Artistic Dance Lessons and EU Song Contests – Where Your Foreign Aid Money Goes

Much of the UK’s huge foreign aid budget is spent on ridiculous ventures such as dance lessons in poor African countries and “poverty-fighting” song contests, due to bizarre EU allocation decisions, it has been revealed.

Nearly half a million pounds in funding was given to Belgian dance teachers to train teenagers to perform artistic dancing in Burkina Faso and Mali, where people earn less than 70p a day, through a project called “I Dance Therefore I Am”.

£80,000 was spent on an “I Fight Poverty” music competition set up by the EU to increase “development awareness”, and £8.8 million was wasted on a Mali job centre that only found work for six people in three years.

The UK currently contributes more than £1.4 billion to EU external aid spending as part of its £7.7-million annual aid budget.

In total, the EU gives away £47 billion of its member states’ money a year.

Shockingly, the biggest slice of this amount goes to middle-income Turkey, which receives £500 million of EU aid a year, twice as much as Afghanistan, despite being ten times richer.

A report by the think tank Open Europe also claimed that much foreign aid was either swallowed up in EU administration fees or by corrupt third world dictators.

Malawi, one of the world’s least developed countries, will get £450 million over five years despite passing laws punishing homosexuals with fourteen-year jail terms and restricting media freedom.

Malawi’s president, Bingu Mutharika, bought himself a multi-million-pound presidential jet shortly after his country received a previous EU aid gift.

Uganda will be given a similar amount.

It's president, Yoweri Museni, recently bought a Gulfstream G550 jet and built himself a lavish £100-million residence while most of his citizens live in poverty.

These new revelations of financial lunacy are just the latest in a string of wastages of European taxpayers’ money.

In January this year, it was revealed that millions of pounds of the UK’s foreign aid budget was actually being spent on “equality and diversity” schemes in Britain, including a “Celebrating Diversity” conference in Cambridge featuring an “Afro-Cuban dance gala”, and a twinning project between Kenya and Newcastle-upon-Tyne to “promote awareness of climate change”.

In 2010 it was reported that at least £32.5 million of the aid budget was actually spent on taxis, newspapers, staff bonuses and offices for the Department for International Development’s staff.

The ConDem government has promised to increase foreign aid each year, in line with the EU’s target for its member states to give away 0.7% of their gross national incomes by 2015, which in Britain’s case will be over £12 billion per annum.

Only the British National Party will put an end to this madness. We will end foreign aid completely, spending the money at home, on the people who earned it in the first place.