David Craig, on October 1st, 2022weekend blog
Using the Kami-Kwasi excuse
As I predicted in my Friday blog, the trade union bosses have started to use the Kami-Kwasi tax breaks for the rich as justification for their strikes. I saw two trade union leaders on the TV news this morning both saying that if the richest are getting thousands of pounds due to Kami-Kwasi abolishing the 45% top tax rate and scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses, then why should their members accept below-inflation pay offers of just a few percent.
You can’t really argue with that
It’s costing you about �500 a year
This year the UK will spend/squander around �14.5bn on foreign aid. Assuming there are around 30 million taxpayers in the UK, that’s just under �500 per taxpayer. And, of course, the more corrupt a country is, the more foreign aid it will get.
Where did the money go?
In Europe, after the Second World War the US-sponsored Marshall Plan is generally credited for helping war-ravaged European countries to rebuild and become prosperous. So some people have demanded a �Marshall Plan for Africa�. There�s only one problem with this demand. Africa has already had its Marshall Plan � several times over. In the last fifty years Africa has been given the equivalent of around ten Marshall Plans. In today�s money, the five-year European Marshall Plan saw about $100bn – $20bn a year – being used to rebuild Europe after WWII. In the last fifty years, Africa has received over $1 trillion in aid. So, Africa received about the same every year – $20bn a year – for fifty years that Europe received each year for just five years. Yet there�s little evidence that those countries getting the most aid have benefited from this aid and a quarter of Sub-Saharan countries, including some of the world�s recipients of the most foreign aid, are now poorer than they were 50 years ago.
Where looting is the national sport
We don’t know how much of the aid money we give ever reaches those in need. But there are indications that most aid money is looted by the political and bureaucratic elites in the recipient countries
Millions of dollars were given to South Africa to buy schools textbooks. Hardly a single book was bought as almost all the money was allegedly stolen by people with close links to the ruling ANC Party. The year before the 2014 Ebola outbreak, $60m of EU taxpayers� money was donated to Liberia to build clinics and train health workers. Of this $60m, only about five per cent ($3m) ever reached the Liberian Ministry of Health. A few months later, Liberia was the African country with the highest death rate from Ebola, partly due to a lack of clinics and lack of trained staff. And following the Asian tsunami in 2004, customs officers in Sri Lanka impounded vehicles and medical supplies we sent to help Sri Lanka�s 516,000 displaced tsunami victims and the families of the country�s 35,000 dead. The corrupt customs officers would reportedly only release the vehicles and aid in return for an immediate payment of around $1m in cash bribes and further payments of another $2m, again in cash.
The stories are almost endless. But we seldom hear them because, if the public knew how much of our money was being pillaged, then we might be rather less inclined to hand over our cash when the next disaster strikes and the next charity comes calling.
Corruption is us
Corruption affects emergency aid and development efforts in two main ways. Firstly, aid money or goods are stolen directly through expropriation by warlords, the military or politicians or else money pours out through bribes, tricks like double invoicing and shoddy (or even non-existent) construction work on roads, schools or hospitals or payments for imaginary children and schools. Britain�s Department for International Development, for example, proudly claimed that �388m given to a programme to support children going to school in India had reduced the number of out-of-school children by five million. But an Indian government report found that at least �70m of this money had been stolen having been allocated to children and schools that didn�t exist.
Secondly, if foreign aid money pays for basic public services such as schools and healthcare for the poor, then local politicians feel little obligation to use the country�s own money to provide these services. Thus generous provision of aid can tempt them into avoiding paying any tax, embezzling their departments� resources or wasting their country�s wealth on vanity projects like palaces, mansions, fleets of Mercedes or space programmes. In Pakistan, few if any of the many multi-millionaire politicians, their business cronies or top bureaucrats pay any tax, leaving it up to foreign aid donors to hand over more than $2.5bn a year to provide services for the poor in Pakistan in order to make up for rich Pakistanis� tax avoidance. And now Pakistan’s elites are licking their lips at the massive amount of aid they’ll get following this year’s floods. They’re hoping for about $28bn. We can be sure that, whatever they do manage to squeeze out of us, very little will ever get anywhere near any flood victims
In many countries, the elites loot more than the country receives in aid:
Let’s end this farce
This foreign aid farce has gone on for over fifty years. And it has made many Third-world leaders into billionaires:
And now the most corrupt people on this planet are demanding trillions more from us in supposed ‘climate justice’ reparations for the supposed damage caused by supposed climate change.
Maybe it’s time to end this foreign aid farce?
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I’m sure the people in government deciding on these ‘donations’ feel better, especially as it’s not their money they’re wasting. Just like the ones pushing Climate change – They feel better while wasting (or stealing) our tax money on their crazy schemes
As Ian J says it is time to stop our politicians stealing our money. They really are not much different to the corrupt African rulers. Taxes on our property are theft and it should stop. The main benefit of no property taxes is that we can then accumulate wealth and hand it down the generations.
We can argue with the views of union leaders and people who think that the rich should not keep their wealth. Bill Gates is often in the news, but when his wealth is discussed, it is forgotten that we bought his products and we had a choice, and the same applies to everybody else who has started up companies. It is also convenient to forget the employment that the wealthy create. The strikes are aways in the state sector or ex-state sector which is the basis of the trade union power. Just give into them and put up the prices and let them find out about how markets work when nobody wants to buy their services and they don’t have jobs. But if it is essential then we will pay and cut back elsewhere, but we cannot cutback on foreign aid when we have no control over it. This is why governments should not be involved in most things and let the markets work. We should decide whether we want to donate to charities in poorer countries. The �500 would help with our higher energy bills.
