The PM preaches open markets while his government practises privilege

David Cameron here: ‘We won’t build a better economy by turning our back on the free market. We’ll do it by making sure the market is fair as well as free… open markets and free enterprise can actually promote morality’.

He talks the talk, but he does not walk the walk. While Cameron talks up free markets, the Foreign Secretary and his team of FCO diplomats amend the agenda. Only a few years ago we quoted the wretched British ambassador in Libya saying that the British Council represented the best of Britain, even as the organisation was brownnosing its way into the tender parts of the Gaddafi clan. Today Hague tells the doubtless underwhelmed Brazilians (whose economy has overtaken ours by hard work and enterprise) that the British Council budget for Brazil has been trebled. Wow. Thank you massa. And all at arm’s length too.

Meanwhile the ambassador in the Ukraine gushes about the British Council (as it collects another monopoly insider contract) “The British Council has a global ambition to provide learning and teaching materials to all teachers and learners of English worldwide”. A sort of global interference model.

While the BC swan around the world flashing their credit cards in fancy restaurants, while they spend millions refurbishing their centres, and then get civil service pensions paid for by the taxpayer (having collected a gong or two on the way for what passes for “public service”), the taxpayer goes on being asked to cough up more and more for them, and so ensure that markets do not work and that competition is not free and fair. For, Mr Cameron, if open markets and free enterprise can promote morality, the corollary is that closed markets, cronyism, and support for inefficiency, incompetence and unwarranted privilege promote corruption, arrogance and waste. The British Council. QED.

Comments

[Neil Robertson]

http://www.dca.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/jane-louise-wilson.html

[Neil Robertson]

http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/leighturner/2011/02/18/mi6-art-and-freedoms/

[Neil Robertson]

On noticing the words 'Research has been supported by British Council Ukraine' this morning as I entered Jane and Louise Wilson's "Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum" about Chernobyl I filled in a complaint form pointing out that The British Council is the most toxic organisation in Britain! Felt even more justified in that when I entered the second installation which was done with no British Council assistance. It was all about the assassination of a Palestinian (Hamas) activist in Dubai by Mossad agents using false passports to infiltrate the hotel to kill him .....