In all my life, I have never seen such insecurity as we have been subjected to in all those aspects of our lives that affect us most, created by the ever-changing mindset of a Labour Cabinet since Tony Blair came to office. It is no wonder that the educational and NHS environments are almost at a standstill because nobody knows which way it will go next, and how to accommodate these changes, many of which seem to occur on a monthly basis. For some unaccountable reason Brown wants everyone to foot the bill for broadband being introduced right across Britain, not I notice Northern Ireland, at a time when money couldn’t be shorter. I have complained before about authority feeling that it is enough to broadcast information on the Internet, when only a small proportion of the adult population has access to the Internet. This idea being broached at the moment assumes that people are going to be on the Internet on a daily basis, but why should it? It strikes me as another one of these flags being run up the pole to see who will salute it, and has been engendered as a sop to a small pressure group, interested in promulgating music, advertising which is now falling away on television, and also Brown trying to appear abreast of the times. When you consider the damage that will be done to the road’s infrastructure over the next few years, and also that the quality that he is proposing as ‘a world leader’, is below that in some of the Asian countries, it makes the whole project laughable.
In a recent broadcast Brown laid out his financial priorities for the near future, one of which was to increase overseas aid. I found this incredible when so many of our own people are being dispossessed, not necessarily for there own fault but the government’s inefficiency. Anyone who has been interested in what has happened to the money that they have donated to overseas countries to help the children and the health of those countries will know, and no longer be surprised at the fact, that very little money actually reaches its intended target. A high proportion is hived off for something called expenses, and can be as much a 60 or more percent of that donated, not to mention the fact that the military in a lot of these countries takes the imports for their own use, not that of the population generally.
In Northern Ireland we have a case where a £700,000 has been donated by the populace, towards the purchase of an air sea rescue helicopter. It transpires that in the first year £500,000 of the 700 was spent on wages and expenses. A pencil on the back of an envelope could soon indicate how fatuous this is when you start working out just how many people are needed, the size of the building and the cost of the collection boxes. Anyway as it was a charity there would have been a lot of people there to give their time to collect the money, if they haven’t already done so. The fact that nobody is quite sure whether we need another helicopter or not, nor calculated that if one is brought into service the costs will not rest merely with the purchase, there will be salaries for the flying staff, the maintenance crews, the hangar, spare parts, throughout the life of this helicopter which somebody will have to budget for.
Years ago, as I have written on this blog before, I knew a case where a husband and wife were singing outside Woolworths in Balham High Street while they owned six houses that they rented out. I no longer subscribe to these European beggars squatting on our streets, they will probably gather more in a day than they could earn in a job.