Cameron's Great Aid Scandal!

At last the media has started to skewer Cameron’s ludicrous and irredeemably wasteful foreign aid programme.

 

Currently in the cross-hairs is Ruanda.

 

This little country in  back-of-beyond Africa, a former Belgian colony, had one of the worst genocides in history. More people were butchered than were killed by both atomic bombs.

 

It is currently getting £250,000,000 from the British taxpayer. The ruling dictator has been pictured many times with Cameron, Andrew Mitchell and other big-shots, basking in the publicity and legitimacy given to him by all these photo-ops.

 

And here is how it works.

 

Most of the money is not for specific projects. It is allocated as ‘DBS’. Direct budget support means that we say ‘Here’s the money. Spend it how you choose!’ The outcomes are hardly surprising. DFID will say that there are spending parameters, so that money can only be spent in DFID-priority areas.

Is that right? On my last major DFID assignment, I was responsible for spending a great deal of their money, and I was never asked once what I was doing with it.

 

I did once suggest to Andrew Mitchell that there should be a DFID auditor in every DFID Regional Office. I guess they will get around to it.

 

Even if the money is spent properly, a major effect is to release funds for rather more sinister purposes.

 

Nigel Lawson said on C4 Despatches that DFID just shovels the money out and lets Ruanda just spend. And they use it to fund rebel massacres in the Congo. The aid money is almost exactly equivalent to the Ruandan military budget.

 

The President of Ruanda poses as a true democrat because they have ‘free and fair’ elections. A slight snag here is that opposition candidates tend to get murdered or exiled before the elections.

 

One opposition leader was found decapitated. The Ruandans even had the effrontery to send a hit-squad to London to take out a British opposition activist, who is now under police protection.

 

Is this the exception that proves the rule?

 

Not at all. Two examples.

 

The late unlamented President of Malawi spent a huge tranche of his aid money on an executive jet and a fleet of Mercedes for his cronies. And when I was working on an aid programme in another African country, I stumbled upon the fact that aid money allocated to buy 600 ambulances had actually been spent on 300 SUVs.

 

This racket has been going on for years, and there is a very large body of literature exposing the dreadful waste and corruption that accompany aid programmes.

 

Cameron’s fixation with foreign aid is incomprehensible. Its budget has increased by 37% at a time of huge cuts in public services at home. DFID is swamped in money to the extent that it is parking large amounts in the World Bank for lack of capacity to spend it on aid programmes.

 

Footnote: DFID refused to be interviewed for the Despatches programme. No surprise there, then!

 

 

 

 

Rotherham: who wins? PC or love?

In the light of the Rotherham scandal I ask myself whether there is something temperamentally flawed in women who get top public service jobs – poor judgment, lack of nous, and so on.

 

The major local government scandals of recent years have all had women at the heart of them.

 

There was the Victoria Climbie tragedy, in which social workers knew that this toddler was being subjected to severe and frequent beatings but failed to intervene because ‘physical punishment is part of African culture’, never mind that it is a crime in English culture.

 

Then we had Baby P in which a small child, known to be at risk from parental violence and neglect, was left to die. The female head of the department took an early bath as a result.

 

We had the Birmingham vote rigging scandal. The judge at the subsequent election court said that it would disgrace a banana republic. So the female CEO resigned. To spend more time with her severance pay? Nope. She was appointed head of immigration at an even higher salary, which might explain a few things about the current state of immigration.

 

There was the fiasco at Suffolk County Council, where the CEO almost brought it to its knees before she too rode off into the sunset, not exactly poorer but wiser.

 

Now we have Rotherham.

 

The head of the department, Ms Thacker, that has removed children from the foster parents care without any investigation or prior consultation with  the foster parents but purely on a tip-off by a nark that they belonged to UKIP.

 

Ms Thacker has a bit of form.

 

She was in charge when the Asian child-raping outrages occurred. She has some questions to answer there, including whether it is a fact that she suppressed information that all of the culprits were Asian.

