Clearly you're a guilty until proven innocent, no smoke without fire merchant. The morality I'm talking about is with the Executive. That is, the ruling government in the House of Commons. It's rare to find criminality in the Executive. Mone is a businesswoman in the House of Lords. Though appointed by the Tories, the government will not be held to be "corrupt" as you say, per se. There would have to be proven collusion. Lords are convicted from time to time. Jeffery Archer was banged up for perjury. No one claimed the government was corrupt. As for Mick Grinch, it's his look out. If he thinks his cause is furthered by ****ing up the public's festive holiday arrangements, then he should go ahead.
Albania was the top nationality claiming asylum in the UK in the year ending September 2022. The UK received 13,650 asylum applications from Albanian nationals, 6,624 of whom arrived on small boats.
another waste of 3.5 billion pounds by the uk government UK aid to Afghanistan entrenched corruption and injustice, report finds Government watchdog says £3.5bn aid in 20 years to 2020 failed to achieve aim of stabilising Afghan government please log in to view this image The aid ‘benefited a narrow group of Afghan political elites at the expense of the population at large’, such as these internally displaced families. Photograph: Jalil Rezayee/EPA Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editorThu 24 Nov 2022 00.01 GMT The UK’s £3.5bn aid to Afghanistan between 2000 and 2020 was implicated in corruption and human rights abuses and failed to achieve its primary objective of stabilising the country’s government, an assessment by the UK government’s aid watchdog has found. Describing the two-decade aid project as the UK’s single most ambitious programme of state building, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) says decisions to spend aid on counterinsurgency operations were flawed, adding that efforts to reduce gender inequality are likely to be wiped out by the Taliban. Money was spent on meeting the US’s excessively short-term objectives, the report finds. It suggests, on the basis of extensive interviews with senior UK government officials, that the UK had little influence on US strategy, even though it disagreed with the US decision to exclude the Taliban from any political settlement at a point when the Taliban were relatively weak. please log in to view this image ‘Some days we eat grass’: families on the edge in Afghanistan’s food crisis – in pictures Read more The damning new ICAI report says: “Unwilling to challenge the US approach, the UK became publicly committed into a narrative of imminent success.” It adds: “The commitment to aligning with the US left the UK locked into investing large amounts of aid into a state-building process which its own analysis suggested had limited prospects of success. As one senior official told us, ‘If we’ve invested in a state-shaped object that cannot command the loyalty or support of large parts of the population, it will amount to nothing.’” The report says the UK spent £3.5bn in aid over the 20 years to 2020, of which £2.5bn was spent between 2014 and 2020. The review says: “In complex stabilisation missions, large-scale financial support for the state should only be provided in the context of a viable and inclusive political settlement, when there are reasonable prospects of a sustained transition out of conflict.” It adds: “UK aid should not be used to fund police or other security agencies to engage in paramilitary operations, as this entails unacceptable risks of doing harm. Any support for civilian security agencies should focus on providing security and justice to the public.” The review finds that the UK spent £252m funding the salaries of the Afghan national police, describing this as a “questionable use of UK aid”, because the police were primarily assigned to counterinsurgency operations rather than civilian policing. Overall, the UK spent £400m over six years to help the Afghan security services. Efforts by UK aid officials to stop the funding were overruled at the highest levels of government, the report found. “Channelling funding in such high volumes through weak state institutions distorted the political process and contributed to entrenched corruption,” the review finds. “The creation of a parallel institutional structure to manage international aid drew capacity away from the Afghan administration.” Between 2017 and 2020 the number of consultants in the ministry of finance only fell from 780 well paid staff to 585, the report reveals. It adds the UK was mistaken to spend so much aid on US-designed objectives that entrenched corruption and human rights abuses, including semi-paramilitary objectives. It says the US was itself aware of its errors, with officials admitting: “The ultimate point of our failure was not an insurgency but endemic corruption.” Advertisement UK government documents cited by ICAI and written as late as 2019 “describe the situation as an extreme form of state capture, which benefited a narrow group of Afghan political elites at the expense of the population at large”. Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “In these circumstances, there was little prospect of meaningful institutional development. One year on, in 2020, the Department for International Development assessed that central government institutions were largely unable to deliver on their mandates, despite years of financial and technical assistance. Afghan leaders saw them as fiefdoms for patronage, rather than mechanisms for promoting the public interest.” Advertisement The UK, the report says, “took a largely technocratic approach to building the capacity of state institutions, focusing on their internal systems and processes, rather than their relationships with Afghan society. It also left UK aid subordinate to rapidly changing objectives and short planning horizons in the security arena, leading to unrealistic assumptions about what was achievable.” The scale of the aid and the way it was delivered meant by 2021, 98.7% of Afghans described corruption as a big problem for Afghanistan as a whole – up from 76% in 2014. The report finds the UK was aware of the problems in the design in the aid programme, but “the UK’s determination to provide unconditional support to the US meant that there was no attempt to reconsider the approach to state-building, even as its prospects of success receded”. The review finds the sheer scale of the aid resources funnelled through central state institutions was distorting. The Afghan state spent approximately $11bn each year, but raised only $2.5bn of its own resources, the report finds. Echoing previous studies it suggests it would have taken 35 years for the state to become self funding, leaving the Afghan state locked into an open-ended dependence on external aid. The report finds: “Ultimately, the US decision to conclude an agreement with the Taliban in February 2020, setting a timetable for the unconditional withdrawal of US troops, made it necessary to abandon most of the objectives of the UK aid programme, despite heavy sunk costs.”
You're more slippery than another ex-poster that used to be on the board. Again I ask you to read the report and make a judgement on what you see…..it’s not that hard is it now ? Unless of course you’re happy for it to happen but then of course I’d expect you to man up and just admit it. And as for Mick Lynch……he’s a ****ing legend and makes most of the people that try and belittle him and the Rail Workers cause to look very silly indeed. I’m sure I’ll be getting your support if we decide to take action at my place…..but then probably not.
I've now read the Daily Mail report on it as posted on here. There is already an investigation against Mone for having unlawful interests in government contracts. I'd say what the Guardian has found now may merit a further investigation. Labour are already justifiably asking questions which must be answered. There's a bad smell but I can't say more than that at present. This isn't going away. NHS staff including paramedics have a much better claim to inflationary wage rises than railmen imo. But it will be hard, because there's a stack of other occupations demanding the same. The government would have to distinguish between them if it gives some wage rises and not others, which will lead to dissatisfaction. I suspect it will take a hard line on all. And Labour may be making a rod for their own back if they criticise this approach, when the prospect of them forming the next government is in sight.
He was ultimately responsible for the deaths of thousands of people for a cause that was found to be false and untrue. Hard to prove that he knew about the “sexing up” of the dossier but, in my opinion, he probably did. Don’t know by rule of law if he can be tried as a war criminal
****ing tricky to prosecute people who have/had a lot of power and have people around them who could get caught in a **** storm or who have their own skeletons.
A Paramedic or a Nurse or a Carer or anyone for that matter has no better claim to a decent pay rise or to keep their hard earned conditions than any other worker. To fall into that trap is what the elite want us to do….stay divided. Don’t you see that ? Ok, at least you’re giving some kind of opinion on the Mone scandal…Thankyou for that at least. Another question for you…from what you’ve read do you not feel that if true, there has been some kind of collusion with either Government or individuals representing the Government to award these such companies on the preferred “VIP list” highly lucrative contracts…..?
As I’ve said before Wills, I hate Blair and his cronies for what they did and what they (he) continues to do. Like many before him, and many to come…..he’ll remain unpunished for the ills that he brought.
Yep, sadly like the corrupt bastards we’ve got now they know they’ll get away with it. Like you said they aren’t even bothering to hide it either. Absolute contempt.
That’s the thing for me Wills, we know it goes on…the corruption…the lies…the greed. And no party is completely innocent of any such actions. However it’s now the absolute contempt that this current bunch have that irks me. As you say, they can’t even be bothered to hide it anymore.
please log in to view this image Lee Harris @addicted2newz · Nov 23 Jeremy Hunt = **** Rishi Sunak = **** Financial markets = **** Investments = **** Protecting Brexit = **** Inflation = **** Energy prices = **** My business = getting better, but still **** MSM = **** as always Labour in power next GE = monumentally ****. The list is endless
Mick has done a great job with interviewers wanting a dramatic sound bite. Loved the way he turns round to show her what a picket line is.
