The Euro, UK Overseas Aid and the NHS

All three of these are the great project of politicians and exhibit the same defining characteristic of chucking money away and getting no return other than enabling politicians to boast how much they are doing ie how much of our money they are wasting.

All three of these areas are corrupt so the money poured goes into the pockets of the fat cats in Greece and the other PIGS, corrupt third world regimes and health service fat cats principally GPs and management  Money spent in all three of these areas has been and will be wasted. All three need  root and branch reform but all are political sacred cows so can never be reformed by the political class..

The Euro is the great project of the EU. It defines the EU a nation. It must succeed at all costs and it will certainly cost more and more until one day the money runs out. At the end of this process there will be some very wealthy fat cats in the PIIGS and the problems of the great mass of the PIGS people, no jobs etc, will be exactly as before.

The UK aid budget doubling is a cynical attempt by Cast Iron Dave to detoxify the Tory brand so he and his public school chums can win the next election by persuading the electorate that Tories are caring people. Its going to cost the UK £10 bn most of which will end up with ruling third world despots. Does Dave care? No, as long as he can point to a rising foreign aid budget that is sufficient. The UK electorate has no way of finding out where the money goes and what it buys and Dave is certainly not oing to tell them.

It has been the same with the NHS and Labour. Money has been poured in since 1997 and has achieved very little other than create some very wealthy GPs who now do less work than they did 10 years ago and an army of wealthy health service managers.

All three projects are impossible to challenge as they define the EU, Tory and Labour political class. The problem is no attempt is ever made to measure the outputs of these projects. How has the Euro benefited the PIGS's proles? How much has overseas aid raised the living standards of the poor in the third world? How much has UK heath improved relative to other developed countries?

Politicians do not want these questions answered. For them success is spending more and more of our money. End of story.