreed to hand over another £1.1billion in the years up to 2014. It's true that his successor Justine Greening announced last year that we would stop giving India any more taxpayers' money from 2015.
That did not go down well in India. Its then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee reacted by saying that British aid was "a peanut in our total development expenditure".
In which case he won't miss it. But none of that explains, let alone justifies, why we have thrown away - and are still doing so this year - so much money on a country that simply doesn't need it.
This year alone, remember, even though we have already decided that India doesn't need our money, we are handing over £280million. It beggars belief.
The real explanation is that logic and need don't enter the equation. Yesterday it was revealed that we are stopping any further aid to the Ugandan government after corrupt government officials were shown to have stolen £1.3million. That's sensible - even if, astonishingly, it is the first time that all aid payments have been stopped to a country's government as a reaction to corruption being exposed.
But there'll be no reduction in the total amount actually sent to Uganda. It will still receive another £37.5million. It's just that instead of it going to the government it will be given to aid agencies to distribute. And so overall the aid budget continues to soar.
Ministers have repeated their commitment to increase the amount we give away to £11.3billion this year. That will mean that we hit the target they have repeatedly said is their aim - spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid. The sums are breathtaking. Next year it will be £12.6billion.
And although we are stopping aid to one country with a space programme, we have already given Nigeria £300million this year. That's the same Nigeria that has its own space programme.
What a bizarre racket. The hardworking poor in the West hand over their taxes to governments which would rather squander their taxes on space programmes than dealing with their own problems.
Confused? Not half as confused as our own government.
Express
Last year India received £280million in aid from British taxpayers. On Tuesday it launched its first rocket to Mars at a cost of more than £45million.
Asked why we were handing over money to a country that can afford to send rockets into space, a spokesman for the Department for International Development said: "Not a penny of British taxpayers' aid money has gone on India's space programme."
And with that, the unidentified spokesman should take a bow. He or she is the runaway winner of the contest.
Mind you, fatuous doesn't even come close to describing the deliberate, calculating missing-of-the-point mindset revealed by that statement.
The issue is what are we doing handing over British taxpayers' money to a country wealthy enough to allocate around £750million of its own money for a space programme?
Aid is trumpeted by its advocates as a form of moral duty on the wealthy West - that we have an obligation to do our bit to help those less well off than ourselves. As David Cameron put it: "Even when things are difficult at home we should fulfil our moral obligations to the poorest of the world."
The majority of people would agree with the broad sentiment that the wealthy do indeed have a charitable duty to the poor. But fine as that sentiment is in intention, when applied internationally it can be distorted beyond all sense. For one thing, there's the corruption intrinsically linked to aid.
Study after study reveals the corruption that is endemic in the aid industry - and that's what it is, a multi-billion-pound global industry.
Then there's the fact that much aid ends up making things worse - by subsidising inefficiency and bankrolling societies that are incapable of standing on their own two feet, it can act to prevent poor areas ever adopting the reforms or developing the tools needed to grow and prosper.
As for our "moral obligation to the poorest of the world", if you want to understand how distorted that gets, just look closely at what the Department for International Development spokesman had to say about the Indian space programme.
Yes, India still has grinding poverty of a kind no British welfare recipient ever experiences. But if India chooses to spend its vast resources and growing wealth on rockets, why is it our duty to make up the difference with aid? As if to ram home the madness, India even has its own £328million-a-year overseas aid budget, not to mention a huge defence budget.
Where is the moral duty on us to send taxpayers' money to a nation that has enough of its own wealth for that?
Yet under the last Labour government India was the largest net recipient of British aid, receiving £421million in 2010.
And then when the coalition took over in 2010, far from tightening the purse-strings, David Cameron's obsession with aid meant that the then international development secretary Andrew Mitchell agreed to hand over another £1.1billion in the years up to 2014. It's true that his successor Justine Greening announced last year that we would stop giving India any more taxpayers' money from 2015.
That did not go down well in India. Its then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee reacted by saying that British aid was "a peanut in our total development expenditure".
In which case he won't miss it. But none of that explains, let alone justifies, why we have thrown away - and are still doing so this year - so much money on a country that simply doesn't need it.
This year alone, remember, even though we have already decided that India doesn't need our money, we are handing over £280million. It beggars belief.
The real explanation is that logic and need don't enter the equation. Yesterday it was revealed that we are stopping any further aid to the Ugandan government after corrupt government officials were shown to have stolen £1.3million. That's sensible - even if, astonishingly, it is the first time that all aid payments have been stopped to a country's government as a reaction to corruption being exposed.
But there'll be no reduction in the total amount actually sent to Uganda. It will still receive another £37.5million. It's just that instead of it going to the government it will be given to aid agencies to distribute. And so overall the aid budget continues to soar.
Ministers have repeated their commitment to increase the amount we give away to £11.3billion this year. That will mean that we hit the target they have repeatedly said is their aim - spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid. The sums are breathtaking. Next year it will be £12.6billion.
And although we are stopping aid to one country with a space programme, we have already given Nigeria £300million this year. That's the same Nigeria that has its own space programme.
What a bizarre racket. The hardworking poor in the West hand over their taxes to governments which would rather squander their taxes on space programmes than dealing with their own problems.
Confused? Not half as confused as our own government.
Express
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