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By  David Craig, on July 8th, 2014 It’s time to buy shares in companies manufacturing whitewash. After a flood of stories concerning paedophilia and sexual abuse by the high and the mighty, Home Secretary Theresa May has announced two major new enquiries/cover-ups into what did or did not take place. This is the same Theresa May who announced last year, after a ‘full and thorough’ Home Office investigation ‘leaving no stone unturned’ that nobody anywhere had ever had done anything wrong, that there was no evidence that the 114 lost incriminating files had been ‘lost’ on purpose and that the matter was closed.
Sadly for Theresa and her chums in the Establishment, the lurid stories just kept on coming and she’s been forced into an embarrassing U-turn launching not one but two new cover-ups to cover up what really happened and to cover up the people who covered up the original revelations of sexual abuse.
As for Dodgy Podgy David Cameron, who writes this guy’s speeches? They should be fired. When talking on TV about the alleged boy-buggering on an industrial scale by our rulers at a guest house in London, Cameron used the unfortunate words, “we’ve got to get to the bottom of this”. I’m sure heavy-weight former LibDem Cyril Smith and his partners in crime would heartily agree with that sentiment, though perhaps not in the way Dopey Dave intended.
The Establishment has a long and successful history of ‘full and thorough enquiries leaving no stone unturned’ which all seemed to have used extraordinary quantities of whitewash. There was the Hutton enquiry (IMHO cover-up) into the mysterious death (murder?) of Dr David Kelly. And there was the still unpublished Chilcott enquiry (IMHO cover-up) into the causes of the Iraq war started by the (IMHO) lies of Blair and his minions over Saddam’s WMDs that could allegedly be launched within 45 minutes. Tens of millions of pounds of our money have been squandered by these supposed ‘enquiries’ in order to fool us about what our leaders are really up to.
Like millions of others, you may be waiting with baited breath for the results of Cameron’s and May’s two new ‘wide-ranging full and thorough’ enquiries/cover-ups ‘leaving no stone unturned’. But there’s no need to wait. I can already predict the results. We’ll be told that it is possible that there have been events in the past which should not have happened, but that as so many years have passed it’s difficult to establish the exact truth and we’ll be assured that ‘important lessons have been learnt’ then everything will carry on as before.
And as we’re told nothing can be proved, here are the words used by Tim Fortescue, who was a government whip between 1970 and ’73, in a 1995 BBC documentary Westminster’s Secret Service. Fortescue said: “Anyone with any sense, who was in trouble, would come to the whips and tell them the truth, and say now, I’m in a jam, can you help? It might be debt, it might be… a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal in which, erm er, a member seemed likely to be mixed up in, they’d come and ask if we could help and if we could, we did. And we would do everything we can because we would store up brownie points…and if I mean, that sounds a pretty, pretty nasty reason, but it’s one of the reasons because if we could get a chap out of trouble then, he will do as we ask forever more.”
“Important lessons have been learnt”? I don’t think so. The only lessons our rulers have learnt is that they need to be better at covering up who they’re screwing and how much of our money they’re stealing.
Oh, and if your children won’t eat their vegetables, here’s my suggestion on how to get them to do what you want:
By David Craig, on July 7th, 2014 On Thursday, Britain’s wonderful, hard-working teachers go on strike yet again and again and again. I’ve written before about the odd situation where our teachers are forever going on strike for more pay, more pensions, more holidays, more everything www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/9788
Yet while our teachers want more, more, more, Britain’s educational performance (as measured by the PISA study – see link above) keeps falling further and further behind the countries with whom we compete. Moreover, due largely to the utter failures of state education dumbing every child down to the same pathetic level, there are massive skills shortages across the country which have to be filled by educated immigrants, largely from Eastern Europe.
Oh, and as proof of this dumbing down, here’s a question from a maths GCSE paper taken by 15-year-olds in Britain:
I imagine that in China or Singapore, Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria or wherever, nine- or ten-year olds would be able to answer this ‘difficult’ mathematical problem.
