Given that the NHS is perpetually short of funds, and given that local authorities are going to be allowed to increase council tax in order to continue providing a minimum of services, I find it inconsistent that the Environment Agency is awash with cash.
They have recently spent £313,000 on providing a new home for a family of badgers. By all accounts, this home had a larder stocked with £50 worth of peanuts, a sleeping area, latrines and a communal area. This luxury apartment was an attempt to lure the badgers from a sett in the banks of the River Steeping, which potentially could have weakened flood defences. For £313,000 you can build a four bedroomed house in the leafy suburbs fit for a civil servant to live in and still leave enough money for a local man with a gas gun to sort out the leakage problem.
While on the subject of potential flooding I find it bewildering that the Labour Party are insisting that the government consult them on the conditions for leaving the European Union. If my memory serves me correctly, Tony Blair consulted no-one when signing up to free movement of labour between member states, which he initially thought would result in a trickle of 20,000 Bulgarians and Romanians each year, but has resulted in a flood from everywhere this side of Timbuktu.
As a nation, our capacity for wasting tax payers’ money is without parallel. This is no doubt due to the fact that the civil servants who throw it around like confetti have been given the money to spend rather than earning it. As a consequence they do not have a clue as to the value of one pound sterling. Witness the staggering amount of money scattered on the winds in the name of foreign aid, amounting to £12 billion a year. As an example, £199 million goes to seven well known international charities and aid agencies. The seven figureheads of these organisations are paid £2.72 million in salaries, including David Milliband who gets by on £530,922 each year and is currently lamenting the shortage of cash available to the International Rescue Fund of which he is president.
Waste is not the preserve, however, of politicians and the Westminster tribe. Ten million tonnes of food are dumped in landfill sites each year and according to statisticians this is enough to feed 145,000 people for life. My simple mathematics tells me that over a 10 year period we would be able to feed 1.45 million people for life – which probably equates to the number of illegal immigrants in this country by the year 2027. No problem then. But wouldn’t it be better if supermarkets stopped giving BOGOFS and started paying producers a decent price, in the hope that the consumer would eventually shy away from their part in the throw away society. I believe each tonne of waste consigned to landfill costs £30.
Management has again reminded me that the content of my monthly scribble tends to be on the negative side, so in the spirit of the recent season of goodwill I am delighted to report some good news. Despite the Remoaners’ promising armageddon, the world at large does not seem too concerned at our impending mutual separation from the EU. Recent figures show that in the nine months to September, foreign companies invested £100 billion in acquiring UK businesses against £24.4 billion in the same period in 2015, while in contrast UK acquisitions of foreign firms dropped by nearly 50%. Let’s just get on with it!
Management and her staff wish you all a happy and prosperous new year.
