Aid waste
Sir: In Andrew Mitchell’s response to my article ‘The Great Aid Mystery’ (5 January), he asks ‘what about the 11 million children in school who wouldn’t be there’ if it weren’t for DFID’s aid efforts. It would be hard to come up with a more representative example of the dishonest marketing rhetoric that is the standard aid industry response to outside questioning. Not only is there the inevitable reference to children, there’s also a classic bogus statistic. Yes, the British government may have paid for 11 million school places over the years, but even if DFID had proof that 11 million real children were genuinely enrolled in schools as a result of UK aid (itself a dubious claim), that does not mean that they actually attend those schools, or that the schools have teachers, or textbooks, or electricity, or are more than half-built wrecks. Mr Mitchell is either deliberately stretching the truth in this claim, or he knows startlingly, dismayingly little about the realities of aid delivery.
As for his boast about vaccinations ‘every two seconds throughout this parliament,’ Mr Mitchell must know that vaccination programmes form a minuscule proportion of the DFID annual spend and hardly justify an expansion of the department’s bloated budget. May I suggest a book that might help him? Aiding And Abetting: Foreign Aid Failures And The 0.7 Per Cent Deception, available from Civitas.
Jonathan Foreman
By email
Sir: I refer to your excellent article ‘The great aid mystery’ (5 January). For some eight years, we at my charity Homes in Zimbabwe have watched with incredulity at the way DFID aid is deployed in Zimbabwe. During this time some £500 million of UK taxpayers’ money has been spent on, among other things, funding the Zimbabwe civil service, education and health programmes. No doubt some of this money has been spent wisely, but not a single penny has gone to assist the aged and destitute pensioners — many who fought for this country in the second world war or are their widows — whose assets were effectively stolen by the Mugabe government in the great inflation.
Why on earth should UK taxpayers foot bills that should have been paid for by the Mugabe government? If Mugabe had not wrecked the economy to keep himself in power and then allowed the theft of the Marange diamond fields by his cronies in the army and police, his government could easily have afforded to pay for the services currently funded by UK taxpayers through DFID — in the current year, over £85 million.
Nigel Kay
Manchester
Mexico’s only hope
Sir: I read with interest ‘Stop the Drugs War’ (12 January). I quite agree with Mary Wakefield when she says that legalisation is Mexico’s only hope. The alchemy of global prohibition turns plants at one end of the trade into products worth more than their weight in gold and catalyses gang violence into the horrors on the streets of Mexico. Now President Peña Nieto, and indeed UK citizens, should also consider how to best regulate drugs. Anyone interested should read Transform’s acclaimed book After the War on Drugs — Blueprint for Regulation, which details the simple regulatory options. It is counter-intuitive, but legal regulation is both desirable and possible — in fact it is the only solution for countries currently being torn apart by prohibition-related crime. It is a blueprint that we believe will become a reality within ten years.
Danny Kushlick
Transform Drug Policy Foundation, Bristol
The bigger things
Sir: Oh thank you, thank you, Clarissa Tan, for your eye-opening piece on life and living it properly (‘Old year’s resolutions’, 29 December). For people like me who frequently feel ashamed about the disgusting car interior, the wine stain on the carpet, the cheque lost down the back of the sofa, etc, it’s good to remember that when life is put into the sharpest focus, it’s not about the missing sock.
Clarissa Brooke-Turner
Via email
Seacole’s place in history
Sir: Rod Liddle is spot on, as ever, but he needn’t worry (12 January). The idea that Mary Seacole is about to be purged from the history curriculum by that evil racist Michael Gove is nonsense in itself, since she wasn’t on it in the first place. The National Curriculum for history does contain a lot of guff about ‘diversity’, but few individuals are specified for compulsory study. Most history teachers, myself included, barely get enough hours in the curriculum to teach the children about the stuff that matters, let alone obscure 19th-century nurses.
Simon Everett
Norwich
Breast cancer causes
Sir: With regard to Charles Moore’s Notes of 12 January, the New England Journal of Medicine published a long paper by the leading expert in breast cancer epidemiology a few years ago. It confirmed that rates of breast cancer started to rise in the West as soon as women began to choose to delay childbearing, and that countries in the East such as Japan quickly followed suit, and concluded that delaying childbearing was the major factor. All sorts of reasons for this were discussed, such as delayed breastfeeding or a protective effect of actual pregnancy. On the methods used to delay fertility, there was an ominous silence.
Dr Lesley Kay
Harley Street, London W1
Don’t tell the childer
Sir: Dot Wordsworth might be interested to know that in the Isle of Man of my childhood (1940s and 1950s), people would commonly refer to us as ‘childer’. My mother-in-law in Devon (despite her Cheltenham Ladies’ College education!) always refers to bought food items as ‘boughten’ as opposed to ‘homemade’.
Dorothy Chavasse
via email
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