I get where this is coming from, honestly. Seeing kids I know struggling because the system's stretched to breaking point makes you want to pull up the drawbridge sometimes. My mum’s still on the estate and the ‘support’ she gets is a joke. But cutting off aid isn't the answer, is it? It feels a bit like saying we can’t help our own neighbours because we’re too busy looking after our own street – but what if our street is next door?
The real problem isn't that we're giving some money away, it's that we're not putting enough into our own services in the first place. It's the same with my job. We’re drowning in paperwork, waiting lists are insane, and we're constantly relying on expensive agency staff because the proper jobs aren't funded well enough to keep people. We need to fix that here, properly fund social care, schools, the NHS, so we’re not just patching things up with sticking plasters.
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It's a bit like the situation with our local library, where we're struggling to find people to take on part-time work because the pay is so low and the hours are unpredictable. I'm not sure how this relates to the foreign aid debate, but it seems to me that we need to think about how we're valuing the people who work in our public services, not just the services themselves.