Monkeys obscured by peanuts
There’s been much hot air unleashed in Holyrood in recent weeks over various “wastes” of money by the Scottish Government. First the opposition accused the SNP of spending £100,000 (which turned out to be a wild piece of back-of-a-fag-packet guesswork vastly overestimating the actual £4,000 cost) in fighting a Freedom Of Information request over EU legal advice. Then there were complaints about £48,000 spent sending a team to the premiere of Brave, despite the obvious benefits to be had marketing Scotland’s tourism industry on the back of the movie.
And finally, Labour in particular screamed themselves hoarse (and were still doing so as recently as yesterday’s FMQs) about the £470,000 the Scottish Government delegation to the Ryder Cup cost, even though it was a contractual obligation, encompassed numerous other business engagements which generated Scottish jobs, and in fact represented a 30% saving on comparable trips by the last Labour-led Holyrood administration. (Which weren’t contractual obligations.)
But still. If just for the sake of argument you were to accept the Unionist parties’ line, that’s a whopping £522,000 the Scottish Government has cavalierly thrown away in recent months. Meanwhile, how has the UK government in Westminster been doing?
This month saw two pieces of information come to light, neither of which attracted a great amount of media attention. One revealed that the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition’s spectacularly inept handling of the bidding for the West Coast rail franchise is likely to cost the taxpayer somewhere in the region of £100 million. And only yesterday, the Ministry Of Defence admitted that it had already paid out £14 million in compensation and costs to Iraqis tortured by British forces during the last Labour government’s war in Iraq, with many millions more expected.
Scotland’s share of just those two sums comes to around £9.6 million, or more than 18 times the amount the Scottish Government spent on the three issues the Unionist parties successfully whipped up a media storm around. We don’t know about you, readers, but faced with a choice between spending half a million quid promoting Scotland and Scottish business in the West’s largest market, or £10 million on a shambolic tea-party of incompetent bureaucracy and torturing innocent civilians in a foreign country, we know who we trust most with our money.
And of course, the oil is running out.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-20811109
o/t Has the world ended yet? It’s a bit hard to tell round here.
£100 million for a referendum on voter reform that no one understood or cared about.
£100m on voting for new police commissioners for England that no one understood or cared about.
£1.2Bn for a new submarine that no one wanted.
£1Bn this year alone for Afghanistan war that no one understands or cares about
£1Bn worth Nimrod Mk3 aircraft smashed to pieces to further the EU Defence plan
£1Bn for a spare aircraft carrier and £1Bn for another one with no planes to put on it.
£100m worth of Harrier aircraft sold to the US for £6m
£20Bn a year for the next 40 years on useless windmills for the global warming scam.
£10Bn a year for the next…..yrs on the useless EU
£10Bn on the Olympics for London and BBC TV ‘personality’ show.
£12Bn on foreign ‘aid’ while people starve or freeze to death or top themselves through despair in the UK.
£3.4Bn on BBC that no one wants but must pay on threat of prison.
£2m to pay off 3 useless BBC staff for covering up scandals.
£100Bn to find for PFI scam payments.
£400Bn to the banks that went bust through incompetence.
there’s more but getting bored. We’re fecked basically.
but but but Bobby, the snp WASTED taxpayers money, something we could only talk about Westminster doing if we lived south of the border and werern’t the feckless subsidy junkies that we are.
If this is as bad as it gets having the SNP as the party in Government in Scotland, then the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems really are very bad at Government.
When you look at the waste of money that some local councils manage to squander, then the SNP again are elevated miles above these other parties in terms of ability and focusing on things that help the nation on a day to day basis.
I’m surprised no one from Labour was accusing the Scottish government of genocide yesterday. After all as Tris points out over on Munguin’s Republic there have been a number of suicides. As we all know these extremely sad and regrettable circumstances MUST be the result of the Scottish government. If they were not then surely even the now right of right of centre Labour party would be asking questions of their new best friends the right of centre Tory party, wouldn’t they?
At the very least they would be asking the Scottish government what they can do to stop all these senseless deaths wouldn’t they?
I guess this is just another example of the “caring” principles of the Labour party, supporting the Tories in mass murder by the back door!
http://www.munguinsrepublic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/we-are-youll-remember-all-in-it-togetehr.html