Dave plays the tough guy...while billions go missing
Maurice O'Brien • Published 30 Sep 2011 09:30
1 Comment
HIP HIP hooray! One relatively successful war and Dave thinks he's A. Blair. And whether there was even a twitch of unease at the premature feel of that Tripoli victory parade, it must be uncomfortable realising that Libyan rebels still bitterly fighting in Sirte are not jousting with mere ghosts.
Instead of delivering a bucketful of Blairite bathos to the UN, and putting a few dictators on notice that our deliberately enfeebled armed forces are going after them next, had Dave wanted to play the tough guy then bumbling bankers and their featherweight finance minister accomplices could use a good kicking. He might also explain which part of 'austerity' involves increasing Britain's borrowing by nearly £2bn.
God knows, his hero Blair can tell him there's plenty of time to play world statesman, but when the global economy's marginally less sound than a chocolate teapot it takes slightly more than being macho and talking about looking down the barrel. Whether it's G8, G20 or gee whiz, only the Chinese seem to get it, Balls and Milibland are apologising fit to bust and we wait to see if Boy Dave has what it takes to be a man.
Forgive us our doubts when his interventionist threats come against a background of £4.7bn defence cuts which have left Britain without the aircraft carrier necessary for bold buccaneering.
Meanwhile, the lads still valiantly fighting in Afghanistan must be praying that the bean counting civil servants haven't watched too much TV coverage from Libya. If they have, then in the next wave of cuts they could all find themselves tackling the Taliban from the back of a fleet of tatty Toyota pick-ups.
A PRIMARY school teacher named Miss Cady once told our class it was impossible to visualise a million pounds. Jonathan Foley, who possessed a shockingly vivid but, as I discovered later, accurate grasp of the facts of life, vowed to prove her wrong and on Monday morning announced he'd counted every quid. We didn't believe him.
It's hard to visualise £12bn lost on the dud NHS computer system, £469m on fire brigade control centres, and the £365m the UK Passport Agency ended up paying to Siemens for an £80m project; and not one inflation-proof civil servant losing their job.
Miss Cady would never have believed it, and Foley wouldn't even have tried.
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DaveC44
Unregistered User
Oct 10, 13:21
Report commentIt's very easy to visualise what a billion pounds means. There about 60 million people in the UK. If you divide a billion pounds by 60 million it means that every person in the UK - men, women, children, prisoners, oap's, illegal immigrants - everyone last one puts in about £17. After tax.
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