The comparison with the Marshall Plan brings it into perspective. But look at what happened in Europe. Germany used it to modernise its industry and became the most successful country in Europe. We used it to create a welfare state and a sense of entitlement to somebody elses money, which has just become worse and worse over the years. Our government loots our money to support welfare, and now to support an endless stream of immigrants. No wonder the UK is in a mess.
This morning I saw a quote from Thomas Sowell – “No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.” The biggest parasites in the UK are the politicians.
It is pretty obvious to me that the Remainer Tories are deliberately scuppering the big majority that Boris got for them. Boris himself was doing that himself by squandering his own large majority. The idea must be to put Labour back in power so that Labour can take us back into the totalitarian EU, already well on its way to Chinese-style communism.
Ever since at least the 1960s, our degenerate liberal globalist politicians have been systematically destroying all of our country’s institutions – the family, marriage, the education system, the NHS, the police, the military, the private sector, the country’s demographics, the parliament itself, etc. It is highly unlikely that they are ever going to give up on that intent for a second. Liz and Kwazi are just the latest agent provocateurs.
The tools they are using are sexual and social equality, feminisation that involves waging a non-stop war on the most creative human in history, the Caucasian male, the so-called pandemic, the so-called climate emergency, wokeism,etc., etc.
The same creeping subterranean war disguised as virtue and concern for the planet is being waged against the people of Christendom by their own degenerate people.
People who are so intent on destroying their own people must be nihilistic degenerates, not so? But how were they created and how did they come to power across Christendom?
They must have been created by Christianity preaching hatred of the body and sex for centuries. Preaching that sex was only for reproduction and was a damning sin for pleasure. Many women would have instinctively chosen undersexed men for spouses in order to avoid being damned sinners if they chose a man who was well sexed. And from undersexed men come more undersexed, more feminine men. Where the men become feminine, the women become masculine in order to redress the gender imbalance. Masculine women develop masculine tastes and want masculine rights. Feminism was born and the rest of the social decline was a matter of course when women wanted to go to work rather than have children and look after them.
Try using runts to breed any animal and you will see how quickly its species degenerates.
The moral of the story: anti-nature practised as a religion for centuries must be paid for extremely dearly.
Knowing what we’ve long known about corruption in Africa, India and Pakistan, we should have stopped foreign aid decades ago, focussing on the needs of the UK’s own population. Remember the saying? Charity begins at home. And now we have the ludicrous – deplorable? – situation where thousands of illegals crossing the Channel (32,000 plus so far this year, and 3 months still to go) are accommodated in hotels, fed 3 meals a day and given spending money while UK citizens wander homeless, begging and sleeping in doorways huddled under newspaper and cardboard. Never mind that some may be junkies or alcoholics; that’s not the point. A civilized society should be caring for its own. And just wait until escalating mortgage interest payments result in entire families losing their homes!
Eric Legge certainly makes some valid points about Christianity and its creeping tendency over the centuries to coat every joyous activity with the cloak of sin. Concerning wokeism though, and the explosion of “transgenderism” as well as straight homosexuality, the latter has always existed and in some cases at least seems to be directly attributable to maternal hormone imbalance during a crucial period of gestation, resulting in failure of development of the area of the brain controlling sexual orientation. (This is nothing to do with the development of the observable external sexual characteristics). Such individuals are to be regarded with understanding and compassion and left in peace to pursue their sexual lives according to their desires. However, there is, surely, something very wrong when multiple and apparently ever-increasing members of entire societies such as the UK and America start to deny their birth gender? What has gone wrong? Is it the consequence of flagrant over-indulgence since childhood of every desire, be it for food, physical comfort, general sensual desires? Is it Nature rebelling against over-population and thereby finding a way to reduce reproduction? Is it in short attributable to the absence of the need actually to fight for anything – including physical survival? I go back to ancient history. The Ancient Egyptians, the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, all became so prosperous and self-indulgent that the ruling classes had means and leisure to indulge in all manner of perversions, and over time the weaknesses consequent upon their indulgences brought about their downfall. Daily it seems ever more probable to me that the Judaeo-Christian society into which I was born more than eight decades ago is rapidly on the way out. Not everything was right with that society and its mores – far from it and as a youngster I greatly wished for some things to change. Well, change came and much of that change has not turned out well. Single women with several children all born to different partners and ne’er a father in sight to support those children morally or financially. Violence and fatal stabbings in our cities and towns a nightly and daily occurrence. Law which now appears to favour the law-breaker rather than the victim. That’s if the Law ever catches the offender in the first place! Little girls who are still so young they barely know what sex is are being dosed on “sex-changing” drugs and even having their organs of reproduction and child-feeding removed because they are tom-boys and have said they prefer boys’ games. It is, frankly, sick!
Oh yes – in conclusion! I read that the “trans” and “gender neutral” lot are attempting to “gender neutralise” European Latin-based languages – and that’s basically all of them except English – by getting rid of “masculine” and “feminine” nouns, adjectives, pronouns and their multiple compounds. Well, good luck with that one! Couldn’t make it up, could you? (They’ll have fun with German, where there’s already a Neutral as well as a Masculine and Feminine.)
Back to Truss and Kwasi-Kami, it seems that Truss is aiming to be the second Thatcher, but is totally overlooking the fact that it took Maggie the best part of a decade to stabilise the economy, wrecked by her predecessors, before being able to loosen the tax strings. Sadly, it seems rapidly becoming evident that Truss just doesn’t have the intelligence or ability to sort out the mess brought about by the twin economic disasters of unbridled borrowing to finance useless (Test & Trace) or fraudulent (much of the furlough) pandemic spending, plus exorbitant energy costs resulting from the Ukraine war. But if not Truss, who else? (Anyone but Starmer, please!)