By Joan Bridge Taylor

British people are extremely generous. Every year they raise millions of pounds for charities at home and abroad. Long may they have enough money left in their pockets to do so.

What people do with their own money is their own business and ought never to be confused with what governments do when they deduct tax compulsorily from hard-earned pay cheques. Charitable donations and overseas aid are two entirely different things. With the first you have a choice. With the second, you have absolutely none.

Governments send your money wherever they want, often to corrupt and ruthless dictators who spend it without an audit or any accountability to you. You may want to see where your money has gone and what good it has done. Mostly, you can whistle in the wind. You pay the piper, but you don’t call the tune.

Whatever politicians may think, or try to persuade us to think, charitable giving and government aid are entirely different. One is given from choice and the other by force, but both are taxpayers’ money – not government’s money. There is no such thing as government money. It all comes from us, the earners, the taxpayers.

At a time when everything else is being cut back, overseas aid is an ever-growing burden on the British taxpayer. Increasingly hard for us to swallow is the fact that we give overseas aid to people in their own countries and then give more money to them again when they decide they want to come and live in ours.

Most of us would feel a bit better about how our money was being spent if the overseas aid budget could be tied in with the immigration budget. At the moment, foreigners get it both ways. We finance them if they stay at home and we finance them if they come here. Why not make it either/or? For every Afghan or Somali or Kenyan, or whatever other nationality you care to name, comes to Britain, why don’t we deduct the amount the immigrants costs us in this country from the amount of aid we give to their country?

Whatever noises politicians make about cutting back, the fact remains that immigration is at record levels. The fact also remains that it is the one budget that has no cap. No one ever says to immigrants that this year’s allocation of money has been exhausted and we are sorry but applicants must apply to another country: never. If admission procedures were carried out by embassies abroad rather than immigration offices in this country and each embassy given an allocation, it could easily be done.

Once on our soil, by whatever means, however, money is always found for shelter, food clothing, legal aid, education, healthcare, interpreter services and whatever else the newcomer needs. The immigration budget now hovers around £8 billion a year. This does not include any legal aid, health, education or diplomatic services they may use.

Pensioners may go cold and ill-fed, schools and prisons become over-crowded, police numbers reduced, swimming pools and libraries closed, but money for the immigration budget is never allowed to run out.

We do not place any restrictions on the number of people coming into our country, nor on the way we give our aid. We never tell a country, we will give aid provided they spend the money in Britain producing British jobs for British workers. As a result, British aid money in India is soon likely to be spent providing jobs for French aerospace workers in France. Yes, that’s right. Our foreign aid money to India is soon likely to be spent subsidizing French workers in France!

How long will it be before we bankrupt ourselves to the point that we can no longer send any aid anywhere at all? Don’t whisper it too loudly. That point has already been reached. We already borrow the money we are sending abroad in aid. Your grandchildren will still be repaying the interest on the one trillion loans to keep our economy going way into their futures. Interest on this amount, by the way, works out at about £80,000 per minute right here and now.

It is not only in industry that our overseas aid money fuels our competitors. Overseas students can afford to come here on scholarships that our aid money pays for while our own students (whose parents’ taxes are paying for that aid) are priced out of education by the high fees. Politicians will tell you this is not so. The students will not have to pay back the loans until they are in good jobs, they say. This is nonsense. They are priced out because they will have to pay those fees back just at the time of life when they will have high mortgage payments, the expense of young children and probably elderly parents in need of help with expensive care too! They will have an unbearable millstone of debt around their necks for the rest of their lives.

Mortgage payments are also linked in with foreign aid. The high cost of housing in Britain (particularly London) is partly caused through aid money being syphoned back through London lawyers into property, which forces prices up too high for ordinary British citizens to be able to afford them. Only people on welfare (often immigrants) and the super- rich (often foreigners) can now afford to live in London (52% of Londoners are non-British).

We help our competitors and ignore our own economy. Such a situation has a limited time to run before our own economy and even our country collapses completely.

Aid, like welfare, is corrosive and demoralising. It robs people of self respect and initiative. Self help must be the answer for both ourselves and for under-developed countries. Proper audits of aid must be made and any country that cannot account for the money we give it ought not to receive any more – starting with the EU, whose auditors have not been able to pass its books because of financial irregularities for over 10 years.

By all means, let us provide training in self sufficiency, maintenance, and self-help everywhere we can, but we must not pursue the old ideas that everybody has to live like us and when they do it will be a happy world. That is just a continuation of old colonialism; the ideas that spurred Joanna Lumley with the Ghurkas – and look what has since happened in Aldershot.

Aid and mass immigration are the dark sides of imperialism. We used to go to other countries and tell their people to live like us. Now we pay aid workers to show people how to live like us, or we invite them to come here and live like us. It is colonialism and arrogance in another guise and we can’t afford it.

It is done to encourage people from poor countries to become consumers on a global scale and it simply doesn’t work. One day soon, when Africa has 5 billion people and Britain has 100 million and the loans and the aid derived from more loans and credit finally run out, the whole thing will come crashing down.

No one in the Freedom Party is against manageable change, but the way we are going right now seems to be a rush to commit suicide on a national and international scale. Let’s hope it is not too late to be stopped.