Apologies for the Mail style headline, but it gives some idea of the anger generated by the revealation that
MPs on the international development select committee have discovered that £1.85m, supposed to be for overseas development aid was spent on the Pope's UK visit in September.
The money was transferred from the Department for International Development which handles foreign aid to the Foreign Office.defended the transfer saying it would not affect overseas aid spending as it was taken from its running costs budget, used to pay for staffing and administration costs, which is not ringfenced from spending cuts unlike core overseas development aid which is protected.
The department was one of several which part-funded the Pope's visit. However the excuse given by the Department is even more extraordinary: "Our contribution recognised the Catholic Church's role as a major provider of health and education services in developing countries."
The four-day visit in September was estimated at the time to have cost Whitehall departments £10m. Roman Catholic churchgoers also contributed to the costs of the visit.
The Select Committee has asked Ministers to explain exactly what this was spent on and how it tallies with our commitments on overseas aid
It is to be hoped they also ask what other Departments contributed to this so-called state visit, and how much the Pope's visit has actually cost the government. Perhaps they should also ask the Pope to provide evidence of the health and education services provided, and compare these with the damage caused in Africa by the Pope's injunction on the use of condoms.
Or perhaps he was on a Government sponsored mission to investigate the profit potential of the privatised health and education the Tories are determined to foist upon us.
I had to remove an angry post I put up on my own blog about this. I was apoplectic. I am NOT a fan of the Vatican, nor of religion in general, and then I find out starving children in the developing world might go without due to the nonsense of a ""state visit" by Joseph Ratzinger.
ReplyDeleteIt was Ratzinger (as head of the Inquisition) that ordered the crackdown on the development of Liberation Theology in South and Central America, a theology that stood for social justice, as the bishops and archbishops went to cocktail parties thrown by supporters of the dictators that the priests "on the frontline" were fighting at pulpit and in the slums.
The Department for International Development has either no knowledge of this, or has chosen to ignore it to supplicate itself before the god of propaganda.
Makes my blood boil. I'm getting angry again now, best curtail this comment.
As James Connolly wrote in 1899;
'our contention [is] that the social question, or the bread and butter question, is the root question of all, and until it is settled no other question of fundamental importance can be grappled with in any but an incomplete and unsatisfactory manner.'