Letter: Overseas budget

CONGRATULATIONS on your leading article focusing on the real purpose of Britain's overseas aid budget ('A dam waste of money', 6 February). This is yet another Conservative Party scandal that John Major would prefer to avoid and about which John Smith is largely silent.

There is one point, however, which you have missed. It has been fashionable for some time to deride the Sixties and the radicalism of that decade. Yet the concept of aid as imperialism, developed at that time, now turns out to have been all too true.

Keith Flett, London N17