State education is failing. But most people can’t afford to send their children to private schools, can they? Of course, they can’t afford to pay for private schooling when they’re also already paying for state schooling through their taxes. But what if people didn’t have to pay so much for state schooling? Let me explain:
The typical cost of each of our nine million state school pupils is around £7,000 a year. For a private day school, the cost averages £12,700 a year. Now, what if all parents were given vouchers for £4,000 to be used to pay for private education? Then an awful lot more parents would be able to send their children to private schools. If, using these vouchers there was a massive expansion in private schools and say three million children could be taken out of the state sector, then that would save taxpayers £3,000 per child – an incredible £9bn a year. Then the Government could use this £9bn – an extra £1,500 for each of the six million children left in the state system – to improve educational standards (providing our leftist teachers would allow our children to be properly educated). That would provide a massive boost to our economy as our schools started to churn out more educated children and fewer functionally illiterate and innumerate, useless, X-factor infatuated, unemployable ignoramuses.
What’s not to like about that?
Then each year after that, more and more children could be removed from state education leaving ever more money to improve the teaching of those left in state schools.
The teaching unions will never allow state education to be reformed. So it should be replaced.
By David Craig, on July 5th, 2014 One of the events planned for yesterday’s naming of Britain’s wonderful new floating white elephant – the Queen Elizabeth II aircraft carrier – was a fly-past by the fabulous new US-built F35B joint strike fighter jets which will use the carrier. Sadly we didn’t get the fly-past as the F35B was somewhat indisposed. Yup, you guessed it – the plane doesn’t work. Apparently the entire fleet of F35 aircraft has been grounded until engine inspections are completed. On June 23, an F-35 caught fire as the pilot attempted to take off at a Florida air base. According to Reuters, one unidentified source described the incident by saying, “The engine ripped through the top of the plane.”
There were also plans for the F35 to take part in air-shows this summer. The way things are going, you’re going to need awfully good eyesight (or a good imagination) to see one.
Yesterday I wrote about the catastrophically useless aircraft carriers being built in Scotland, with some major parts being made close to Gordon Brown’s Kircaldy constituency in order to get votes for Labour – a decision which caused the carrier to be redesigned as it was found to be too high to fit under the Firth of Forth bridge. Still, perhaps we should be glad that the MoD spotted this small detail in time, otherwise they’d have had to embarrassingly dismantle the bridge in order to get the carrier out to sea.
The first of these massive floating already-obsolete sitting ducks is about five years late and instead of costing £3bn for two carriers, we’re probably going to end up paying about £6bn each.
However, the MoD’s incompetence is not confined to the carriers. Our military bosses have also botched the purchase of the F35Bs. These may start flying from the one carrier, that isn’t immediately mothballed to save money, by around 2020. The sad story of this plane’s bungled development is too long and involved to recount here, so I’ll just give a few key points:
1. It’s a ‘jump jet’ A wonderful feature of the F35B is that it has VTO (vertical take-off) capability. Like the Harrier it is replacing, the VTO capability makes the plane very versatile. But the VTO features also make the plane overweight and underpowered. So, while you can deploy it almost anywhere in the world, it can’t turn, climb or run as fast as Russian-, Chinese- or French-built planes. It’s OK for bombing and shooting up enemies on the ground, but it’s a flying coffin if it ever gets into aerial combat.
2. Jump jets don’t need great big aircraft carriers If you’re really stupid like me, you might also be wondering why we’re building two massive sitting-duck aircraft carriers for a plane that has VTO capability. Like helicopters, VTO planes don’t need aircraft carriers, at least not very big ones. I guess our military leaders must be a lot more cleverer than I am to have bought eye-wateringly expensive underperforming VTO fighter/bombers for a carrier built to carry better-performing conventional take-off planes.
3. “Whoops, we forgot to buy the software” One of the many cock-ups by our military donkeys was that when negotiating the price of the planes, they forgot to include the software that was needed for them to fly. When asked about this by the House of Commons Defence Committee (DC), some chump from the MoD claimed that the MoD were “actively negotiating” for the handover of the software. But a member of the DC pointed out what should have been a no-brainer, “it is no good when you have signed up and handed your cheque over then to go back to negotiate the release of technology”.
I could go on, but I imagine most readers get the picture. The MoD has paid consultants from PwC and McKinsey over £100m in fees to ‘improve’ the way it buys military equipment through its Smart Acquisition programme. Yet the bungling buffoons still can’t do single thing right with most military equipment programmes costing four to five times the original estimate and taking two to three times as long as intended making much of our hardware obsolete before it becomes operational.
By David Craig, on July 4th, 2014 Here it is in all its glory. Britain’s latest military white elephant – the new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth II which will be named today amidst much pomp and media puffery
Isn’t it wonderful? Doesn’t it make you proud to be British?
