Whitehall civil servants camouflaged sparkling wine acquisitions and five-star hotel catering as ‘bookkeeping services’ and ‘administration’, as part of a £145 million of government debit card spending.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of overseeing a shameful chronicle of waste as it was disclosed how officials splurged on booze, luxury furnishings and costly dinners abroad.
Opposition MPs said the Labour Party’s new report has shown a culture of extravagant spending, while the country suffers in the cost of living crisis.
Ministers and officials ate in high-end restaurants costing up to £115 per head even when no dignitaries were attending.
Boris Johnson and his posse spent £4,445 on dinner at Smith & Wollensky in New York, where a steak main course costs up to $115 (£95), despite no foreign dignitaries being present.
Liz Truss and her crew dined out twice on Remembrance Day in 2021 in Jakarta, Indonesia, costing £1,443, but she forgot to pay her respects to the war dead.
The Foreign Office racked up bills of up to £18,000 with high-end and designer furnishing, lighting and rug shops.
Thousands were spent on corporate brandings, such as branded USB cables which are never seen by the public.
Departments spent £1.4 million with Amazon on government debit cards.
The Department for Transport paid £5,388 for training, using animal examples to help analyse service models, with questions such as: ‘Do you hoot, growl or wave your feather?’
At the beginning of the pandemic the Conservative Government relaxed rules around taxpayers funded debit cards, first introduced under Tony Blair, permitting them to be used widely, the report claimed.
Key users were allowed to spend up to £20,000 in one go, with an overall monthly spending limitation of £100,000.
But the Labour Party, which compiled the report, claimed the Government black cards had less transparency than ordinary invoice procedures. This was compounded by a failure to correctly categorise payments for controversial items, such as alcohol.
The report found officials spent £3,158 on catering from the five-star Gulf Hotel in Bahrain but filed it under ‘Accounting, Auditing and Bookkeeping Services’.
The Foreign Office spent £3,266 on goods from luxury lighting designer Marc Wood Studio, but this was filed under ‘Computer Software’.
A bill of £1,190 at The Marina Crossroads leisure complex in the Maldives and £1,282 spent on bubbly from Bluebell Vineyard Estates were described at ‘Computer Equipment and Services’.
The Foreign Office also spent £3,680 at Coates & Seely, another English sparkling wine producer, which was put in the ‘Consulting, Management and Public Relations category.
So Liz Truss could find the time to go out for a fancy meal on Remembrance Day in Jakarta, all taxpayer-funded, but couldn’t be bothered to pay any respect to the war heroes who gave their lives in service to this country. Well, that says it all about the greedy, shady, ineffective Tory party – they’re all on the make and couldn’t give a tuppence about the rest of us.
This is disgusting behaviour, and not only that, it’s theft, and the culprits should be unmasked and made to pay back the money, even if it takes them a lifetime, and they should be fired for taking from the public purse.
It’s also increasingly apparent that Brexit has cost not saved money, encumbered not liberated trade, hampered not improved our sovereignty, and threatens to break up the United Kingdom. In fact, if you wanted to argue it, it’s nothing more than a political Ponzi scheme, and it’s still going on.
Bernie Madoff is not longer alive but his obituaries, and there were many, reflected on his remarkable ability to convince people to join a pure Ponzi scheme, worth $64.8 billion when it collapsed.
He simply exploited human nature. People are happy to believe a lie, without asking too many questions, especially if it promises them what they want, and this applies in politics too.
The essence of a Ponzi scheme is to offer impossibly attractive returns, 15 per cent a year in Bernie Madoff’s case, which keeps enticing new investors whose savings pay for the impossible returns to the initial investors. So, it only works if it keeps growing, and that requires maintaining people’s trust, assuring them that everything is working as intended come good times or bad, and in all circumstances keeping up the pretence, and maintaining the lie.
However, it starts to collapse when people start smelling a rat, or as with Bernie Madoff in 2008, need to cash in their savings and ask for their money back. Then the whole thing was exposed as just one big lie, and many of Madoff’s investors lost every penny.
Brexit is a political Ponzi scheme, and it’s still going strong. The crash in this case is a slow-motion one, but it’s happening, and in politics, it’s easier. People are looking for reassurances as much as cash, so it’s easier to maintain the lie. Of course, numerous people who voted for Brexit just wanted out, at whatever cost. They believed that Brussels was meddling with our national way of life and wanted it over, and for them, if they lost their money or their job, or if the Union broke up, it was all worth it, but not for every Brexit voter. There were some among the 52 per cent who believed the promises they were sold.
So did any of these promises hold water?
The first one was that Brexit would save money, £350 million a week for the NHS said the big red bus.
The NHS is getting more money, but this is only because of COVID, and it’s borrowed from the future not recovered from the EU. The reality is that the costs of Brexit far outweigh the cash benefits. In 2016, the net annual cost of the UK of EU membership was £9.4 billion (£181 million per week).
From 2021, the UK will still make a net contribution to the EU for continuing liabilities of almost £2.5 billion (€3 billion) p.a. and in 2018/19 alone the Chancellor set aside an additional £1.5 billion for Brexit costs, which only partly covered them. On top of this, approximately £100 million per week cash cost is the impact of the 4 per cent hit to the GDP estimated by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which cuts government revenue as well as national revenue. Overall, there is now no question that Brexit costs, not saves money.
The second promise is that it would free the economy, stimulate enterprise and make Britain more nimble on the world stage, but far from liberating British business, it’s now trussed up in red tape.
The essence of the EU’s Single Market was to slash costs and reduce bureaucracy for international trade, and it succeeded.
Rules will always be required to protect competition as well as individuals and protect consumers from environmental harm, bad food and dodgy products. It’s more affordable and more efficient to do that with our neighbours than on our own.
Now the costs and bureaucracy are before, especially for services, and the more we divide, the weightier the costs will be, and it will be numerous years, if ever before the benefits of other fabled free trade deals will match the losses on trade with the EU.
Thirdly, there was a belief that where England led, the other nations of the United Kingdom would dutifully follow, and that Brexit wouldn’t impact Northern Ireland.
The Unionists were complicit in this, rejecting the only deal that would have both delivered Brexit and preserved the Good Friday Agreement with no significant change for the province, and the Prime Minister swore blind there would never be a border in the Irish Sea, and then agreed to one.
Finally, there’s sovereignty. This has become the last refuge of the Brexiteers. Even if Brexit has cost money, and increased bureaucracy endangered the Union, we have our sovereignty back – really? This is only true if you adopt a North Korean definition of authority.
If you judge it instead by the ability to protect our national interest and control our own fate, we were far better able to do that within the EU than outside of it.
Brexit has thrown away control, not taken it back, and this, in some ways, was the greatest lie of all.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 