Letters | 27 September 2012

Bureaucratic excesses

Sir: Your otherwise excellent leader on the billions wasted by Department for International Development (22 September) fails to mention the duplication and excesses in the department and its parent Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Around the world there are only three classes of country: those whose money we want, those who need our money and those to whom we are indifferent, at least financially. In the first group we need embassies or high commissions but no DfID, in the second we need DfID but no FCO, and in the third we need neither. It is absurd to send aid to India, for example, a country richer than ours. It offends the Indians and implies we know how India should be run better than they do. Of course, money is not everything and we may seek politically to influence those in the second and third groups. Today there are plenty of ways to do that, through the UN, special meetings and short ministerial visits, without the costs, and now dangers, of permanent missions.