There are only a few ‘small’ niggles.
1. No aircraft – There is something about the words ‘aircraft carrier’ that our military bosses seem to have misunderstood. Because when this floating white elephant is launched, there won’t be any aircraft for it to carry. They won’t be ready for at least another 6 years. So, this monstrosity is going to paddle round the world, costing us hundreds of millions a year to run, supposedly ‘projecting British power’ without any aircraft. You’d laugh if this wasn’t so tragic. Though I suppose in the meantime, it could carry a few clapped-out helicopters if military bosses can find any that work and can afford fuel to put in them.
I warned about this lack of aircraft in my 2006 book PLUNDERING THE PUBLIC SECTOR. That was eight years ago. At the time my warnings were ignored as nobody thought our over-paid, over-pensioned military leaders could be so incompetent. Well, they are.
2. One will be mothballed – If I remember correctly, two of these £6bn monstrosities will be built, because the military signed contracts for two of them. But as we can’t afford to run both, one will be mothballed or even sold at a knock-down price to our potential enemies. Ye gods, we truly are led by brainless donkeys! Sorry, I’ve just insulted brainless donkeys by comparing them to our hopeless, big-spending military bosses.
3. They are vulnerable targets – I suspect we’ll never be able to use this white elephant in anger. It’s so vulnerable to attack by missiles or even small motor boats loaded with explosives that we’ll have to keep it awfully far away from our enemies, making it next to useless. Of course, our great military leaders will deny this. But they also denied we’d end up with aircraft carriers but no aircraft.
4. Are they being built just to buy Scottish votes? – One could imagine that we don’t even need these while elephants at all and that our billions could be better spent preparing for the predictable, never-ending future wars against the Religion of Peace rather than on vulnerable, eye-wateringly expensive aircraftless aircraft carriers. One could even suspect that the useless recidivist liar Gordon Brown only put the contract out to create spurious jobs in Scotland in order to ‘buy’ Scottish votes for Labour
Britain’s ordinary soldiers may be ok. But their leaders are IMHO stupid, over-paid, over-pensioned, self-serving, self-aggrandising, incompetent buffoons only interested in getting lucrative post-retirement jobs working for defence companies and seats in the Lords.
No wonder we humiliatingly lost our last two wars – Iraq and Afghanistan – where we were utterly thrashed by poorly-armed, poorly-trained, poorly-equipped but more motivated and better-led opponents.
By David Craig, on July 3rd, 2014 Hooray! Yippeee! Yabbadabbadoooo! We’re all going to be rich!
Just two days ago, on Tuesday 1 July, George Osborne’s new ISAs (now called NISAs) were launched. Now the Government allows us to save up to a wonderful £15,000 a year from our already heavily-taxed income into a NISA. So what’s the advantage for us? Well, we won’t have to pay any tax on the ‘massive’ amounts of interest cash NISAs will earn nor on the huge possible gains stocks and shares NISAs could achieve.
Most of the newspapers have been running stories about this fabulous opportunity with supposed ‘experts’ wittering on about how we can all become ‘NISA millionaires’. Billions of pounds of ordinary taxpayers’ money will now pour into these NISAs.
So how have our banks reacted to all this cash heading their way? Well, in a free competitive market, they’d be hiking up interest rates on NISAs in order to attract our money. But in a market tightly controlled by a small, self-serving, parasitic cartel they’d push down interest rates in order to exploit savers.
The cheerleaders for the banks, our highly-paid personal finance journalists, are all telling us that interest rates on NISAs are going up. And this is true. Since December 2013, ISA/NISA interest rates have nudged up ever so slightly. But as this revealing chart shows, they are still around half the level they were at just two years ago even though the Bank of England has held its interest rate steady for the last five years (click to see more clearly)
Yup, the banking cartel have been continually lowering interest rates in order to increase their own profit margins and then have infintessimally increased them over the last few months to make it look like they’re in a competitive market and not a rent-seeking cartel. And, of course, our tame personal finance journalists bleat on about ‘rising NISA interest rates’ to con us into handing over our money.
Of course, not all the NISA billions will flow into cash NISAs. A goodly amount will go into stocks and shares NISAs. But if you read the serious financial press, not the tabloids, most market watchers believe that world stock markets are at unsustainable highs and what they politely call a ‘correction’ is coming. A ‘correction’ can be a fall of anywhere between 10% to 20%. So, you’ve got much bigger cojones than I have if you put any money into UK or US shares at current levels.
