Toby on Tuesday 

‘Charity/Fatuity’

 

I though that this week I’d offer a modest proposal to our Chancellor, George Osborne, as our public borrowing is now the second highest of all OECD members at 5% of GNP, way ahead of the numbers for Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico and even Greece, and still running at close to £100 billion a year. Now above all else we really want to live well with our neighbours, but the two ways to ensure that we fall out with them are first to have an open door policy, with completely uncontrolled coming and going, and second to share a joint bank account, from which they can help themselves at will. That is why the whole Euro project, which was designed to create goodwill between the nations of Europe, has led only to mutual recrimination and mistrust.

Of course the same problem goes well beyond the shores of the so-called “European Union”. At a time of pressing social need within Britain, our net contributions to the EU budget and to the Overseas Aid budget are both running at very similar levels of around £13 billion a year and, as our economy grows, these figures are forecast to increase to some £16-17 billion a year each by 2020. And both of budgets are riddled with fraud and corruption. The EU budget has not been properly audited for 19 years now and infiltration by the Mafia and criminal gangs is endemic. As for Overseas Aid, much of this is simply stolen or spent on schemes that are beyond parody.

Now we all know that David Cameron has declared that, other than same-sex marriage, his proudest achievement is spending 0.7% of GNP on Overseas Aid. So a sensible step at this time of immense pressure on our public finances would be to include our net contribution to the EU budget in our calculation of Overseas Aid. Together they currently amount to some 1.4% of GNP at £26-27 billion a year. By reducing the combined total to the internationally approved 0.7% of GNP figure, we would meet this supposed obligation as a Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council while rebalancing our out-of-control public spending. In economics there is something called the multiplier effect by which public expenditure spent at home generates additional value for the economy. Money disappearing abroad has a corresponding negative effect.

So let’s spend more of our limited resources on our own people and their needs, deny European crime syndicates and Third World despots their funding and bring a degree of integrity back to our public spending. And I offer this modest proposal to our Chancellor as evidence that UKIP, now fully recovered from gaining only one seat in May’s General Election despite winning nearly 4 million votes, is now needed more than ever!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby