Bin this waste
EVERY penny, Labour vowed, will now be scrutinised to get value for taxpayers.
But Britain is currently so skint, they said, we must freeze your income tax thresholds yet again and hammer your employers for a jobs tax.
Labour must scythe through taxpayers’ cash Elon Musk-style and spend it where we really need[/caption]
We must strip hard-up OAPs of their winter fuel payment and fleece farmers for inheritance tax, even if it jeopardises their food businesses.
And, no, we cannot set a deadline to spend 2.5 per cent of our GDP on defence, even if Keir Starmer IS pledging British boots on the ground in Ukraine.
Today, though, The Sun reveals how millions ARE available for “research” into the wokest imaginable frivolity.
A million for a university to probe “intersectional inclusion”, another million for “inclusive histories”, £200,000 to study TikTok dancing, £247,132 on some impenetrable nonsense about “queerness” in animals.
This profligacy and more by the UK Research and Innovation quango is on top of the BILLIONS in supposed “foreign aid” being blown on sickeningly spurious grounds.
No Government can plead poverty on defence with this borderline criminal squandering of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash rife in the public sector.
Why is Labour not scything through it Elon Musk-style — spending it where we really need or giving it back in tax cuts to kick-start our stagnant economy?
Jails copout
SICK of terror attacks and other atrocities, the public wants politicians to be tough on all crime.
Politicians pledge to be so and get elected. Some even fulfil those promises.
But a predictably limp report by the Government-appointed “Independent Sentencing Review” blames them and the Press for Britain’s jails overflowing.
It’s the fault of “populists”, buckling haphazardly to media pressure to do as voters demand.
The study says jail terms are too common and too long, that prison often doesn’t work and there is an “over-reliance on a tough-on-crime narrative”.
Panel chairman David Gauke, the liberal ex-Tory, presumably favours a “soft on crime” narrative.
But the real problem is that successive Governments, the Tories especially, failed to build more prisons as our existing ones became overcrowded hellholes.
Mass immigration has placed an extra burden on them and cells are full of foreign criminals we seem unable to deport.
And the reality is jail DOES work.
Freed prisoners may frequently reoffend . . . but at least they can’t harm innocent people when behind bars.
That may upset hand-wringing liberals whose cosseted lives are untouched by crime.
The public want to be safe. They cannot be blamed for that. Nor can Governments for doing what they ask.
Don’t pretend that prisons don’t work. Build more.
