Scandal: Foreign Aid Budget is Twice as Much as British Higher Education Budget
Evidence of the vicious anti-British nature of the Westminster parties has come with the “education budget cut” announced by the ConDem regime — which inadvertently revealed that the foreign aid budget is now twice as high as the higher education budget.
The shocking news was contained in the announcement by Chancellor George Osborne that the spending review cuts have meant that the higher education budget will be cut from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion by 2014.As bad as that news is, a quick look at the “ring fenced” foreign aid budget reveals that even prior to the recession, more money was being put aside for foreign aid than for higher education.
A “revised spending budget” issued by the Department for International Development (DFID) in June 2009 showed that the foreign aid budget for 2009/10 was £6.8 billion and was set to rise to £7.7 billion in the 2010/11 financial year.
The DFID announcement has deliberately understated the figures, hiding the true cost with an administrative trick. The figures they announced are only the direct aid programme, and not the total cost, which is called the “Gross Public Expenditure on Development” (GPEX) – which adds nearly £2 billion each year to total DFID expenditure.
For example, the GPEX in 2007/08 amounted to £6.027 billion, of which £5.2 billion was direct aid. The GPEX for 2006/07 was £7.4 billion, of which £4.9 billion was direct aid, and the GPEX for 2005/06 was £6.6 billion, of which £4.4 billion was direct aid.
This means that in the financial year 2010/2011 the GPEX for the DFID amounted to some £9.9 billion.
Given the higher education budget cuts, this means that British taxpayers now spend more than twice as much handing out cash to countries like India and China than what is spent educating British kids.
The budget cut announced by Mr Osborne amount to a 40 percent cut in higher education teaching budgets.
In addition, universities will be allowed to charge higher tuition fees, which will mean that the debts with which those kids lucky enough to get into university leave those institutions, will be even higher than before.
According to a report which quoted Professor Steve Smith, president of the vice-chancellors' association, the stagnation of investment in the science budget has meant that Britain is “now one of the only countries in the industrialised world that is not increasing our investment in science and research.”
It seems that the ConDem regime, and its Labour twin, are perfectly happy to keep funding nuclear power India and buying schoolbooks in China than ensuring that British kids have a fair chance at obtaining a higher education.
How much more treason do they have to perpetrate before the public sees through the Westminster party scam?
* Mr Osborne also announced that the government will establish a new £150m national scholarship fund to support students from “disadvantaged backgrounds.”
While the principle behind such a scheme is praiseworthy, observers have pointed out that the ConDem’s own definition of “disadvantaged” has generally meant to be those of ethnic origin.
Time will tell if this scheme is just another affirmative action handout or no
