Labour - death by a thousand cuts…

[MyNameIsX]

Labour - another day, another calamity…

Utter treachery and deceit from our illustrious government.

The Government’s own estimate of the cost of giving away the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius is almost £35bn, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act – far higher than the £3.4bn figure Sir Keir has previously used in public.

Labour ministers now face claims that they misled Parliament and the press with an “accountancy trick” to hide the size of the bill from taxpayers.

Under the terms of Sir Keir’s deal, the UK will give up the Chagos Islands by the end of this year and lease back the Diego Garcia military base, a facility built there in the 1970s that has been used by UK and US forces.

The cost of the agreement has been fiercely disputed. Sir Keir claimed in May that it would be £3.4bn over 99 years, accounting for inflation and other discounts, but the Conservatives said it would total £30bn.

An official document produced by the Government Actuary’s Department shows the cost of the deal was first estimated at 10 times Sir Keir’s figure, at £34.7bn, in nominal terms.

It explains how the cost was lowered by the Government using inflation estimates, then reduced again under a controversial accounting method sometimes used for long-term projects.

The total cost, which ministers refused to release to Parliament, is equivalent to 10 Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, or more than half the annual schools’ budget.

It's even worse...

14 years... including a global pandemic which caused worldwide economic devastation and also a war in Europe which caused energy and food prices to soar... and an alleged 20 bn black hole

versus

Less than 14 months... where the world has been about as stable as it gets and we should be preparing for future external challenges... and 51 bn and climbing.

It's a worry.

Love it... one is "alleged" but the other is "fact" yet includes an 11bn amount she is supposed to wants as Headroom....

It is very clear that Hunt never accounted for any public sector pay rises, nothing for compensation scandals and funded with 4%NI cuts with spending cuts which he never had to implement... that NI cut is costing the Govt £10bn per year and rising....

On Chagos, that "alleged" 30bn is over 100 years.... so 330k per year... meanwhile the cancelled leg of HS2 cost the tax payer 29bn in just 5 years..... 6bn per year....

What would you have done to maintain access?

But Labour are the problem..... Really???

I'm all for constructive criticism of this Govt, they've got plenty wrong, eg WFA, IHT, Social Care reform... but to whitewash the last Govts cock ups???

You re better than that?

This is true and it will get worse as Labour dumbs down the whole country to Angela Rayner level. Shudder.

Plus the Tories had COVID and the COL crisis that resulted from the Ukraine war to deal with as well. Inflation was high but the rest of Europe and further afield were also suffering from inflation for the same reasons. Now our inflation is high because of incompetent Labour policies…

And I didn’t vote Tory for anyone that wants to accuse me of being a Tory bot…

The Chagos Islands are 1,250 miles from Mauritius.

Therefore by your reckoning, I’m not sure what business Mauritius have with the islands either, because they are OVERSEAS to Mauritius.

Oh yes drag out a Pandemic, which Bojo & Sunak handled so badly & cost us far more than other comparable countries..... 12bn for Eat out to .... what an utter waste.

Whats the excuse that you have for taking debt to GDP from 65% to 88% between 2010 and 2020?

Whats your excuse for gilts going from 1.5% yield to 4.5% under the Tories? that increase took govt borrowing costs from 30bn to 90bn per year....

All good under the Tories.....

We've paid £35 billion to a random country to take our territory. And allowed the occupants of that territory no say in the matter. Hardly progressive. I thought Keir Starmer was in to human rights.

I’m always paralysed with indecision about voting. They are all as corrupt as each other.

I do feel the last government was hamstrung by Covid and Ukraine. We didn’t get to see what they could have done with some stability. I wish we had. Though, Boris was shameful.

Sunak seemed to be making some headway on the economy, once the worst of the Covid challenge was past. The progress is gone now with the NI and NMW increases.

Yep and the rest.

He was. But I was always skeptical about the partying. I think that was cooked up by Sue Gray who as we later found out, isn't entirely politically neutral.

Boris had just come out of intensive care where he had nearly died and had just had a newborn baby. Even if he was 25 years old he would have found partying a bit of a stretch. Particularly as he was also PM during a pandemic which would hardly be a relaxing role.

Ha at this. Poor old Labour, a few still rallying for them.

Agree on Chagos disaster.

So you want low pay to continue, though the NMW increase was lower than that Sunak gave us.

Plus the Tories presided over the pollution of our seas and rivers, thats going to cost us all many times more than 300k per year.

@Lifeinthepit I agree- I had sympathy with people whose behaviour was a bit erratic under very trying circumstances. It felt like the end of the world at some stages.
But imo Boris was embarrassing before all that. I do hold his personal life against him.

What was the point of this Chagos arrangement? We can all see the flaw, but what was it supposed to achieve? I’ve not been paying attention.

Oh, I didn’t mean that I agree with the decision to hand the islands to Mauritius - I think it’s ridiculous.

I was just pointing out that by that PP’s reckoning, Mauritius had no more “rights” to the islands than we do, and that if we should be giving up all our overseas territories then we shouldn’t be creating another o/s territory for another country by giving the islands to Mauritius.

@myplace Yes I'm not excusing him for all the other things he did. Particularly taking the limits off immigration and listening to his wife too much. We will never know whether he could have been a good non-covid PM. But at least he was positive and cheery I suppose. And tried to argue against too many restrictions.

Imagine Keir Starmer as covid PM. I imagine if anyone posted negatively about covid restrictions they would be immediately shot by his elite squad of online thought crime police.

Yep. Without Cumming’s partygate I wonder if Starmer would be in power at all.

Yes I got your point and it was a good one!

I was just agreeing with how random it is.

You'd think we lived in a golden age judging from these comments. Potholes, crumbling schools, years long waiting lists and people dying on the floor in A&E, bankrupt councils, lack of social care, Brexit, corruption, millions using food banks, child poverty and reduced mortality rates, housing crisis, Rwanda scheme, Hs2, sewage in our waterways, bonuses for fat cats, Windrush scandal, men in women's prisons, energy crisis, cost of living crisis, Trussenomics...The good old days.

The official explanation is that international opinion is swinging against us because of the non-binding judgment, and that makes international action likely in terms of blocking our use of certain defence functions (access to radio frequencies is the only one I can recall), which risks making the islands undefendable. So putting things on a different legal footing with Mauritius is a safer option.

But that seems so flimsy that I’d love to hear a better explanation as to why it’s in our interests. The only thing I can come up with is that they really love international law and think it’s going to be around forever (I’m being flippant there, but it’s not entirely untrue – basically they think a strong international system is best for Britain and calculate that giving the islands away helps to strengthen it even/especially when the judgment was a non-binding one).

But neither of those seems very compelling, so I’d love to hear a steelman case for the deal.

At least the country was hanging on in there. Unfortunately Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are the straws that broke the economy and the camel's back.

Apparently China and Russia are very supportive of the deal. So at least international opinion is swinging towards us in some areas.

Also what countries do we give a shit about that were going to disapprove of us or block radio signals? I though the US were against the deal?

The economy isn't broken. Talking nonsense doesn't help your case.

Of course it is. Or will be soon.