Earlier this year, Lord Young of Cookham, a Cabinet Office spokesman in the Upper House, was speaking about the furore that the ‘Punish a Muslim Day’ letters incident had created, announced that £1.9 million pounds of public money was to be given to the shonky and sometimes dishonest ‘Islamphobia’ monitors Tell Mama. This is, in my opinion, a shocking waste of money and I wondered what else this money could have been better spent on.
As Tell Mama are back in the news again trying to claim that the Free Tommy movement was a vast international far right conspiracy and not a grass roots UK based campaign. Having observed the Free Tommy campaign, whilst I concede that this campaign had international support, as cases where government’s oppress dissidents often do (see the Asia Bibi case for a similar example of international support for the oppressed), the overwhelming support I saw on social media has not come from overseas, but from within Britain. Although there were foreign supporters the driving force for this campaign doesn’t come from this source but from within the United Kingdom. Because of Tell Mama’s incredible claim that the Free Tommy Campaign was a ‘vast right wing conspiracy‘, I decided that maybe the British public should know just how much this Tell Mama group is getting from the taxpayer’s purse, money that it is using to try to attack Mr Tommy Robinson and his supporters. I undertook a little research into what this money could have bought instead of being wasted on Tell Mama I discovered that the £1.9 Million spunked away on Tell Mama could have paid for:
The training of 79 teachers at a cost of £24k each
The recruitment and training of 21 British soldiers at a cost of £88985 each
The training of 27 nurses at a cost of £70k each
Training nearly four NHS General Practitioners at a cost of £479k each (3.9 GP’s)
The recruitment and training of 147 police officers at a cost of £12900 each
Providing 925 of Britain’s mobility impaired subjects with a quality powered wheelchair at £2054 each
Cost of building a 2.4 miles of of railway at a cost of £768k per mile approximately
Provide the funds to run an urban bus for 15.8 years at a cost of £120k per bus per year
Cost of a 84 places at state schools at a cost of £22500 per place
Provide 46 fully funded bursaries to send bright but poor boys to Britain’s premier public school Eton College at a cost of £41k per place
Undertaking basic maintenance (not total replacement) of for 23 miles of a stretch of two way single carriageway road at a cost of £80k per mile per year
Looking at the list of useful things that £1.9 million could have been spent on, does not this make the money spent on Tell Mama look like an egregious waste of taxpayers cash? I certainly would rather that this money was spent on giving some bright boy a chance at attending Eton for example than have it spent on this bunch of grievance mongers and those who use public money to attack Mr Robinson. Maybe, after this very obviously political use of their funds to attack Mr Robinson in this way, it is time for Tell Mama to give us back our damned money and let it be spent on something more useful instead.
