Government Waste

[Lonan3]

From The Times:

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2030087,00.html

 

Total public expenditure during the current financial year will be about £519 billion.

 

According to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a pressure group that monitors what Gordon Brown does with our money, £82 billion of that will be wasted, either on giant projects that have completely run out of financial control, or on well-meaning but fruitless schemes.

 

Examples:

 

MEPs allowed to claim up to 21 visits a year to the sauna on their expenses.

 

The £2,500 retraining grant paid by the RAF to Aircraftwoman Stephanie Hulme to fly from her Northern Ireland base to a London hotel last year to train for a new career as a stripper is but loose change in the bigger picture of profligate misuse of public money.

 

The Department for Constitutional Affairs, for example, spends £9 million a year on outside consultants — including one who is paid £2,100 a day — compared with £700,000 in 1997 when it was still called the Lord Chancellor’s Department.

£1,900 million of Britain’s annual EU contribution goes to subsidise farmers in other European countries, including £88 million to tobacco farmers whose crop is so foul that Europeans refuse to smoke it.

 

It almost makes our lot seem reasonable!