Foreign Aid and Charities

According to one source, the UK gave £8.4 billion in foreign aid last year, which was 11% of the world total. Why should we be giving such a huge proportion of the total aid budget? What percentage does the rest of the EU give?
The Daily Mail works this out as an average of £500 per family. On the basis of there being approximately 26 million income tax payers, it works out at around £325 for each of these tax payers.
However you look at it, it is a lot of money, which is being given to countries against, I suspect, the wishes of the majority of these enforced donors.
So as far as Mrs EP and myself are concerned, we are contributing a large sum in foreign aid to causes with which we do not necessarily agree, and being firm believers in the old adage "Charity begins at Home", we have now decided that we are not going to give any further donations to charities providing foreign aid.

I am proposing to put a further sign on my front door (adjacent to the one about door-to-door salesmen, etc,) which will be broadly as follows

Charity Collectors Please Note

"Charity begins at Home"

The Government contributed an estimated £500 per family last year in foreign aid, and I believe that this satisfies any moral obligation that this family might have towards such causes.

Therefore, we intend to restrict any further giving solely to charities carrying out medical research and to those acting for the benefit of English citizens and spending less than 5% of their income outside the UK. Preference will be given to local charities run by volunteers.

Please do not ring if the charity for which you are collecting does not fall within the above category.

In addition, where a charity sends a pre-paid envelope, it will get a polite acknowledgement along the above lines, asking them to remove our names from their mailing lists.