I fear the launch of the new ISAs (NISAs) is going to end in a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst naïve savers while our banks and unit trust managers become ever richer at our expense.
(Just a reminder, the ebook version of my book GREED UNLIMITED is available for just 2 more days at the special promotional price of £1.99 https://www.amazon.co.uk/GREED-UNLIMITED-Cameron-protect-squeezing-ebook/dp/B009EWPYT2/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1404376329&sr=1-1 You can read this on your computer, Kindle or tablet)
By David Craig, on July 2nd, 2014 As the dust settles over the appointment of the ghastly, parasitic, arrogant semi-drunk Juncker as President of the European Commission under the orders of Angela Merkel, the next stage of Britain’s humiliation begins – trying to get a decent job for whatever political has-been Cameron decides to send to the European Commission.
Rumour in Brussels has it that Juncker will just be a high-living, champagne-guzzling figurehead for the European Commission and that the real mover and shaker will be his Head of Cabinet (Chef de Cabinet), a German who I think is called Martin Selmayr. Now Britain will have to go cap in hand grovelling to a German (Selmayr) working for a German-controlled glove-puppet (Juncker) to get even the slightest concession in the German stitch-up that is the EU.
Meanwhile, another German Martin Schulz was yesterday re-elected as European Parliament President.
As Britain finds itself in this catastrophic situation, grovelling to Germans or German glove-puppets at every level of the EU, perhaps our quisling leaders should reflect on the 16 million killed in World War I of whom 1 million were British and the 60 million killed in World War II of whom 450,000 were British – all to save us from being dominated by the Germans
The cowardly spineless Dutch, Belgians, French, Italians, Danish and many others are used to giving in to the Germans almost before the first shot has been fired. Only the British have ever really resisted the German takeover of Europe. As we now hand over our country to Germany, perhaps Remembrance Day should be cancelled? After all, the sight of our leaders’ hypocrisy as they claim Britain’s dead ‘will not be forgotten’ while giving control of our country to the Germans is more than sickening.
By David Craig, on July 1st, 2014 Today’s post might send a few readers into a coma of utter boredom. But I’ll try to make it readable.
You may have heard about a ‘rockstar economist’ Frenchman Thomas Piketty whose new 700-page book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has become an unlikely international bestseller and he’s doing the rounds wining and dining with top politicians like Obama and losers like Ed Miliband. And you may be at a dinner party where someone asks, “I say, old chap, what do you think about the central thesis of Piketty’s work?” Or you may be down the pub and some big bloke comes up to you and says, “Oy, you! That there Piketty, is he a Marxist historical determinist or wot?” Or you may be walking down a dark street and be surrounded by a knife-wielding gang one of whose members threatens, “Gimme yer money innit or I’ll stab yer innit. I’s just doing yer distribution of wealth innit. Just like him wild man Piketty wrote innit.”
So here’s brief guide to Piketty’s work, then you won’t need to buy or read his dreadful pretentious and inaccurate book.
Piketty’s central thesis is that we’re moving into an era of low economic growth in which ‘R’ (the returns on ‘capital’ – property, shares, bonds, cash or whatever) will be higher than ‘G’ (the overall growth rate). Thus the simple equation – ‘R>G’. This means that those with ‘capital’ will become ever richer – increasing inequality – while those without capital will be left behind. According to Piketty, this will have two serious consequences. Firstly there is a risk to democracy as the rich are able to ‘buy’ influence with politicians and bureaucrats pushing through policies that suit them. Secondly, R>G will reduce social mobility as the rich will get the best education and life chances for their children, while those without ‘capital’ will be unable to compete.
Piketty’s main solutions include more taxes on wealth, property, earnings, shares and anything else that rich people own in order to redistribute wealth to reduce rising inequality.
