British taxpayers have been forced to hand over £8.5 million through the foreign aid office’s official development fund to Singapore while its prime minister has undertaken to halt immigration there.

Singapore has a gross domestic product (GDP) which is the fourth highest in the world and is 46 percent higher than Britain’s. Its port is the busiest in the world, surpassing Rotterdam and Hong Kong.

Nonetheless, the Department for International Development (DFID) has felt it necessary to take UK taxpayers’ money and “invest” it there through a private company — while domestic cuts bite at home.

To make matters even more bizarre, Singapore's prime minister announced over the past weekend that foreign workers are becoming a problem and that the government will be clamping down on immigration.

"We will control the inflow, to ensure that it is not too fast and not too large," Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said during a speech. "And we will make clear that citizens come first."

Official figures reveal that foreign workers, mainly from India and China, made up a third of the workforce in Singapore and a quarter of the entire population.

According to the media, newspapers have “reported growing complaints by Singaporeans about poor quality customer service at restaurants and retail stores, crowded subways and occasional violent crimes by foreigners.”

In addition, Singaporeans have complained that the foreigners do “not speak fluent English, which is the most commonly spoken of Singapore's four official languages.”

According to Gillian Koh, a senior research fellow at Singapore's Institute of Policy Studies, a poll last year found that 63 percent of Singaporeans believed the government's immigration policy was “weakening national unity.”

Another report quoted Kenneth Jeyaretnam, secretary general of the opposition Reform Party, as saying that the government's immigration policy has “provided cheap labor for companies and depressed wages for Singaporeans.

"The government continues to treat Singapore as a business rather than a country," Mr Jeyaretnam said. "As long as the government permits a relatively elastic supply of labor from abroad while the cost of other domestic inputs, like land, continue to rise, then the real wages and salaries of our own workers will get squeezed, and this has indeed happened."

* Other recipients of British tax money in “foreign aid” include Slovenia, Malta, the Czech Republic and Hungary, all developed First World countries and members of the EU.

British taxpayers also provided £380,000 in aid to the oil rich sheikhdom of Saudi Arabia which is so wealthy it does not even have personal income tax.

The DFID also paid £40.2 million last year to China, now officially classified by the World Bank as a "middle-income country." Among the items funded were "storytelling projects" to encourage Chinese children to campaign against climate change.