 

She commented that it was ‘interesting’ that child abusers on her patch were Asian.

 

Then there is the case of Laura Wilson, a 17-year  old single mother. She was murdered by an Asian and her body thrown into a canal. She was known to be seriously at risk; in her 17 years she had come to the attention of 15  care organisations. She got little help from Rotherham authorities.

 

My prediction? That’s easy. After her car-crash interviews on radio and TV she will depart shortly with a hand-bag of council tax-payers’ Wonga.

 

To revert to my original question, the answer is no, there is nothing inherent. The real explanation is that many ‘right-on’ councils may have chosen women CEOs and other big-shots not from merit but to show how terribly correct they are in matters of ‘equality’. If they happen to be sympathisers of TIGMOO, so much the better.

 

Let me close with a small anecdote.

 

When I was working in post-apartheid South Africa I watched a middle-aged couple being interviewed on TV. They were typical Afrikaners, big, tough as old boots. And they were heart-broken. Why? Because they had been fostering a little black girl – yes, black – until they came up against the local Thacker, who took the child away.

 

 Yet another PC apparatchik who couldn’t understand that race has nothing to do with love

 

 

 

Obama & the media: in bed together?

What ho in Bangkok?  Is there an Obama curse? He played the PM and the King like a bold romancer and what happened?

 

 Threats of a coup, exposure of more corruption; same old Thailand we know and love.

 

Then Hillary moves into Cairo and glorifies Mohamud Morsi to the hilt. He then turns around and declares himself the new pharo.

 

What happened to freedom in the press in the USA? Time was when our national newspapers reported the facts and left opinions to the editorial page. We knew their political leanings, but they did not color the reporting, or at least we believe they didn't. Unlike the UK and Europe, American newspapers were not identified with political parties or ideologies.

 

Today, Fox News is manifestly right wing. OK, no problem with that as they are consistent although their motto is 'fair and balanced'.

 

The other national news sources are not as blatantly left in their reporting as they are in what they fail to report. Seldom, does the non-Fox  media criticize Obama. One might think there is an accord between the network news agencies, the national papers and the White House to be kind to O.

 

Indeed, some go to extremes in idolizing him and his administration. This is a new phenomenon for American journalism that I have yet to fully understand. What motivates them to be so delinquent in exposing his antics?

Obama: 'send me somewhere east of Suez...'

Our lad is happily making himself look like a fool in Southeast Asia while those in opposition continue to lick their wounds. Some argue O should be back home dealing with the Gaza crisis, but I am not sure his presence there, or anywhere else, would be much of a boon.

 

 

Fox news insists that an invasion of Gaza is immanent while our domestic version of CNN and the networks are holding out for a deus ex machina in the form of a cease fire negotiated in Egypt.

 

Egypt, my Lord, Egypt. American savants are still arguing over the true nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohamed Morsi looks more and more like an Ayatollah every day. I am sure we have a bevy of functionaries reminding him hourly that the money we give to Egypt is intended to keep the country on our side.

 

 

Everyone knows that this affair could lead to the war with Iran that Israel seems to so desperately want. As for the Gazans, cannon fodder and their leaders are dancing to the tune of the mullahs.

 

I caught a glimpse of Hillary Clinton today. She was in Burma/Myanmar and was largely eclipsed by O himself. The more I see of her the more I am convinced she takes dressing and beauty advice from Angela Merkel. I fully admit that I haven't a clue as to where Hillary's mind is these days. Nary a whisper of or about her from the pundits.

 

 

She must be in deep shadenfreud over the whipping Susan Rice has been taking over her loud, clear and eminently false statements that Benghazi was the result of an anti-Muslim film. When O first appointed Rice, he made it clear she would answer directly to him and not to the Secretary of State.

 

 

Finally, O stepped in to rescue Rice asking the bullies in the Senate to pick on him rather than her. Middle school antics all around.

