Dr Alf makes an excellent point.

Frankly, there should be no EU aid, nor aid from the UK, unless it is for a medical/ humanitarian cause, like Ebola which carries a risk for our own people.

The EU budget itself is riddled with corruption, which is why no self-respecting accountant will sign-off the accounts.

Overseas aid is worse, with most of the money being diverted into the pockets of corrupt dictators and possibly officials within the donor countries.

Certainly all EU officials, UK Government Ministers, top civil servants etc, should have their bank accounts and those of their partners, wives, children, relatives and mistresses audited regularly once a year on an unannounced basis. Assuming that most were honest, nothing untoward would be discovered but if they were like the British MPs, who are fiddling their expenses more than ever, we would need to be ready to expand our prisons and make the judiciary work round the clock as they did in New York under Mayor Guliani when he was cleaning up that city.

Gaza needs some aid but whatever happens there, there is no deadly disease which we can catch from Palestinians, whereas with several African countries Ebola is spreading rapidly and with air travel and the possibility of Ebola mutating into a strain transmissible by air, the risks to us in the UK, Europe and America require that money is spent on making our response to Ebola faster and more robust.

Lord Winston has already said to the Government and MPs that the NHS needs to be ready for the possibility of a mutant strain of Ebola transmissible by air would create intolerable strain on the NHS. Perhaps, he has in mind the possibility of a flu epidemic,large numbers of pensioners cluttering up doctors surgeries and A and E Departments of NHS Trusts during the coming winter, then combining with an Ebola outbreak which would then overwhelm the already not fit for purpose NHS.

Dr Alf wonders, possibly angrily, why the amount of EU aid for Gaza is so great?

I suspect that it is for several reasons, one of which is to pander to Arab and Iranian opinion, to ensure energy supplies from a source other than Vladimir Putin and another is to throw a bone without being too obvious to those who see in Israel the source of all the world’s ills.

John Gelmini