Pakistan Flood Appeal Lack of Success

Sirs,

The UN is asking for some £500,000,000 to be raised for Pakistan’s flood victims. This is a few days income for the oil-rich Arab states with all their billionaires. Remind me again why this is a Western problem when the Muslim world has it so easily within its capacity to sort the problem out for itself, and very quickly indeed?

The relative lack of success of the appeals is not just compassion fatigue, but irritation at the assumption that we have to step in and sort out other people’s problems all the time, especially when so much money has been spent and so many lives lost in that region failing to protect ourselves from the militants they are so ineffective at controlling themselves.

This appeal shortfall is the first direct result of the new Cameron straight-talking foreign policy.

Paul Harper