There are just a few problems with Piketty’s thesis:
1. He ignores the fact that in the last 20 years many hundreds of millions of people (in China, India, Indonesia and other countries) have been pulled out of poverty. In fact, the countries where inequality is highest (China and India) are precisely those where the most people have escaped from poverty
2. Most of those who have become wealthy in the last few decades are actually entrepreneurs who have amassed massive fortunes through their own skill, inventiveness and imagination. The Forbes or Sunday Times Rich List are full of people who have risen from almost nothing to vast wealth through their own efforts, not from their family’s ‘capital’. Social mobility may actually now be higher than it ever was in the past, particularly as now you don’t need to build factories or own estates to become wealthy, as people did in the 19th century. All you need is a good idea and a lot of energy and luck
3. While demanding that governments grab ever more from those with ‘capital’, it doesn’t really occur to Piketty that perhaps the problem is that governments have become huge, bloated, inefficient, self-serving, greedy obscenities and that rather than stealing more from taxpayers, politicians should be cutting down on their own spending
4. The rich can always avoid taxes. So, were governments to implement Piketty’s ‘brilliant’ ideas, the rich would just change their behaviour to avoid paying most of Piketty’s new taxes.
However, Piketty is right on at least two issues:
1. The rich have ‘bought’ government. We see this most clearly in the bank bailouts – hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money was showered on bankrupt banks without any requirement for reform, salary and bonus control or changes in behaviour. And we see this in no government making any effort to tax huge international companies like Amazon, Google, Starbucks, Apple etc because they’ve bought the politicians and bureaucrats
2. The new managerial classes have perverted capitalism in order to enrich themselves. For example, in the last 15 years the real value of Britain’s top 100 companies has fallen by about 25%, but the average remuneration of their executives has shot up from around £1.1m in 1999 to over £4m today.
Piketty’s basic assumption that inequality is necessarily negative for society is questionable. But as I describe in my book GREED UNLIMITED (available as an ebook from Amazon for only £1.99) his view that we are now in an era of crony capitalism where the elite are siphoning off the benefits for themselves while buying political power and squeezing the rest of us are absolutely correct.
Piketty’s book will, like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, probably become one of the most bought, least read books of all time. And yes, I am envious. My books GREED UNLIMITED and DON’T BUY IT! are probably a lot more useful than Piketty’s pseudo-philosophical leftist ramblings – and a lot shorter and more readable.
By David Craig, on June 30th, 2014 This weekend there was, I thought, a disgraceful article in the Sunday Telegraph by a Tory trougher, MP Dr Sarah Wollaston, claiming that Britain’s ageing population will bankrupt the NHS. Of course, the good lady didn’t mention the arrival of 7 to 10 million immigrants in Britain since New Labour opened the floodgates in order to ‘rub the noses’ of the middle classes in multi-culturalism.
But before lambasting the trougher for her political correctness in not mentioning ‘immigration’ I decided to check the figures. And in this case, I was surprised. The Tory trougher may have been actually telling the truth.
Between 1998/9 and 2012/3 hospital episodes rose by 48% from 11,983,893 to 17,715,046. If we break these down by age group, we find that the major increases have been in the older age groups (click to see more clearly)
So, it appears our ageing population, rather than immigration, is the main cause of our collapsing NHS services.
The answer to this problem from the good Dr Wollaston is more money, more money, more money! But hold on a minute, since 1997/8, while hospital episodes have gone up by a worrying 48%, the NHS budget has shot up from £45bn to over £105bn – almost a doubling even after taking account of inflation. So, about a 100% budget increase has apparently been insufficient for our hopeless NHS to cope with a 48% rise in hospital episodes.
Moreover, Britain is slightly above the OECD average in the amount spent per capita on healthcare (click to see more clearly)
So, where has our money gone? A lot has disappeared into massive pay increases for doctors and nurses for doing ever less work. Then there has been an explosion in the number of managers – from around 25,000 in 1998/9 to over 40,000 by 2010 to around 38,000 today. Meanwhile, the number of hospital beds has collapsed from 200,000 in 1998/9 (8 beds per manager) to 140,000 today (a pathetic 3.7 beds per manager)
The NHS also wasted a massive amount of our money by blowing around £5bn on a computer system which (as I explained in detail in my 2006 book PLUNDERING THE PUBLIC SECTOR) could never work. At the time, the head of the National Audit Office, Sir John ‘Junket’ Bourne, gave me a bollocking for my ‘totally misleading analysis’, as he supported the hopeless computer system. It was abandoned in total chaos in 2011 after our £5bn had disappeared into thin air.
So, yes I have to admit that it seems to be an ageing population, rather than mass immigration, which is bankrupting our NHS. But if the NHS would waste just a little less of our money, perhaps it wouldn’t always be bleating about needing more, more, more!
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By David Craig, on June 29th, 2014 In 1990, Tory Nicholas Ridley famously called European Monetary Union, ‘A German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe.” He then went on to say, “It has to be thwarted. This rushed take-over by the Germans on the worst possible basis, with the French behaving like poodles to the Germans, is absolutely intolerable.”
