The paper's bizarre find-cash-quick scheme sinks - then plumbs the depths
Part of the humour to be found in this morning’s Sun scoop is at the expense of the paper.
‘UK taxes blown on lonely fish in Africa… But our military is cut to the bone’
As might not be clear, the paper is arguing the government wastes foreign aid money on silly things while the defence budget is being cut.
If the connection between the two things still seems strange, it’s worth bearing in mind that defence secretary, Michael ‘stab-in-the-back’ Fallon, has suggested the budgets for foreign aid and defence be blurred to reach NATO’s recommended 2 per cent of GDP spending target.
Helpfully, the Sun has launched a campaign – ‘Forces not Farces’ – to call on the government to do, er, what it was already planning to do.
But back to the fish. It seems the foreign office spent £3,400 to help protect and breed a rare tropical fish at risk of extinction. That’s £3,400 out of a total foreign aid budget of £11.7billion.
Another case on the Sun’s charge sheet:
“The department also gave £2,042-worth of free tickets to children for a Hamlet production in the earthquake-ravaged Caribbean nation of Haiti.”
What a heartless newspaper this is! Let Nemo die and no Hamlet for the Haitian kids!
More amusing is the Sun’s ‘evidence’ this money could pay for more worthy things at home – the entire burden of their argument.
It takes one of the most expensive of its cases, £51,564 on UK work experience for people from Serbia, and says this ‘could have bought advanced armour for 50 British troops’. For an army of 90,000 (and that’s just regular forces), this seems hardly worth ditching the Serbs.
And shouldn’t UK troops have the best armour available regardless?
It goes on:
“£30,000 spent ’empowering Indian museum professionals’ – could have paid a nurse on £21,692 for 15 months.”
One nurse! For just over a year! And on a starting salary at that. This is desperate stuff.
They only provide two more examples – £99,800 on shale gas drilling regulations in China ‘could have built five mini-roundabouts’, and £3,104 spent on English training for Uruguayan footballers ‘could have bought two lampposts’.
Some of this foreign aid spending is very odd indeed, and it would be fascinating to know what the FCO was up to. But the amount of money involved is minuscule in terms of the aid budget, let alone government spending generally. And the army should be properly funded regardless.
Meanwhile, the Sun’s attempts to show this money could buy us all sorts of goodies is laughable.
Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
Read more:
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35 Responses to “The Sun thinks killing a tropical fish will fund the armed forces”
stevep
The Sun was purchased and set up to be a comic for the working classes. A poisonous right-wing comic that set about de-politicising the working class, blaming unions, foreigners, lefties and anything not on it`s far-right agenda for the supposed ill`s of modern Britain.
As long as there was Sun Bingo, cheap caravan holidays to be had and tits on page 3, the re-educated masses swallowed the bait whole, luxuriating in their dumbed-down, selfish micro-world and newly-minted lower middle-classness whilst Thatcher laid waste to Britain.
The Sun is still the main propaganda organ of the establishment, dedicated to maintaining as dumbed-down a right-wing view as possible for the working masses to swallow. The Mail is much the same but catering for the middle classes.
The biggest tragedy of Labour`s defeat is that the Leveson enquiry will never be implemented in full. This would have led to at least a partial reigning-in of dubious press activity and tighter regulation.
Objectivity and parity in the press will only be obtained through proper regulation.
There is no such thing as a “free” press, only if you have a couple of billion to spare to set up your (hopefully) mass-market newspaper. You can then propagate any view that suits you. .
Sites like this, although not mass-appeal, go some way to redress the balance, we should use them to bypass the press and formulate our own view of the future.
AntonioSColon
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jacko
A common theme in left-wing writing is the gullible, working-class idiot who needs protecting from himself by a self-appointed liberal intelligensia who only have his best interests at heart. Which means controlling what he can watch and read. Not for us, you understand, because we’re intelligent enough to see through it all. Just the oafs of the country.
stevep
Not at all. I`m working class and intelligent enough to know you are one of the right-wing trolls infesting this website to try and divert attention away from the real issues.
I`m also intelligent enough to know that propaganda and ridicule are the weapons of choice to keep people under control. Goebbels understood that and so do you and the proprietors of the Tory comics.
Politely ignoring the subject of your intelligence and whilst you are on the subjects of gullibility and idiocy, take a look in your mirror.
dnspncr
Utterly simplistic rightwing rhetoric. Having a basic understanding of the content, history and effects of mass media does not make a person a part of a “liberal intelligensia”, a term often employed by tabloids to attack celebrities who are critical of them – in such cases the term is always prefixed with “middle class”, your argument has been severely diminished by the forced omission of this prefix.