Last year, the Foreign Office paid consultants close to £4 million of taxpayer money, including £200,000 for “crisis media training days.”
It is more than twice as much as the department paid for outside consultants the year before. It comes as the department’s spending on temporary agency personnel has reached a record high of about £40 million, an increase of more than 850 per cent since 2018.
A contract worth £200,000 for “crisis media training” was negotiated a few days following David Cameron’s unexpected reappearance in the political spotlight as Foreign Secretary. Staff members will receive instruction on how to “present the public face” of the government to the media “during a crisis response” throughout the training days.
According to the contract, civil personnel would receive training in “managing the media in a crisis setting, roaming media, social media, and managing crisis-specific messaging.” After six foreign secretaries in five years, the Foreign Office has learned from a string of disasters, notably the disastrous evacuation of Afghans from Kabul in August 2021.
Additionally, in April of this year, the Foreign Office faced new accusations of deserting British nationals following delays in the civilian evacuation of the war-torn capital of Sudan, Khartoum. The Sunday Mirror reported in 2021 that the Home Office, led by Priti Patel, had hired a private crisis management firm using public money to assist them in handling “incidents” in 2020.
In March 2020, Black Dog Crisis Management was engaged at a cost of £16,000 to conduct a “debriefing exercise” with department employees. In November 2020, they were invited in for a second time to “deliver impartial debriefing exercise and follow-up work following a complex critical incident”. The value of this second deal was £19,200.
The Home Office refused to identify which crises the firm was brought in to deal with.
To be honest, any other party in power would most likely spend the same amount, but we wouldn’t likely hear about it. Of course, wasting taxpayers’ money is not okay.
Why do they compensate advisors? Government employees are employed because they are expected to be well-versed in such matters and what is necessary. What would be the use of belonging to a government entity if you just hired someone else to tell you what to do?
Perhaps the Tories are just trying to spend as much money as possible so that if Labour wins the General Election, they have nothing to start with when they get into power. It’s only taxpayers’ money after all.
They don’t have any concept, concerns or cares about spending money like it’s gone out of fashion, simply because it’s not theirs, and it’s the taxpayers’ who are having two fingers stuck up at them.
It also demonstrates the extent to which our government controls the media and how they are now concealing the truth in a variety of ways, anything that has a ‘Con’ in it is a con.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 