Of course, even back then such political incorrectness had to be punished and he was immediately forced to resign from the Government. But with this week’s shenanigans which resulted in Jean-Claude Juncker being installed by the Germans as our leader, it seems Ridley was absolutely right.
Originally Angela Merkel was going to support Cameron in opposing the ghastly parasite Juncker. Then Merkel came under pressure from the socialists in her coalition to support Juncker. She quickly changed sides. Then she ‘advised’ other countries to support Juncker too. “Befehl ist Befehl” as they say in German and they all grovelingly did as their German boss commanded. As for the ever cowardly French and Italians, they stitched up their own dirty little deal whereby if they voted for Juncker, the EU Commission would allow them to keep on borrowing and spending breaking supposed EU fiscal rules.
It really does seem to be a case of “Deutschland Deutschland uber Alles”. And there’s nothing Britain can do to prevent this German take-over of Europe.
But Ridley wasn’t the only Tory to have been punished for daring to say the unsayable.
In 1968 Enoch Powell warned us of “rivers of blood” that would flow in British streets due to immigration. He was, of course, wrong to suggest that this would happen as a result of Afro-Caribbean and Indian immigration. But as the July 7 2005 London bombings with 52 innocent British civilians dead and another 700 innocent British civilians injured, we did get the predicted “rivers of blood” due to the arrival of rather a lot of people from the Religion of Peace (RoP) who seem to like our overly-generous and easily-defraudable benefits system but don’t really seem to like us.
Moreover, there was another series of attempted bombings by Roppers just two weeks after the 7/7 bombings and several more attempts since then. And, of course, there was the case of soldier Lee Rigby hacked to death and almost beheaded on a London Street. And who knows what’s going to happen when the crazies currently carrying our mass slaughters in Syria and Iraq decide to return to Britain.
A German plot to take over Europe? Yup we got that. Rivers of blood? Yup, we got that too.
Perhaps we should all be apologising to the now deceased Ridley and Powell?
By David Craig, on June 28th, 2014 Britain is in the grip of a crime tsunami. Every year there are at least 9,305,000 criminal offences committed. That’s 178,940 every single week:
That means every week 178,940 innocent people have their lives blighted by a crime. And these are just the crimes the police admit happened. As we all know, for a long time our politically-correct useless police have been fiddling the figures to hide the real level of crime while they persecute innocent taxpayers and protect criminals.
Of course, most criminals are not stupid enough to be caught by our plodding police. But those that are caught are costing us a fortune. With 85,580 people in prison at an average cost per year of £38,000 each, our prison system costs us at least £3.25bn a year to keep Britain’s dimmest criminals in relative luxury with three good meals a day, TV, gymnasia and all the other comforts they expect.
So, how could we reduce this enormous bill? Well, here’s a suggestion – introduce a ‘three strikes and out’ rule. It could work like this:
When a prisoner is sentenced for the first and even second time, we give them the benefit of the doubt and try to rehabilitate them. But when anyone is convicted for a third offence, we assume they have decided to stick two fingers up at the rest of us and have no wish to go straight. So, we make the minimum sentence for any third offence five years. But, and here’s the catch, on a third offence, they lose the right to do their time in the UK. Instead we agree contracts with wonderful countries like say Kenya or Equatorial Guinea or the Sudan whereby we pay them say £10,000 per year for every British third time offender they look after for us.
This does several things. It creates jobs in Third World countries – surely something handwringing Guardianistas would welcome. It cuts the cost of each of these prisoners from £38,500 a year to just £10,000 a year. And it might make some hardened criminals think twice before committing their third offence – after all, I rather doubt prisons in most Third World countries are quite as comfortable as those in the UK. And the food probably isn’t so great either.
Plus, if we assume that just 10% of prisoners are third-time offenders, shunting these 8,550 scumbags off to a Third World jail would save us about £244m a year. That would be enough to hire around 5,000 of the 39,500 troops (who are being fired to save money) to help rehabilitate those prisoners who want to go straight. So we’d be investing those savings in helping those who want help. Surely the handwringing Guardianistas and professional worriers and do-gooders and bleaters about human rights would approve of that?
And here’s a wonderful comment from a reader “I can’t fault your reasoning. I would only add 1 thing – if they complain about their “right to a family life” we could also send their families with them!”
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