by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
British government spent 400,000 GPB (USD 625,000) on twelve fig trees for the atrium of Portcullis House, the new “home” of the Members of Parliament. No wonder the country is broke.
This is another one of those contracts like the one for the aircraft carriers that would cost the country five times as much to cancel than to actually build the carriers, which will not have any planes, and to scrap them in a few years after building them.
Both of those contracts came to us courtesy of the Blair/Brown Labour administration but the Con-Lid coalition is about as stupid, in that they are going to privatize the police, and the gods only know what else.
Is it, with stupidity like that, any wonder that, as a country, Britain is more or less broke and has no money left? I am not surprised anymore at all as I can see waste on a local government level on a daily basis and central government is but local government on a large scale.
While services, essential ones even, have to be cut, workers laid off or have to accept pay freezes or even pay cuts, etc., stupid contracts are entered into and are maintained. Who, I would like to know, and millions beside me, is getting his or her palm greased.
Public sector workers in Britain face a third year having to accept a pay freeze (but that is the workers only and not the ones at the top) while central government spends nigh on half a million Pounds on buying and then the best part of fifty thousand Pounds on maintenance for a dozen fig trees. Are they out of their minds?
This shows, once again, that those in Whitehall and especially our politicians in the Houses of Parliament, do not live, to all intents and purposes, on the same planet as the rest of us. They seem to be in Cloud Cuckoo Land and away with the fairies.
Still, despite all this and still more, the majority of the British people, in general, are totally apathetic on this level and keep voting the same characters into office time and again.
© 2012