 

House of Crooks!

 

I don’t make a practice of recycling round-robin e-mails; they usually get ‘delete’ unread.

 

But I thought that this one deserved a wider circulation

 

Can you imagine working for a company that only has a little more than 635 employees, but, has the following employee statistics..

29 have been accused of spouse abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
9 have been accused of writing bad cheques
17 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have done time for assault
71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
8 have been arrested for shoplifting
21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
84 have been arrested for drink driving in the last year

And collectively, this year alone, they have cost the British tax payer a cool £92,993,748 in
Expenses!!!

Which organisation is this?


It's the 635 members of the United Kingdom House of Commons.

The same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.

What a bunch of crooks we have running our country - it says it all...

And just to top all that they probably have the best 'corporate' pension scheme in the country - whilst trying to ensure that everyone else has the worst possible!!

The Artful (tax) Dodgers!

For some time the financial pages have been running shock-horror accounts of the tax affairs of large international companies, in particular Starbucks, Microsoft  and Amazon.

 

The bottom line is that they don’t pay any, at least in the case of Starbucks.

 

I am one of the few people who has never entered one of their places, but I understand that they sell very expensive cups of what they call ’coffee’, although people tell me that this is this gets a bit close to the boundaries of the trades description laws.

 

So how much tax does this very successful company pay in the UK?

 

Nothing. Zilch. Naff-all!

 

Why do they avoid tax? Because they can. They are doing nothing illegal.

 

How? By not making any UK profit.

 

One of their spin doctors was being interviewed on TV news by an anchor who didn’t know her subject. He spent his time successfully throwing dust in her eyes, explaining how they do in fact pay VAT, NI and other stuff.

 

But this is how it really works.

 

The UK presence is set up as an English company, a separate legal persona. The US company then charges a ‘licence fee’ for the use of the Starbucks brand. What they don’t tell you is that the fee is set at a level that is the equivalent of the profit before tax. So no corporation tax is payable.

 

Trebles all round.

 

It’s not just these three firms. Most very large companies have ‘tax efficient vehicles’. News International is registered in Delaware, a notably tax-friendly location. That’s how it writes off the huge losses on The Times. 90% have such off-shore vehicles. It is relatively simple. You are trading in a foreign country through a subsidiary. You have another subsidiary in a tax haven. This lends money to your foreign company, which amount coincides with the profit. When the loan is redeemed there is no taxable profit to be seen.

 

The two biggest tax havens? No, not the BVA, or Luxembourg or Switzerland, but the City and the US.

 

Is there a solution?

 

An intriguing suggestion is to abolish corporation tax entirely and replace it with a dividend tax.

 

Whether this has legs I have no idea, but I will keep tabs on it!

The Petraeus Pentangle: a take from Texas

My take of the generals is a bit different from yours. I see all sorts of circumstantial activity surrounding a feud between rival bonkers. David Petraeus  is a brilliant general and strategist. However, when confronted with a pretty woman he falls to pieces. He comes across as a geek and not a lover. While he can mastermind a war on several fronts, he goes all mealy mouth and giddy when it comes to women.

 

John Allen appears to be more practiced in the art of love. He must be with some 30,000 pages of sexually explicit e-mails to his squeeze, the lovely Jill Kelly. Reportedly, both John and David were entertaining her.

 

Jill is an unpaid 'social organizer' for the ranking officers and is likely collecting trophies of her star-studded conquests.

 

Paula Broadwell is the most sinister of the lot. She hung on Dave like white on snow and she was jealous of her general. That is why she threatened Jill with e-mails which I gather is the modern way of marking one's territory. Part II of he biography on David will probably be x rated.

 

The husbands and wives of this foursome are incidental to the main plot.

 

I am sure that David will testify over the Benghazi hearings as he is remarkably good at it. He is not intimidated by the likes of Senator Dianne Feinstein and her Senate Intelligence Committee, although I bet he would blush at the site of women's undergarments hanging out to dry.

