Originally Posted by Chris

UK welfare spending in 2012: £117 billion.
UK overseas aid spending in 2012: £8.8 billion.

This, I submit, constitutes "looking after your own people first".

Incidentally that welfare figure includes both central and local government benefits, but excludes the NHS, for which you could add another £126 billion to the tab for "looking after [our] own people first".

Our overseas aid budget is ring-fenced so that as other departments' spending comes down, the proportion of spending on overseas aid goes up ... Until it gets so high that we are spending a mahoosive ZERO POINT SEVEN PER CENT of it on aid.

Again, I make the point that there is absolutely no equivalence whatsoever between the furore over the so-called "bedroom tax" and the question of whether children everywhere deserve an education and whether rich nations have an obligation to help poor nations achieve it.