This from Mr Osbourne
“All budgets have pressure. I don’t think there’s anything particularly unique about the Ministry of Defence”
Unless of course you are the budget for the Department for International Development.
In 2008/09 we provided £5.5 billion of aid to poorer countries. Our budget will increase to £7.8 billion by 2010/11. By 2013, the equivalent of 0.7% of the UK’s gross national income will be dedicated to development assistance, from 0.36% in 2007/08.
Can anyone please explain how the MoD is being battered by a Conservative PM and Chancellor of the Exchequer whilst the very same pair are increasing funding for contraception in Uganda
Britain will provide urgently needed contraceptive supplies to Uganda to help prevent unwanted pregnancies and improve family planning, DFID Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell said today.
DFiD – Britain to provide life-saving contraception in Uganda
Am I in some sort of weird alternative universe?
“Am I in some sort of weird alternative universe?”
Your telling me.
I’ve written my letter of resignation (I assume I can resign my membership).
Not posted it yet, but I’ve written it.
This is why i suggested it was time to fund a peace-keeping force from the DfID budget, and equally why I would encourage Fox to argue for the very cheapest deterrent he thinks he can get away with, in the hopes of causing a backlash because the nuclear willy won’t be big enough to wave at anyone, thus causing the proper funding to materialise or the project to get scuppered.
yes, you are in a weird alternative universe and there’s a whole bunch of us bemused and befuddled individuals wandering around in said place, bumping into each other wondering what in the flying fvck we did to deserve any of this. What the serving Army think goodness only knows.
Good post though, kind of hammers the point home.
HunkofJunk, see your back on the blogging treadmill, nice to see you back around these parts!
http://www.mentalcrumble.com/blog/2010/7/29/way-off-the-reservation.html
Agree completely
i’m wearing a tin foil hat that can’t get me!!! anyway just to check blair and brown pumped billions into africa if i remember rightly it was schools and then school books for every child. Not a bad thing people who know me on here know i did 4 months in rwanda, it’s pants and we should help, however, when it starts to affect our quality of life we need to back off, not stop i’m not some heartless, racist git (as that would be the obvious chant from our lefty friends). The peace keeping force is a good concept as you can’t buy the top spec merc with donated people!!
Also on that train of thought with british industry needing a boost, aforementioned force could see what is required and then that equipment is purchased from UK companies and sent there not the cash so they can’t order that merc!!
what with education, contreception and a continual source of spends how long before we become the third world country and somebody does a “live aid” for the UK.
think it’s time to pull down this “ring fence”
rant over!!
“somebody” as in one of the well (uk pounds)funded countries to clarify
Paul G – I agree entirely, we are not heartless racists, when RN I once spent a week building a “school” out of odd bits of timber and sheets of corrugated iron.
Brown’s lofty ambitions to help the world, and especially the third world were actually very cool – when we had the money to pay for them. We can argue over the greed of ‘city’ bankers and the sub-prime collapse being brought on by even greedier Yanks, but in the end, as a country we used to have cash, and now we dont. At the same time we have been fighting the so called global war on terror on two fronts – and I don’t think we need to summarize the press coverage of wrong kit / crap kit / no kit stories of the last 9 years. It would hardly be unreasonable to reduce DfID budget in light of said ‘war fighting’ operations would it ?
As I have said before, take a leaf from the Italians, keep DfID budget as is, but completely re-capitalize the RFA flotilla from that budget ! The “excuse” (if you like) would be that all RFA have emergency diasaster aid capabilities, and can appear where ever they are needed in the world to render assistance, thus providing aid, but as they are not ‘warships’ per se we would not have to worry about bleeding heart liberals complaining about using aid budget for military procurement (well, we would, but our argument would be a good one). Replace all 4 x Fort’s, Diligence and Argus with Dutch style JSS and that’s a heck of an softpower “aid fleet” capability – all paid for by the nice folks a DfID….
It’s an idea i have been working on, interesting to see what TD says about it:
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/warfighting-and-peacekeeping-%E2%80%93-an-idea-for-hagues-joined-up-foreign-policy/
it must not be funded from the defence budget however!
Jed, one of the last of the FDR series will be on integrating humanitarian response and development (not the same thing) with the military for a more (hate to say it) joined up approach and it will involve raiding the DFiD piggybank!
No you are not some heartless racist, things go round as they come round.
It was said time and time again that their was no difference in the policies of tbe labour and conservative partys
We are now begining to see the truth of that,it appears that once again the demands of the corrupt third world politicians come before the defence of the UK.
Why dont these politicians realise that the Chinese will be every much as welcome as were the British.
Give them twenty years to try and milk the continent and the Africans will be just as sick of them as they were of us.
the using men and equipment is an excellent idea, drawing from my own experiences it works really well, when in rwanda a lot of the NGO’s avoided us when we first tipped up as obviously our reputation as baby eating killers went before us!!!
However after about 2 weeks of relative non action a young guy turned up at the compound asking if we had vehicle knowledge ( a REME wksp, so maybe)!! turns out they had bought 20 odd “knockers” (a 1950′s truck that the army finally got rid of late 80′s). Needless to say the old sweats wet their pants with joy and jumped in getting 90% of the fleet on the road, another point there NGO’s are rather gulible and will buy shit at inflated prices.
After that it was flat out ranging from building schools/orphanages to field hospitals (2 landrovers, 1 parachute, 6 RAMC people) when i helped these guys about 1000 people turned up.
After the tour one of the reccy guys got the MBE for ensuring the MSR was always open for essential supplies.
The reason for this nostalga trip is us the australians and the canadians got in there and sorted it with typical no nonsense military panache, considering how bad it was look how it is there today, using the military works.
footnote; using osbornes theory of budgets does then mean will can start billing for the use of RAF aircraft next time there’s a hurricane/earthquake/flood and we send out emergency supplies?