Aid, I need Aid!

Much is being said on the internet and the press about Prime Minister Cameron's latest uttering s about maybe taking money out of the overseas aid budget to prop up security instead.

Now I have to say that I have become so disillusioned  with politicians and politics that I have been fairly quiet on that front recently and not even any feel good stories have drawn me out of the stupor that I am in, have there in fact been any feel good stories that I may have missed, thought not!

I even have to confess that I am not up to date with what the latest hulaballoo is all about, as I really can't bring myself to look at in in any great detail!

But, what is annoying me even more and prompting this little return to the fray is the mention of oversees aid, again.  £10 billion is the UK's budget for overseas aid I believe.  Don't get me wrong I am all for helping out those less fortunate than ourselves and we should do it without any strings attached, and hope those we are giving aid to, manage to get their countries together making them a better place for their own people to live in.  We hope the aid we give to the leaders of these countries is going to be put to the most beneficial use, but unfortunately, and all to often, all we end up with, is feed back from news specials about the corruption and the misappropriation of funding in the countries that we give to. Or, as in the case of India and Pakistan who we have giving millions if not billions of pounds to over the years, and who are continually firing shots at each other, while they both spend billions on their nuclear arsenals, and while the majority of their country folk live in abject poverty with no proper road, hospital, school, sanitary or welfare infrastructures.

The same can be said for most if not all of the African countries who also receive aid from us too.  And then over the last couple of days I have heard that we should be proud as again, Prime Minister Cameron has stated his intent that the overseas aid payments will be maintained and that Britain's should be proud as we are the 'ONLY COUNTRY TO CONTINUE TO DO THIS'.

Now this brings me to another point about our own 'Green and Pleasant Land' where aid is also needed in the form of food banks to stop our own unemployed and out of work and low paid folk who are finding it increasingly more difficult to feed and clothe themselves on a daily basis let alone from week to week as we did not so long ago with our weekly trip to the supermarket, stumbling back to our cars with the burden of the overfilled trolley safe in the knowledge that we had enough food and detergent and toilet paper to last us the week before we had to make the return trip.

Now, people in our country are the starving masses, as they are in every other Western democratic country, with the only thing, free to us, for the moment, the air that we breath. Everything else is taxed, food, clothing, fuel and in the UK the poorest in our society are to be hit with the latest Tax invention, The Bedroom Tax.  yes, you read that correctly, the current government, made up of a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are bringing in a Tax system that will take those on low paid or out work and receiving state benefits, with a reduction in the benefits they receive if they have empty bedrooms in their homes!

Prime Minister Cameron came to power with the war cry of 'our big society' the idea I think was to make us all be inclusive and to think not only about ourselves but our neighbours and our towns and villages and districts and ultimately our country.  That everything that we do should be done on the basis that it will not only improve our own lives, but everyone else's lives by the help and the sacrifices and the tightening of our belts; And the Government would do their part too!  This was a policy that every one should adhere to, government, councils and businesses.  But it seems to me that penalising people for having empty bedrooms is not a moral or just way to go about it, as it was our Governments who created the problem in the first place.

The bedroom tax is, I fear, designed to push people out of their homes, homes that they may have lived in all of their lives so that those homes can be given to people with families, regardless if your sons and daughters and grandchildren visit you on a regular basis.  When you are forced to downsize you are effectively being told that you are now no longer allowed to have family visits.  There are even cases where couples who might have two bedrooms but one of the parties is sick and or disabled.  This may mean that they can't sleep together in the same bed in the same room.  But the rules say that if they are married or in a common law relationship  THEY MUST SHARE THE SAME ROOM, and therefore one room is technically free and therefore if they are on benefits, as they are likely to be as one is unable to work and the other is a carer, then they will receive a cut in their benefits!

Since the 1980's when the Tories introduced the 'right to buy' scheme where council tenants were actively encouraged to buy their own homes from the council, at below market prices, and with councils NOT ALLOWED to reinvest the shortfall in monies raised by building replacement stock, a policy that the Labour did not change when they were in power for 10 + years, the number of council houses available to the public has shrunk to the dwindling numbers that we have today, and as families have grown up, children have had families of their own, there has been insufficient housing stock built in the public sector to meet the needs of the unemployed and low paid, so family members who are on benefits now, must pay a price for the inadequacies of our Governments who continue to mismanage and govern badly on our behalf -  So much for an inclusive and caring society.

The other battle cry of the politicians is the attack on those people on long term benefits in that they have been conditioned into receiving these benefits and because generations of the same families have never worked, their children and their children's children are therefore also conditioned into not working but to sticking their hands out to receive the 'free' benefits that those of us who work must pay for through taxation.  So coming back full circle to overseas aid my questions are:

Are there countries out there that receive overseas development aid from the UK and other countries who are conditioned into receiving this aid?
Is the aid given to these countries being misappropriated by corrupt local politicians?
Is the aid being provided, the wrong aid?

