Mars attack
Mark Boyle (Letters, 26 September) was right to point out the contrast between India being unable to feed its poor, yet being able to afford to put a space craft into orbit around Mars – particularly since India has received the equivalence of £300 million per year in foreign aid from the UK every year since the 1950s.
Unfortunately, we are standing in the same glass house, and can’t afford to throw stones. What did we do when our own homeless and hungry figures started to spiral out of control some years ago? We spent billions, and sacrificed our soldiers’ lives, to join an invasion of Iraq which killed more than a million Iraqi civilians.
It’s what governments do – when they can’t cope with a problem at home they create a foreign diversion, in the case of the Mars mission an extremely foreign diversion.
Next year we are pulling the plug on aid to India; some may say not before time, but not the hungry.
David Fiddimore