'Government' Money?

I don't care if the Conservative Party puts up a statue to Margaret Thatcher. I was sickened by the influence she had as PM but she's been gone a long time now. Under her government, life in the UK became much worse. Her government was cruel and narrow-minded and if you want to know where the 'nanny state' originated, you need look no further: the Tories started interfering in life our bedrooms and classrooms 30 years ago and successive governments haven't stopped since. Any attempt to portray Theresa May as a worthy successor to Thatcher has been well and truly blown out of the water since the general election.

I doubt if I would cross the road to see either of these people but I do care very much who pays for the planned statue. I get annoyed when I hear people talking about funding things with 'government' money. The government has no money. The people with the money are us - you and me. We pay for government and just about every service we have through income tax, vat, stamp duty, airport duty, duty on petrol and alcohol, etc. Given the state of the UK right now, a statue of a former Tory PM is not top of my list of essential spending. How about yours?

The billion pound bribe paid to the DUP is a different matter. I keep wondering if removing that kind of cash out of the national budget to keep a political party in power is even legal. It's certainly not ethical. Did anyone ask if we thought it was okay? Has anyone in government explained where the money is to come from? Whose budget is to be robbed? Health? Education? Social security? Or has Theresa May in fact got a magic money tree in the Treasury that she can shake from time to time? Is Philip Hammond burrowing away with his Letraset printing the money?

Are the Tories accountable for how that money is spent in Northern Ireland? Arlene Foster has a very poor record in that regard. How much did the DUP lose over 'Cash for Ash'? £400 million? It was £490 million, to be exact.

We are so far from transparency in government in the UK that I wonder how politicians have the nerve to complain about how other organisations like the EU, the United Nations or NATO spend their funding. As for the endless complaints by politicians and the press about how foreign aid from the UK to countries round the world is spent, I'll bet few of them can tell us any of the good projects that foreign aid pays for (clean water, education, providing basic health care such as vaccination). It's as if the whole world is getting rich on the back of the UK government, whereas the reality is that the UK pays 0.7% of its gross domestic product in foreign aid, the very minimum recommended by international summits - and we only reached that target in 2013.

I've been reading today about people despairing at referendums and wanting no more of them. I look at it differently: I've visited places in Europe where there are rarely national votes taken on anything but where a population of 5 million would be seen as unmanageable, so power and budgets are devolved to much smaller communities. There seem to be fewer local politicians with the power that our elected representatives have and they have to give an account of how every pound of their devolved budget is spent.

I'd like to try accountability. But then, I'd like to try a lot of things: turning Westminster into a museum and housing our elected representatives in a modern building somewhere outside Manchester, where there are enough seats in the chamber for everyone and the equivalent of a travelodge beside it for accommodation. I'd like our representatives to pay for their own meals out of their wages and to have a cap put on their other expenses. I'd also like them to endure the same pay freeze as other public sector workers. And our representatives should have one job: if they take our money, they can give us 100% of their attention.