No one objects in principle to emergency and disaster relief etc. But the database of government's generosity, reveals things like the taxpayer giving £Millions to the WWF and WRI, which are already well-funded by billionaires, to leverage that funding in lobbying governments.
For example... How many children's lives did these extremely expensive "forest governance" projects save?
They might have helped Zac Goldsmith's family and friends raise a few quid. But they didn't need it.
These are just funds for the green agenda.
No babies saved.
"Supporting Structural Reform in the Indian Power Sector" is not saving "tens of thousands of children".
It's foisting western green preoccupations on other countries -- at the expense of their own development.
This simply is not 'aid' in any commonly-understood way. It is politics.
The dead children are just props for the moral argument.
And notice that where there is a claim to offer material help to people, it is wrapped up in the green agenda.
That's not 'aid', that's quid-pro-quo. And it paints a picture of a basket case, which may not be accurate.
For e.g. here are some old slides that show Bangladesh's development. (The comparison with Ethopia is of no significance here, they were just useful at the time.)
And some more...
And more...
Lastly. You wouldn't get any of this data from that pitch for £7 million of taxpayer's money, would you. You'd think that Bangladesh was all but a lost cause.
And look at this... Using "aid" budgets to persuade poor countries to meet the Paris agreement.
Zero dead children saved.
Plenty of children locked into poverty as a consequence.
The aid budget is a political fund.
Look, I am really not making this up...
It's NOT 'aid'.
The budgets are vast, unending, unmonitored.
Is *this* what most people -- the people who pay for this
-- understand when they hear debates about the aid budget?
The Green Blob is recycling its "air pollution" proxy battle of the climate war today with this "new" report from the @RCPhysicians. It claims that air pollution kills 500 people a week and costs the economy £500 million a week.
Many knew that this was the point of the green agenda, before even climate change turned up as the problem that the solution was looking for.
What we need from politicians is a deeper explanation of green politics and action to counter it:
* How was this toxic ideology able to capture so many western institutions and political centres?
* How will the party address its own role in expanding that ideological project? Will it boot out the Gummers and Goldsmiths?
* What options will exist to overcome the legacies of its own actions and the following government?
Degrowth was the core of the green ideological project since the 1960s.
Abundance was anathema to environmentalism (and still is), because green ideology believes that an economy is a subset of an ecology, and is thus a zero-sum game. That is why billionaires were drawn to it.
Many Tories are of a similar view. They sense no problem with green rent-seeking and zero-growth. It is all in Gaia's plan.
In fact, many of these ideas came from the Conservative fold. It was only later that the centre of gravity moved to the putative left.
Until Copenhagen in 2009, the main hope of COP climate talks was a one-size-fits-all emissions-reduction policy. At Paris in 2015, that was finally abandoned, and emphasis moved to making local government, not national, the main weapon of climate policy. How it's going...
The green blob realised that national governments were unable to pass draconian legislation to change society.
But local politics was in such a sorry state that it would be easier to capture by small numbers of activists.
Turnouts were as low as 12%. And it was very easy to lobby local politicians to form a consensus on issues that were proxies of climate change. Air pollution and planning policies, for example, advanced the climate agenda, with Tory, Lab and Lib Dem and Green support.
Hi @Ed_Miliband. Look how much UK gas prices have fallen since the April energy price cap was introduced. From £1.42/therm to 89p. That's a 37% decrease.
Will the Jul-October price cap be lowered, and when it is, will you explain that this is because of "global gas prices"?
@Ed_Miliband Here's the 10-year view.
We should be seeing lower bills, right?
@Ed_Miliband Also, since the price on "global markets" has dropped, and since the April-June price cap was lifted ahead of this drop, many energy companies still charging the full whack. So the next price cap should reflect the excess payments, too, right?
And I don't think urging other countries to war at our expense is any definition of "standing with" worth defending.
Hundreds of thousands are now dead because of "standing with". Hundreds of thousands more are now fatherless, sonless, widowed...
You make a claim on behalf of "Britain" that you have never tested, and which your Prime Ministers could not even deliver for us.
Do you stand with people who are now scattered in bits across eastern Ukraine? How does one "stand with" people who lay beneath the ground? How does one express "solidarity" with young men snatched from the streets to be forced to the front line against their will?
Other people's wars make Toryboys feel all big and important about "global Britain". But their Ukrainian counterparts' children will never know their fathers. War is glorious when you don't have your comrade's guts blasted across your face. They've no idea what they "stand with".
Did you ever wonder how David Miliband, who oversaw the development of the Climate Change Act (and consequently Net Zero) landed a job worth a $million a year as a director of a charity?
Wonder no more...
Those are just *some* of the grants made by the government to the charity now directed by the former government minister.
He's worth every penny of that million bucks a year, as far as his extremely-well paid colleagues and appointers are concerned.
@CharlotteCGill @WokeWaste @procurementfile - if you haven't seen this tranche, it's worth taking a peek at. (On CF and DT).