On UKIP & the Mail’s shameless ploy…

The recent floods in the South of England have helped UKIP and the Daily Mail set a debate raging across radio phone-ins about whether part of the UK’s aid budget should be used to fund the response.
 
There are plenty of reasons why this is a bad idea but instead of rattling through them all it is probably easier to point you to this piece in the New Statesman by Jonathan Tanner at ODI, who criticises Nigel Farage for exploiting the world’s poor two months ahead of European elections and calls on us to stick up for aid and sensible politics.