 

Parallel to the sexcapade is the Benghazi attack. David has already been reported to have a clear view of both the true story and the White House version. The real drama in all of this is which version will David ultimately admit to. Telling the truth would put  him seriously crosswise with Obama and Co. And it is still important for David to maintain good relations with O and Co.

 

 

My call here is that David will own up to the truth in all instances regardless of the consequences. He will act to preserve his image and as a good West Point graduate and will follow the code of honor on the night.

.

 

General Petraeus; more than meets the eye?

The resignation of General Petraeus from head of the CIA should provide rich tilth for the conspiracy theorists, but it must be said that there is a whiff of sulphur about the whole affair.

 

The story so far is that the FBI received complaints from women of abusive and threatening  e-mails. On investigation, it turned up e-mails from Petraeus that showed he was having an affair with his biographer.

 

But the CIA was kept in the dark about this investigation until the very last minute. The Director of National Intelligence was similarly not kept informed. Obama was only told on election night. The Head of the Senate Intelligence committee was not told at all.

 

Are we seeing a reversion to the pre-9/11 shambles in which the intelligence agencies refused to co-operate with one another? In which they spent much time on spying on each other instead of on their legitimate targets? Even a replay of the J Edgar Hoover practice of keeping secret records on prominent people for purposes which were not exactly in the line of duty?

 

Or is there another story?

 

In the wake of the murder of the US Ambassador in Benghazi, we were initially told that it was a rioting mob. Then it was a terrorist attack. Then it was a renegade Libyan militia. And finally, one of the wilder stories is that it was a CIA operation  to set-up a prisoner exchange that went wildly wrong, a story so patently absurd that it might just be true.

 

The Ambassador was dragged form his car en-route to a safe house, sodomised and killed. Or he asphyxiated through smoke-inhalation in the Consulate after it was set on fire.

 

Congress was due to question Petraeus shortly. Presumably he can be subpoenaed to appear even though he has no official position, but he could also refuse to be forthcoming without any substantial repercussions because he is no longer in Government service.

 

When Obama appointed Petraeus well before the Republicans had chosen their POTUS candidate, he removed a potential threat because Petraeus was being trailed as a possible rival. Petraeus has served his purpose and can now be safely discarded.

 

And the received wisdom is that Petraeus is now tainted with adultery which rules him out as a threat to the Democrats next time around.

 

Or so it is said. But if that particular sin is a disbarment from high office, it never applied to Roosevelt, Ike (whose long affair with Kate Somersby was common knowledge for years), JFK, and, of course, the champion Bill Clinton.

 

One for Tom Clancy or Frederick Forsyth, perhaps? Or Matt!

 'I wouldn't call that shock and awe!'

 

 

The Beeb, boobs, and bias........

Oh dear, can it get any worse for Statler and Waldorf a.k.a Entwhistle and Lord Fat-pang at the BBC?

 

Savile’s Travails looks set to run almost as long as ‘Jim will fix it’ (an alternative ‘f’ word might be more appropriate here).

 

The Beeb has made a balls of the whole thing, culminating in Entwhistle’s pathetic apologia and Patten unwisely telling the Minister to get her tanks off the Broadcasting House lawn.

 

We had the Newsnight fiasco when the Savile expose was pulled, and then scooped by ITV.

 

Now we have the MacAlpine affair.

 

Once again it seems that the programme-makers skipped the elementary stage for any controversial story. They failed to clear it with their in-house ‘m learned friends. And in the MacAlpine case, they shrank from actually naming this elderly, distinguished (and very, very wealthy) old gent. Instead they snidely hinted as to where the name could be found on the internet.

 

Writs will fly like confetti.

 

The survival of Newsnight now looks a strong possibility. And the word is that the BBC news operation is like an up-turned rats nest, with everyone rushing for he exits.

