By William Spearshake. Speaking of his policies for crisis-hit Britain from 10 Downing Street – oh, sorry, from that well-known London suburb Nigeria – our unfortunate country’s supposed Prime Minister David Cameron has made his “strongest defence yet of Britain’s foreign aid program.”
His stated objective is a knee-jerk attempt to “confront critics who oppose increasing aid while budgets are being cut at home.”
Or, to put this into plain English, ex-Eton-toff Cameron will try to convince the British public that he is absolutely right to continue to flush immense quantities of British taxpayer’s money down the foreign toilet while his own country – the country he was elected to run for the benefit of its voting inhabitants – falls to pieces in a financial collapse unseen since the Great Depression of 1929.
At the same time that Cameron is prancing through Africa planning to scatter British money like confetti, a survey of public opinion in his real country – to remind him, this is Britain – shows a consensus of public opinion that government foreign policy has “changed for the worse” since David Cameron became Prime Minister.
The public have demanded that our highest priorities should be strengthening our country’s border control, properly funding the armed services and hardening our investigation and treatment of terrorists. 60% of people thought overseas aid was a waste of our money. (Survey conducted by Chatham House and YouGov.)
It will be no surprise to the public that Cameron, the Lord of Cuts, Master of Misrule and Servant of Strange Priorities, has waltzed off to arrange more squandering of taxpayer’s cash in Africa while at home we are all reeling under a deluge of rising prices, unemployment, collapsing standards, dangerously reduced Council and NHS services and gravely threatened family values.
It is still less of a surprise that he is cutting his African tour short in order to fly home for something really important – a personal statement to Parliament this week regarding the phone-hacking scandal.
One cannot help but wonder whether Cameron’s speech about phone-hacking will have been prepared for him by his former communications chief Andy Coulson, a previous editor of the News of the World who on 8th of this month was questioned at a police station about his paper’s hacking operation.
Presumably nobody is in a better technical position to inform David Cameron about this subject than he is, and it’s about time he did something to justify the salary he received whilst on Cameron’s staff payroll.
In connection with Cameron’s African spending spree, a spokesperson from the Foreign Office has actually stated that “the government rejected any notion that Britain’s role in the world was shrinking.”
To be necessarily blunt, the ordinary British member of the public doesn’t give a bugger about Britain’s role in the world – our population’s greatest worry these days is the rapid disappearance of Britain’s role in Britain!
As a reply from a member of the public posted on a news website put it, “The UK will be in need of aid soon if we continue with this unsustainable program of increasing what we give, while making less ourselves and spending less at home – Fix Britain before the rest of the world, Dave, that’s why we voted for you and not Labour!”
This very reasonable and sensible opinion is highlighted by a serious report from the spending watchdog the National Audit Office.
They have issued a statement that the UK has “no clear picture of the extent, nature and impact” of countries making fraudulent use of British foreign aid payments.
In response to International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell’s announcement that future foreign aid will “be targeted more at war-torn and ‘fragile’ states”, the national Audit Office has pointed out that such countries are more likely to have poor government and high corruption.
This will risk diverting even more British foreign aid money into private bank accounts and quite possibly even help fund terrorist groups.
A check has revealed that all nine of the countries where the government is to increase foreign aid spending by over 50% are actually amongst the worst in using it for improper purposes, or “leakage” as it is officially called.
The Audit Office report on financial management at the Department for International Development contains the damning statement that current government methods “cannot provide Parliament and the taxpayer with a clear picture of the extent, nature and impact of leakage”, adding that “leakage will potentially increase as the spending increases…”
In the face of these facts, David Cameron has nevertheless committed cash-starved British citizens to raise an extra £3.3 billion over a 4-year period merely in order to gratify a United Nations target for “wealthy nations” to spend more of their GDP on foreign development by 2013.
Is Britain a wealthy nation? Try to find 100 ordinary pensioners, or 100 unemployed people, or 100 university students who agree!
Perhaps the news that the Department for International Development’s complete budget of £7.8 billion has not been affected whatsoever by the government’s radical cuts to our services will make readers feel happy about rising prices and shrinking standards in Britain. It seems that David Cameron is actually sufficiently mental to believe so.
2
Having watched Cameron and other crooks, weirdos, incompetents, traitors and immigrants in this afternoon’s boo-ha “debate” concerning whose complicity with Godfather Murdoch’s Syndicate is/was worse can there seriously be anybody in this country who can not see how rotten to core they all are and yet still the general public will continue to vote for them. Frankly it doesn’t take a great intellectual awakening to see what is wrong here and what needs to be done. I despair of the British people. They are their own worst enemy.