Waste of Money

Our government recently spent £2.6 million on a new briefing room so that they could conduct daily briefings and be quizzed by journalists. A way to speak to the people and be more accountable. During the pandemic, we have seen many briefings from our government, explaining, cajoling, lamenting and generally trying to get some information across to the population. I don’t envy them this task, public speaking at the best of times is nerve wracking and doing it during a pandemic, with quite dry material must be especially difficult. I feel sorry for the scientists, those unaccustomed to the spotlight, thrust into it. They’ve managed to do all of these briefings from a room, with the appropriate hardware and come across as professional. A different room to the one they spent such a large amount on.

Things £2.6 million could be spent on:

• 10,400,000 popular frog shaped chocolate snacks (I found out they’re now 25p!)
• 26 years of a Press Secretary’s wages. (More on that later.)
• 87 nurses salaries for a year (don’t get me started on a disgusting 1% pay increase for those who put themselves at risk the most during the pandemic.)
• 1,040,000 nine pack of bog-standard toilet paper. (Bloody hoarders.)
• 43 weeks salary of the average Premier League footballer. (Shakes head, gives up.)

I’m sure you can come up with your own measuring stick on what £2.6 million could be spent on. It’s a lot of tax-payers money. It’s a lot of money to be spent on something which we did not need.

To compliment this brand spanking new briefing room, our government hired a press secretary, to speak on their behalf from this shiny new toy of theirs. Reportedly their salary is £100,000 per year. I have no axe to grind with this particular person, I don’t know them personally and I’m not that interested in their political views yet. But our government have spent the best part of a year speaking for themselves, so why do we need to hire someone to speak for them now?

Here’s the bitter chaser. The shiny new briefing room that the tax payer spent so much money on will no longer be used for daily briefings. In fact, the notion of daily briefings has been cancelled. The press secretary has been reassigned to assist the upcoming climate change summit, a worthy cause. And do you know why this has happened? Because our government are yellow bellied scaredy-cats who have realised that if they want to pompously stand in front of the flag amid their shiny new toys, they’ll actually have to go through with the briefings. And briefings invite questions from journalists. Some of whom will not hold back with doing their main job… holding government to account, asking difficult questions. And our government just does not like to be asked difficult questions because collectively they don’t have the faculties to answer those questions. Fucking waste of money.

PS – I used google for a lot of the info above.