Let's quickly look at the last question there.  It's that time of year again in the UK for RED NOSE DAY where we are encouraged to donate to charities to help out the poor in third world countries.  So, the millions that they raise, added to the already £10 billion that we pay for through taxation means that third world countries are certainly getting a lot of money each year, just like benefit recipients do, and they need do nothing at all to receive their 'reward' except live in abject poverty with starvation, drought and who knows what else thrown in for bad measure!

But there is one other constant, and it has been a constant for as long as I can remember seeing these images on the TV screen and even when I have been to Africa, and it is this.

You have large cities, and let's take Mombasa and Nairobi. Cities of gleaming steel, concrete and glass in the centre but surrounded, like a doughnut with shanty towns with little or no sanitation or clean water supplies. No power lines, no sewerage or water pipes, no metalled roads, nothing, nada; no infrastructure that allows a country to grow and develop, yet we continue to give hand over fist and investing in schemes that maybe help a few thousand instead of tens or hundreds of thousands? It is madness, yet we keep doing it, Why?

Why not, instead of giving these countries millions of pounds in cash each each year do we not just say enough is enough and every developed country who does try and help, instead just send their Army Corps of Engineers with all their equipment and we build proper roads, with sewerage runs, with the plants that go with them, Water pipes, electric pylons and metalled roads.  We can then give them prefabricated houses that can be built along these metalled road routes and get the people of the slums they are living in with the infrastructure in place.  Surely this would be better than continually pouring our money into an abyss of apathy and greed feeding local politicians and their corrupt regimes?

I only ask this as I seem to be unable to understand it all, maybe I'm just thick!

Social Housing Sell Off - Conservatives Never learn from Past Mistakes

I heard a snippet on the news this morning as I passed a radio that Government are saying that council house tenants may get up to £70k knocked off the cost of their house should they wish to buy it.

Now we all know that the cost of most council houses that form terraced streets are not that large, but have over inflated prices, that the estate agents and BANKS propped up from the 80's and continue to do so today, so there will still be a substantial mortgage left to pay on the property.  Of course another reason for the inflated price of houses in the UK was the last disastrous sell off of council homes, also led by the Conservatives, this time assisted by the LIB Dems, and ignored by Labour, was that Councils were not allowed to use the money to build  more social houses to replace that which was lost.... SHAME ON ALL POLITICIANS FOR THAT DEBACLE OF BAD GOVERNANCE

Of course the Government will argue that SOME COUNCIL HOUSES are too large for some of there occupants and they want to throw them out into single bedroom homes or care homes, just so that their families, sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters can't come for a sleep over, unless they all huddle on the floor of the lounge of the single bed home they want to force the current occupants to move into.....

Grant Shapps MP (@grantshapps twitter) Welwyn Hatfield MP and Minister of State for Housing & Local Government. Website here http://www.shapps.com is always harping on about the good that he is doing for housing and local government, well Grant I have news for you, you aren't!  You are doing exactly what your predecessors before you did, you are creating a disaster for the rest of us to clear up, or not, in the not to distant future.

Is it just me?  Every day I see and hear ministers and opposition members of Parliament prattling on about the need to create jobs, and yes there are undoubtedly SOME jobs being created, but more and more jobs are being lost and unless some government brings in a law to restrict the use of labour saving technological advances that science is making every day, more and more jobs will be lost to these technologies with no hope of bringing them back...

If the work place is shrinking and our children are suffering the deprivation of poor and inadequate education to their and our future detriment, for goodness sake we aren't even teaching them how to claim benefits, although many learn that easy lesson from their parents, yet we do tell immigrants, legal and illegal how to do that!

The point is that while we should all aspire to be more in life than we are and to, if we can, be in a position to, buy and own our own homes it is an easy move from home ownership to being thrown out in the street when you fall behind when that manageable mortgage is suddenly no longer mangageable.  I have no statistics to back this up but I would be interested to know if after the first time this sell off occured under a previous Conservative Government what was the average debt level of a council house tenant when they rented their house and what it rose to after they 'bought' their council house and fell into the trap of being in the coveted position of being a 'home owner'.  What is it with we Brits, why are we conned so easily into believing that home ownership IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO?

Did you know that only 39 percent of Germans own their own home, compared 68 percent in the U.K.   . Apparently Spain has the highest rate among advanced industrial nations in Europe at 82 per cent and in France it is around 56 per cent.  So while Spain beats us in this and I have no idea why, and maybe that is another reason to add for their current economic gloom which apparently is worse than ours, unless you are a banker or an MP or a member of the non elected upper house, with the salaries, expenses bonuses and platinum pensions, can you AFFORD TO BUY YOUR OWN HOME.  If I was sitting in a council house paying rent today, I would have to think long and hard about it and the answer would most definitely be a resounding NO.

Why, when so many people are unemployed? Why, when factories requiring thousand of shift workers are not being planned? Why, when so many people, like the country, are in debt? 

WHY, ARE THE GOVERNMENT TRYING TO CON PEOPLE INTO BUYING HOMES THAT THEY MAY NOT BE IN A POSITION TO MAINTAIN THE PAYMENTS FOR, WHY?

related posts:  It's all about delivery - response to a Grant Shapps speach