WITHIN 24 hours of the launch of the Joint Charity Appeal for cash for the latest famine in East Africa, £6m had been pledged by a British public renowned for its generosity.

Alongside the public response, the UK government has allocated £90m since the beginning of July to the region, and is in the forefront of the fundraising effort. Last year, the UK was in the vanguard when Pakistan was inundated, while our own Island, which responded with overwhelming generosity to the torrential damage in Funchal, is already preparing to contribute almost £400,000 to the relief effort in East Africa.  Maybe it’s endemic in the nation’s psyche.

And while there are no prizes for international generosity, the Overseas Development Minister, who recently visited the famine region, has branded the global response as generally ‘derisory’. However instinctive and positive our reaction to such traumas,  you might be excused for asking whether it makes us feel better to be sending money to high profile causes overseas where we’re unlikely to see the benefits, rather than donating towards alleviating the ‘hidden’ poverty affecting elderly and vulnerable in our midst.

The Prime Minister, who has become a champion of aid giving, recalls how he was inspired by the Live Aid concerts in 1985 which convinced him of the need to care about the plight of the world’s poorest and to honour pledges made. Yet, he now finds himself having to take time out to justify his crusade. He is on record criticising as ‘hard hearted’ those who’ve questioned the UK government’s apparent generosity with its overseas aid cheque book.

Last year, Britain gave away 0.5% of domestic national income, that’s £300 for every household in the country, and it’s increasing. But a survey published last week showed 60% of those asked were definitely against increasing overseas aid at the same time as cutting domestic budgets.

There’s certainly been a lot of talk recently about giving – whether aid or bail-out. It effectively amounts to those who have, making over an appropriate proportion to those who haven’t – unless you include the EU which definitely has plenty, demanding increased budget contributions from the UK taxpayers – a historic confusion no doubt during translation between Brussels and Nottingham!

Yet there’s something inherently different between emergency support in the face of natural catastrophe and the prospect of bailing out obdurate Southern European economies where corruption, tax-evasion and indolence is endemic.

Giving – at least at a personal level – is an emotive issue. Support for causes depends on ensuring donors can be convinced that aid in whatever form it’s provided actually reaches the legitimate beneficiaries. This is a difficult guarantee for governments and aid agencies. It’s not helped by reports that the brigands who purport to ‘control’ the stricken areas have the audacity to restrict access or demand ‘taxes’ from aid agencies or divert supplies destined for the starving to the mouths of their warring, pillaging militias.

At the same time, NGOs, for all the humanitarian assistance they provide, are themselves in the business of generating funds. So, when you read that Afghanistan is receiving ‘a tidal wave’ of aid more than it can spend, or hear a respected charity administrator in Southern Africa warn that untargeted handouts can deprive populations of the will for self-reliance and reduce them to dependency and starvation, questions are inevitably raised about philosophy as much as organisation.

There is no question that there are ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ embroiled in the aid business. Here, the Chief Minister has ordered an inquiry into whether so-called ‘vulture funds’ are using local jurisdiction to pursue Third World debt repayments. The practice, in simple terms, is to buy up debts owed by poor countries and then organise ‘easy payments’ for the debtors at a far higher rate of interest. In the old days that would be considered reasonable business practice. Now, it’s sneered at by the conscience-pricked. Creditors may have right, if not virtue on their side.

At the same time, the field is peppered with anomalies. For example, you might ask why India, which boasts a £20bn defence budget and a space programme, should continue to receive an annual grant of £280m from the UK. OK, it’s politics, stupid, but it was certainly a difficult call for the UK Development Secretary to justify increasing the £12bn foreign aid package by 34% ‘because it makes Britain popular’.

It surely can’t be that like some un-discharged addict, the UK government feels bound to splurge cash as the principal donor to new-born countries as they embark on a predictable slide to failed-state status, simply because of a desire to appear ‘the good guy’. But how do you explain why, in the dying weeks of the last Parliamentary session, it manipulated Commons business to restrict debate on payment of an extra £10 billion to the IMF – in fact doubling the UK contribution, fearing that many MPs on its own side would vote against?

Inevitably, we’re faced us with a moral dilemma. Do you give generously to overseas aid projects or support the socially and financially deprived at home?  Ideally, of course, you do both, but is it ever morally defensible to say: ‘no’?  Should one feel bad for buying an expensive squidgy cake rather than putting its value in the aid agency’s collecting plate?  To do so, the realists will tell you, defies the basic rules of economics: stop buying things and there’ll not be the wealth to provide the funds to donate. So, we’re locked into an interdependence in which the economic survival of the rich is no less fragile than the desperately poor, forced to seek handouts in a ravaged land.