One thing that has always puzzled me about our new Coagulation masters is why they insisted that International Aid was ringfenced from any spending cuts.

The amount we pay to India, for example, is hardly peanuts (from FT.com) :

India receives more UK aid than any other country, worth more than £1.5bn over the past five years.

And, the total budget is set to rise substantially by 2015 :

The Comprehensive Spending Review was a step in the right direction, but I agree with Philip Booth and others when they say that there should be far more cuts down the line. But the biggest mistake was the announcement that the Department for International Development’s (DfID) budget will be increased by 37 percent by 2015.
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By 2015, DfID’s budget will be over £11bn – this is one seventh of the entire amount saved by the Comprehensive Spending Review, and nearly double the amount spent on the police. Overseas aid worsens the situation in the developing world, and Britain cannot afford it. It should be abolished, for the good of the country’s finances and for the world’s poor.

A large sum indeed and, as you can see from the chart below, money that could be used to reduce our overall tax burden in quite a few areas which would only boost domestic spending :

At current rates you could, for example, either abolish Car Tax, cut Council tax by one third, remove all duties on tobacco or virtually remove all duties on alcoholic drink.

Now, the main reason for asking why now is due to having read the following article at Pravda, which leaves the question of why the fuck are we still giving money to India? :

India has successfully tested the Russian-Indian BrahMos supersonic cruise missile. The missile was designed by BrahMos Aerospace, a joint Russian-Indian company.

India was not certain whether the tests would end successfully, because there were failures during the previous test launches of the missile. That is why it was decided to evacuate 3,200 villagers prior to the recent launch.

Indian ground forces already have five mobile BrahMos complexes. However, the previous launches of the missiles showed that their software needs to be seriously developed. Now it seems that the problem has been solved. The December launch has become yet another successful test of the ground-based missile complex.

The first launch of the missile took place on June 12, 2001. BrahMos missile complex was put into service for the Indian Navy in 2005. Now specialists are finishing the works on the ground-based version of the system and develop the air-based version of the missile. The tests of the latter are said to begin in 2011.

According to military experts, BrahMos is a new generation of cruise missiles. Some foreign analysts believe that it is a thoroughly modernized version of the Soviet P-800 Onyx missile, which was built at the end of the 1980s. A BrahMos missile is ten meters long; its starting weight varies from 2.5 to 3.9 tons depending on the basing mode. The weight of the warhead reaches 300 kilograms. One of the basic advantages of the weapon is the speed – up to 3,500 km/h. This is the only cruise missile that is capable of developing such supersonic speed. For example, the USA’s renowned Tomahawk flies at the speed of only 880 km/h. BrahMos’s speed made many foreign experts believe that Western missile defense systems will not be able to intercept the new missile.

Nikolay Novichkov, editor-in-chief of ARMS-TASS news agency, said in an interview with Pravda.Ru that BrahMos was indeed a unique missile.

“No other missile in the world can fly at the speed of BrahMos. Indeed, it is very hard to intercept it.

I certainly have no idea why.

Perhaps Chris Huhne can explain this the next time some pensioner freezes to death in their home this winter – one third off fuel duties and no climate change levy being another way you could spend £8 billion.