 

‘At scenes so tragic I can scarce forbear to laugh’.

 

With motor-mouth MP Tom Watson getting in on the act, who knows where it will all end, especially as it was Watson who let Murdoch off the hook in the Commons committee.

 

And if that’s not enough, the excellent The Commentator has published damning evidence of BBC left-wing bias.

 

This has been a ‘given’ for years but now we have so facts to confirm our beliefs.

 

Over the last 10 years, the BBC has spent £335,000 with the Labour Party, £295,000 with the Liberals. And the Conservative Party? A measly £96,000.

 

And there’s the Balen Report. No, I had never heard of it either, which is not surprising because it has been suppressed for years.

 

This was a high level internal investigation into accusations of extreme anti-Israel bias in reporting on events in Gaza. The suspicion is that the conclusions were so damaging   that the mandarins at the Beeb refused to make the report public, and they have successfully fought-off all FOI requests.

 

But before we start to wallow in schadenfreude, just bear in mind who will be picking up the massive tab for all this.

 

 

 

Sandra: New Yorkers the new Londoners?

The WW2 poster ‘Keep calm, and carry on’ has had an enormous revival in these troubled times, as tee shirts and tea-mugs. The probable reason is that it represents our self-image as people who meet disaster and crisis with a shrug of the shoulders, with ‘business as usual’ being the theme.

 

And it is true. The day after 7/7 London was almost back to normal with people calmly going about their business. When a small Yorkshire town was almost immobilised by freezing weather a couple of winters ago because the emergency services were unable to get to them because of snow, the people simply turned out and cleared the roads themselves. When the local Council closed the fresh-produce market because they said the ice made it too dangerous, the traders simply ignored it, set up stall, and carried on.

 

We also tend to believe, rather sniffily, that those Yanks are more inclined to over-react and panic in a crisis.

 

No so, if the response to Sandra was any guide.

 

Sandra threw in the lot. High winds, flood, fire, tunnels inundated, roads closed, public transport and airlines at a standstill, food and water shortages, no electricity or gas, no petrol, and even mobile phones inoperable because the transmission towers were out.

 

The view from here was that there was no panic, no looting, no rioting, no crime, just a ‘stuff happens’ shrug of the shoulders, and a determination to get over it.

 

One old boy interviewed on TV amidst the wreckage of his home, simply responded with a rueful smile and a ‘We can fix it’. In another interview we were first shown the picture of a beautiful beach-front house, then another of matchwood. The owner seemed far from down-hearted. He has already started to clear the site for rebuilding.

 

It was inspiring rather than depressing.

 

Are New Yorkers the new Londoners?

 

 

Savile witch-hunt?

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the media seems to be following its normal course of never letting the facts get in the way of a good story.

 

In the Speccie today, Rod Liddle questions whether they are deliberately suppressing or ignoring evidence that might suggest that some of the people claiming to be abused by Jimmy Savile are actually telling porkies.

 

He led me to one Anna Raccoon (www.annaraccoon.com) who was an inmate at Duncroft, the reform school where JS is alleged to have abused underage girls.

 

In a lengthy blog, she sets out the reaction of the media to evidence that doesn’t quite fit the present witch-hunt. Whether she is genuine or a bandwagon-climbing fruitcake I have no idea, but Liddle for one is taking her seriously.

 

One claims to have been molested by JS when shewas14. But it is now alleged that she was 23 at the time of the JS visit and had left the school 9 years previously.

 

A man now says that he was lured into the back-seat of Savile’s car but grabbed the door-handle and leaped out. Except that the car was a Rolls Corniche which is two-door and so has no rear handles.

 

Another woman claims to have been abused at age 14 by JS when she was in the audience of ‘Clunk-click’. But she was 16 when she was present for that particular programme.

 

It would seem that the media are not interested in any of these stories, neither are they interested in interviewing others whose testimony rather tends to gainsay the juicy stuff, such as the old lady who was in charge of Duncroft at all material times (they door-stepped her initially, but rapidly lost interest when what she had to say didn’t follow the script).

