If you're a UK taxpayer, don't bother donating to the British Red Cross for the relief of Hurricane Irma. You're already giving. About £13bn a year of tax. Not all to the Red Cross of course - they get only a fraction of this. The bulk of it goes to teaching Ethiopian nomads how to play electric guitar, setting up pedicure shops in Sudan and sending top British hat-designers to Basutoland to show the natives how to fashion Crêpe De Chine and ostrich feathers into women's headgear. In other words, the bulk of this money is wasted on hopeless schemes that don't develop anything by one iota.
However, it's the use of this money to fund disaster relief that interests us. It seems the Foreign Secretary, the man tasked with organising aid and relief to Brit islands in the Hurricane path, doesn't have a budget worth talking about for this sort of thing. However, some 17% - some £2.2bn annually - of the IDF is earmarked for this very purpose. DFID - independent of the FCO since Blair, and its current SoS Priti Patel - is in charge of the purse strings.
Oh good, you may think, the government already has a pot to pay for tents, water, C130s, medical teams, hospital ships and the panoply of disaster relief. How reassuring. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. You see, that £2.2bn mainly goes to UN organisations - organisations that undermine European efforts to control economic migration, that openly criticise our elected government, that work to subvert the efforts of our elected politicians. WFP, UNICEF, OCHA, UNHCR and WHO are not friends of the UK - yet UK taxpayers are funding their bloated and corrupt organisations.
And what about the costs to the poor bloody Navy, down to 17 warships and cut off at the knee by spending pressures? Who pays for the fuel oil, the maintenance, the supplies, the emergency aid they are distributing in the Caribbean? Well the Treasury will just tell them to find the costs from within their existing budgets. They always do.
It's high time to reform that humanitarian / emergency aid pot. It should take a bigger share of the ODF for a start. And instead of paying a cabal of corrupt UN agencies who are determined upon our destruction, why not fund our own Navy, Royal Engineers, RAF transport command, volunteer police officers and the like to respond fully and effectively, unconstrained by the swingeing cuts to their operational budgets?
14 comments:
Start by withdrawing from the UN. And then abolish all foreign aid EXCEPT for a fund to help with disaster relief and do the work ourselves directly --entirely free of NGO and all other parasitical globomarxist middlemen.
In short, it is time that politicians that head the nations of the world decided to content themselves with one nation each, rather than dreaming of empire... it never ends well. The concept of a global market has well and truly been trashed during the last thirty years, even if our politicians are still trying to create it. The resulting corporatist society is unacceptable and we will not put up with it.
We don't want you to have influence through bribery, we would rather muddle through by producing a product that people want, and through buying products that meet our requirements, so we don't need that money, and the [politicians certainly don't need it!
Any relief funds that we deem necessary should be available ready and waiting for such emergencies and there is no doubt that these commonwealth colleagues require help most urgently.
Branson is OK though, he can rely on his friend junk-er for aid.
right-writes
"It's high time to reform that humanitarian / emergency aid pot"
As a first step, I'd second that.
But my goal is to abolish it altogether.
We have seen time and time again, that the British public are extremely generous when the call comes, they are more than willing to 'step up to the plate' and put their hand into their collective pocket.
The government simply needs to put the mechanism in place to ensure contributions from the GBP aren't skimmed off by its own bureaucracy before it reaches its intended recipients.
It is time for our government to stop propping up the leeches that infest this sector. By doing so it allows those in charge of these organizations to reward themselves handsomely at the expense of those it should really be helping.
So if our government does believe in a free market let it start practicing what it preaches here. Free these so called charitable groups from the teat of public funds. Allow them to stand upon their own two feet with fully transparent accounts.
We might see less of the heads of these NGOs jetting off to the latest debt/famine relief conference half way around the world. Plus fewer chuggers pestering us on our High Streets.
Whenever I'm approached by a charity seeking money for anything outside this country, I point out to them that I consider that I have more than met my moral obligation to help by means of my enforced contribution, through taxes, to foreign aid, and that they should approach the government for some money, not individuals who have already paid.
I will only contribute to British charities, working for the British in this country.
Government loves NGO's. It can carry out it's UN/WHO etc agenda without any accountability.
When the plebs get a bit bolshy about all their stolen money being given to gov's fellow travelers and rent seekers it can get the NGO's to go to the media and call the plebs racists and phobes and scare them back into their boxes.
"we're all in this together" I seem to recall Dave the spiv saying. Some people thought he might have been talking about the voters but his mates knew exactly what he was saying when he said that he and Clegg shared a "common purpose".
Dear Raedwald
The sole purpose of government - politicians and bureaucrats - has now devolved into screwing as much as it can from the taxpayer and squandering it on all manner of projects for the benefit of themselves and their best mates.
The UN is just one of the many ways that our money is squandered.
Our government is the problem.
How do we fix it?
Elections won't solve anything, because no matter whom you vote for the government always gets in. If UKIP or the new political force it changes into ever looked as if it might achieve a majority in the House of Commons, all of the power and might of government would be brought to bear to stop it.
I suspect that the mass alien invasion and colonisation of this country is just one such weapon being prepared to be used to destroy any attempt to reign in government.
DP
Perfect commentary Raedwald. What's not to like?
The voice of reason and sanity. they won't do it of course. Too many vested interests and back scratching going on.
Amen.
The government appears to think that:
1. DfID's spending increases the UK's influence/prestige
2. We, as a "wealthy" nation, have a moral duty to fund DfID.
The first, if true at all, is merely bribery. British businesses are prosecuted for getting work by doling out bribes to buy "influence". The second is untrue in both its assumptions. It is not "wealth" where we have a deficit. Neither is there anything 'moral' about forcibly taking money from poor British people only for it to end up in the hands of rich people in 'third world' countries.
The government's view that DfID makes the world a "safer, more stable and prosperous world" or promotes "security and justice" is entirely unsubstantiated. Indeed the work of many, among them P T Bauer and Dambisa Moyo (her book: 'Dead Aid') contradicts this claim.
What will help third world countries is to trade fairly with them. One example: "the EU’s industrial fishing fleets are increasingly moving into foreign waters and depriving local communities of a major food source" (Greenpeace 19-06-2011).
'Aid' is not a substitute for stealing their fish. It is indeed ironic that the complete incompetence of the EU's CFP, and its immoral fish dumping policy, should deprive Africans of a living, driving them to dependence on "aid" instead. DfID is a calamity for all.
I am sorry to say that I have become so cynical about the corruption of charity that I never donate to these emergency appeals.
I just "know" that so much of what I might donate would be skimmed off by fat cats, regulatory parasites, leaders' wives shopping Harrods, etc etc, that I refuse to have anything to do with the charade.
I may be wrong, I probably am wrong to an extent, but this is what "big charity" hath wrought; I hope they're pleased with themselves.
This is, of course, the same Priti Patel who was vehemently opposed to the size of the aid budget until she was put in charge of it. Why am I not surprised. She is, after all, a politician.
Three things currently piss me off about the current aid system
(1) The 0.7% compulsory giveaway from our taxes. Thank you Mr Clegg!
(2) That we are not allowed to say where it goes - as evidenced by the fact we are not allowed to use it to help rebuild the hurricane devastated islands in the Caribbean
(3) We contribute hugely to the EU which also has an aid budget - so effectively we are paying twice, once directly and once through the EU
The time for this fiasco to be halted is long overdue...
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