Fewer Ghurkhas, more foreign 'aid'...

Andrew Mitchell, our Overseas Development Minister, informed us this week that aid ‘makes us safer’. He was speaking in Nepal where he had just announced a considerable increase in dosh for that benighted country.

Coincidentally, the Government also announced that 400 Ghurkhas were to be sacked.

Now I may be missing something, but frankly I have this feeling that a Ghurkha is more likely to make me ‘safe’ than clean-water projects in the Himalayas.

Call me simple-minded but I would have thought that the pay and pensions of 400 Ghurkhas and their families was a rather better source of money and better value, too. A sergeant retiring on pension would have about the same income as a senior civil servant. Foreign remittances from Ghurkha soldiers are a pretty important part of the economy.

So, Andrew, how much of your £10.6 billion budget would you have to give up to keep 400 soldiers? As your budget is set to increase by 36% when all the others are getting the chop, how about an internal transfer to the Ministry of Defence to keep them employed instead of scrapped?

By the way, Andrew, the rural poor solved the problem of water supplies years ago. They put gutters around their houses and built large concrete storage tanks for modest cost. They also tackled the firewood problem by making methane gas from human and animal waste.

Too simple for your civil servants, though, and nothing in it for consultants, either!

By the by, Andrew, a recent poll suggests that 79% don't think that 'aid' is a good use of taxpayers' money.