Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited our flood-hit town at the weekend and pledged a million pounds of aid. This has gained a lot of publicity as was no doubt intended but I don't know if it was supposed to be considered generous. I think it is a slap in the face. A million pounds will just about buy four three-bedroomed detached houses around here. I doubt it will even pay for the engineers who will have to survey the 1,000 bridges Mr. Brown has ordered to be checked.
The meanness of the Government's offer hasn't escaped the attention of some of our right-wing political parties, who point out that in the same week Brown gave £1m to Cumbria, the Department for Overseas Development gave away £293 million of taxpayers money to places like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. Another extremist site reported that the government gave £1m to Cumbria but £800m to India, a country that can afford its own nuclear weapons for heavens sake!
At the European elections, politicians expressed concern at the rising popularity of nationalist and extremist parties. If they want to know why, they should take a long look at themselves in a mirror. The mainstream parties are so out of touch with the public, so obsessed with their expenses and their own importance on the world stage, that they have let other parties with some rather unpleasant agendas gain a foothold simply for saying about everyday issues what a lot of ordinary people actually think.
If Gordon Brown wants a hope of getting re-elected he should start spending more of our taxes on us, the British people, and not on MPs expenses, bank bailouts, waging wars and handouts to foreign countries.
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