 

And it was reported yesterday that  Messrs Sue, Grabbit & Runne are now on the case coincidentally with the announcement that Savile’s £4 million estate has been frozen. No surprises there, then.

 

Could it possibly be that the decision to drop the Newsnight expose was correct after all?

Sandy latest.....

People in the Northeast are still wringing themselves out after Sandra had her way. New Yorkers do not tolerate inconvenience very well and tempers are reportedly short.

 

It is amazing to me that some of New York's tunnels flooded so quickly and easily. The Brooklyn - Battery Park tunnel is still full and it may take weeks to pump out the water. There are widespread reports of sewage, debris and gasoline mixed with flood water throughout the City. Wall Street is now operating and its buildings were not flooded.

 

Elsewhere, in Queens, some 80 houses were leveled by fire. Amazingly, one was ignited, perhaps by an exploding electrical transformer, and the strong winds blew the flames across a wide swath of homes. There were very close to one another.

 

Elsewhere, Americans were not much affected. The worst hit were people who lived along the shore, especially the New York and New Jersey shores.

 

 We are told to expect a small increase in insurance premiums in order for the insurance companies to recoup their losses and to better protect them in future. Gasoline prices have declined in anticipation of a drop in consumption. Perhaps worst of all are the large numbers of people stranded in the path of the storm who are unable to find a seat on slowly remobilizing aircraft.

 

JFK was totally flooded but is now partially operational. We have friends who are stranded in New Haven Connecticut and don't expect to fly home before the weekend.

 

People are comparing Sandy with Katrina in terms of the cost they bore. Katrina was much more devastating, but Sandy hit the high rent district and its flooding cost loss of business revenue, hampered all types of public transportation and otherwise did little damage. Katrina, on the other hand, raised havoc with homes and infrastructure owing to its high winds. In short, Sandy was a humongous water storm while Katrina was a winds storm.

EU budget: adding to the gaiety of nations!

Was it only on 27^th October that I wrote about the EU being back on the political front-page after being verboten for years as a topic for polite conversation?

 

Well, it was back with a vengeance last night when Cameron got hammered over the EU budget vote.

 

So what’s it all about?

 

For starters, it’s about €3 trillion (that’s right – trillion). That’s the size of the7-year budget proposal. The cost to the UK is £144 for every man, woman and child. Of this no less than 40% is spent on agriculture, the lion’s share going to wealthy agro-business, rather than to small farmers.

 

Winners include Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states, and the East Europeans. Losers are Germany, France, the UK and Italy. Italy in particular is between a rock and a hard place, since its economy and public finances are dire at a time when it could be facing a very large increase in its contribution.

 

The European Parliament is another player in this trillion euro poker game.

 

It wants more of its ‘own’ money to spend, independent of member states. It says that it will veto the whole budget if it doesn’t get its own way. But the reality is that they wouldn’t have the bottle – they are not overly-popular as it is.

 

Then there is the European Commission wanting its own large slice of the pie. Its proposal stacks up to €1091 billion, an inflation-busting 6%.

 

If Dave gets the ‘freeze’ he wants the UK contribution could actually rise by €2.4 billion over the 7-year budget period.

 

If the budget is vetoed, the existing budget would be carried over, plus  2% inflation allowance. The next step could be to present a completely new budget, and under the EU’s arcane procedures this could be carried by a majority vote.

 

So Dave’s veto would be ineffective. Actually, not quite. Getting a new budget through would take forever and a day. They would have to decide no less than 55 separate spending areas. The new member states could lose out badly, as the current budget proposals would give them proportionately more money.

 

Expect this story to run and run.

 

Meanwhile we must sit back and enjoy watching the whole politically and financially unsustainable monster tear itself apart.

 

As Confucius said ‘ few things are more agreeable than seeing your neighbour fall off his roof’.