… idiotic / criminal / hubristic acts promulgated by our dear political leaders since 1945
Incompetence is shared equally between all Tory and Labour governments
They are both systemically inept because of the voting system’s inbuilt inability to allow governments to plan and execute economical and sensible long term plans.
Our party political system actually forces short term policy making which complies with the media’s desperation for more and more 24/7 news.
This page will change often as I discover bigger and better cock-ups, but this subject just has to have a page of it’s own!
Read and weep 🙁
- [September 2023] Ian Duncan Smith (senior Tory, now retired) says “We have been incredible naive”. Senior politicians finally realise that China’s spying and global aggression is a huge danger but dare not act. I spotted this issue over ten years ago.
- [November 2022] Liz Truss’s 49 days as PM will cost us between £5 to £10 billion each years for the foreseeable future according to Robert Peston.
- [May 2022] £8.6bn of benefits overpayments – again read the government’s own statistics here.
- [February 2022] Covid-19 errors, fraud etc. From the government’s own website the errors have cost us over £70 billion. Read the Public Accounts Committee reports here. So much for Boris’s repeated attempts at saying how well he did.
- [March 2014] Cameron & Cable this time costing the British tax payer, an estimated, £2billion on the Royal Mail privatisation. Sheer incompetence and naivety. A gentleman’s agreement to hold shares long term was broken within days netting millions for Insurance companies, banks & hedge funds.
- [November 2011] – Cameron / Clegg selling Northern Rock to Branson for a fraction of what it is worth, crystallising a loss to the public of some £800 million; continuing in the inept footsteps of their predecessors (see 2,3,5,7,11, 15, 18 & 19 below)
- [1989] Thatcher selling our water supply to Canada, Australia, South Korea, France & Germany). Not only have we now no control over our own water supply, it costs us, forever, far more than it otherwise would have done. Well done Maggie! *1
- [1989 ]Thatcher selling our electricity grid infrastructure.*1
- Major signing Maastricht – the final nail in the coffin for the EEC (which was what ‘We the people’ had actually agreed to in 1975’s historic referendum).
- [1999-2002] Brown selling our gold reserves at an all time low – the economic nouse and vision of a bottom feeding millipede. Best estimates of loss to you & me … £7 billion. (Ed Balls, Ed Millipede and Baroness Valdera were his closest financial aides at the time)
- Blair / Brown embracing the city in 1997 – not realising that moving money about is not actually useful work for adults.
- [1990 – 2005] Thatcher selling our council housing stock completely misunderstanding the purpose public housing.
- Thatcher’s War = waste of resources over Argentina’s Malvinas. The future ‘loss’ of the Falklands is inevitable – but her hubris, face saving diversionary tactics and jingoism were her guide.
- Blair’s war – the dodgy dossier – the lies, the self aggrandisement – at what cost to Britain’s people! Do we know yet why we were actually in Iraq? Well, do we!?
- Brown’s failure to regulate the financial markets and “financial services” sector (laugh ; choke ; guffaw)”
- [2009] Brown’s failure to recover £6 billion of Vodafone’s tax due to the Exchequer – yes SIX BILLION!
- Cameron for actually hiring Philip Green to save on government waste after he neatly avoided paying £300m tax on Top Shop – unbelievable!
- Blair / Brown hiring 500,000 Outreach Facilitation Utilisation Communication Ko-ordinating Media Enablers; you all know what I mean … sigh
- Blair / Brown’s PFI crimes. £13bn quids worth of assets actually costing us £72bn over the next 30 years. £900 to change a light bulb etc. Contracts which the coalition do not have the imagination or balls to scrap.
- Beeching’s railway network cuts 1950s/60s. Short sighted crass decision making supported by several governments, probably losing forever more than 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of railway track and closing 3,000 stations. Thus condemning us to uncontrolled motorway expansion, pollution and health effect from which we shall never recover.
- The failure of all governments to put VAT on air transport fuel – leading to the misery of today’s air transport industry, pollution, global warming etc etc. I know its not just us, but I ask a question – “Is the world a better place for unbridled air transport growth?“
- MOD waste – all governments have been guilty of this and many books exist on this. But to summarise, £billions have been wasted to no benefit of you and me.
- “Ministers wasted £71millon on building 66 motorcycle test centres for manoeuvres that could have been carried out on public roads. A major review of the motor bike L-test has now been ordered after Labour built the super centres to comply with a ‘bizarre’ EU metric rule.
- Two Home Office interpreters are set to win more than £1 million in compensation after being paid to ‘do nothing’ for 15 years. A tribunal ruled the women had effectively been redundant since 1990 when the Home Office first decided to out-source interpreting to freelancers. But no one bothered to reassign the pair and while they were contracted to work 41 hours a week, they were paid £25,000 a year to ‘do nothing’ or asked to do ‘basic clerical duties’ such as filing to fill their time.
- Did you know that the cost of MPs expenses is now higher than under labour? Ah bless …
- 300,000 new “No-interest mortgages” issued in the last 2 years – OK that’s not all the coalition’s fault, BUT – have you seen any attempt to stop this crap? Still no attempt to reign back public debt! Well, do you think that is a good idea? Do you – really?
… and so many more that it makes you weep – and yet we carry on just the same
Parliament, who should be stopping this nonsense cannot hold the executive to account.
The party political whip system means that MPs are a colossal waste of tax payers money. Their opinions simply do not count since Thatcher’s era.
… oh, and here’s 5 from the Lib Con Coalition (for which we all had so much hope .. sigh)
- Several years on from the coalition and the MPs expenses scandal, the national debt was actually higher than under Labour’s last government
- “Phew, it’s OK, nobody noticed”!
- Lets sell our publicly owned Forests. Jolly good wheeze (manifesto anyone – which page was that on?)
- Lets sell off the NHS – rippingly jolly good wheeze (manifesto anyone – which page was that on?)
- (Dec 2010) Lets humiliate our Vince Cable over Murdoch shall we ? (July 2011) Oops ! – Did anyone notice how we wasted £300,000 in moving 70 staff to that idiot minister for the department of Arts, Science and Ballroom dancing dept? Answer “No”.
- Dave Cameron’s Big Society & Localism “We politicians realise that we get things wrong most of the time and could not manage to organise a beer festival in a brewery. So let’s devolve our true responsibilities down to some Quangos and let them take the crap instead.” Oh, and by the way, they can’t do much because we gave them no power to actually change anything! Two months paid holiday anyone? ..
Finally, if the there are any of you out there who still think the EU was a good idea … By far the biggest criminal act was allowing the EEC to morph into the EU and then allowing it to suck billions from the European people and then to waste the cash in so many corrupt ways it makes my teeth hurt.
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- Accounts not passed by auditors for 19 years
- Making Neil Kinnock a Commissioner – ooh I laugh until it hurts!
- Moving the whole shebang, in 70 lorries, every 2 weeks from Brussels to Frankfurt and then back again… <no words left>
Please read my book, published on Amazon, ‘British Politics is broken, but…’ for further mind numbing atrocities.
*1 Please see the whole sorry facts on the OFT (Office of Fair Trading)website – Asset stock take 2009 (scroll down the page to the spreadsheets, read & weep).
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