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!

Its all about delivery - A response to a Speech by Grant Shapps MP

I have just read the draft speech given by (The Rt Hon) Grant Shapps MP, Minister of State, Minister for Housing and Local Government.

The reason for the brackets above is that I just can’t bring myself to call any of these people honourable and reading his speech, it is no wonder. 

He does have some good ideas and he is driving these ideas through but just read the speech and see and judge for yourself. It is his opening remarks that make him as honourable as a Middle Eastern dictator and shows you that it is a game of ping pong with our lives between the political parties that makes them all dishonourable; this is what he says.

“Are you a veteran if you've done the same job for five years?
Normally the answer would be no - unless of course you cover the Government's housing portfolio like I do.
During this time I've seen a total of eight - yes eight - opposing Housing Ministers come and go.
But does this matter?
Well yes if you care about the state of housing in this country.
An endless reshuffling of the ministerial pack meant an endless reshuffling of ideas and initiatives.
But this conveyer belt of policies didn't deliver - and we all watched in horror as the housing sector entered its darkest hours since the 1920s.”

So, it was Labours inadequacies in power that caused the housing problem that we find ourselves in today, according to those few sentences.

They do say that it is always the ‘winners’ that write ‘history’ and once again here we have politicians who won the last election re-writing our recent social history.

Let’s be clear about this, Labour did nothing to bring any amelioration to the housing situation we face in the UK today, BUT, they did not create the problem in the first place.  It was the Conservatives and Maggie Thatcher, that brought social housing to it’s knees.

The Conservative policy of ‘right to buy’ without allowing or enforcing a replacement policy was short sighted and I would say almost criminal in its ineptitude, and not once will any Conservative admit to this simple glaring fact, will you Mr Shapps?

He goes on to say that he wants people to be able to buy their first home and that restrictions on rights to buy are to be lifted......

I really don’t know what planet these politicians have been dropped off from, and it is worldwide epidemic.

Republican White House frontrunner Mitt Romney this week commented, "I'm not concerned about the very poor.” 

And this is one of the problems with politicians.  They are in politics for the power trip and the money they can make from all of their little associate directorships and speaking engagements, we are beneath them, nothing more than a contemptible inconvenience that they have to contend with as they claw their way to the top.

Mr Shapps goes on to state that:

“And because we want to help everyone achieve their aspirations, to feel the pride of ownership - we're scrapping the miserly restrictions on the level of discounts under Right to Buy.
Up to 100,000 tenants will have the opportunity to buy their own home.
It's great news for every hardworking family who have done well for themselves and want to get on.”

But, he does also state;

 “So this will be a one-out, one-in policy. In other words a new home built for every home sold.”  

But, I will only believe that if I see it happening. The other problem I have with this is, 'that a new home built for every one sold',  is that we have a desperate housing shortage in this country because of the neglect of ALL political parties since the 'Right to Buy' scheme was introduced by the Conservatives and instead of building affordable homes that people without jobs or who are in low paid work can't afford , and who are in all probability, living in overcrowded run down social housing, they should be building more social housing homes and not concentrating on a one for one policy that will do nothing to ameliorate the current problems.


But I fear that they are still making a mistake with this and their ‘affordable houses’ policy.  Houses or homes are only affordable if people can pay for them.  To pay for them they have to have jobs (and to try and keep them). But again I have a problem with this. 

Unemployment is rising. Manufacturing jobs across the world are being ‘destroyed’ by technology.  Where once you needed an army of workers to manufacture a car you now need a handful. Where once you needed factories with tens of hundreds of shift workers to produce clothing and textiles, all you need now is a poor third world country with cheap child labour and their government who receive millions of pounds in British Taxpayers aid, or as the forked tongue politicians now like to call it, Overseas Development, to maintain their vast armies and their nuclear weapons.

Where are these jobs coming from that people in this country can have to earn a wage to pay for affordable housing? Social housing is what is needed and it is needed now without all the fancy bells and ribbons that Mr Shapps is offering in his speech. 

And I would suggest that the UK's Housing Sector entered it's darkest hour under Conservative policies and was just left to fester by a labour government who turned out to be nothing more than capitalists hiding under a veneer of socialism......