[ Info Drop #036 ]: UK Govt Spending, Queer Theory For Mexican Coffee Farmers, Studying "Pregnant Men", and Bankrolling “The Ethiopian Spice Girls”

Waste not, want not.

Government wasting money? Yep, the grass is green, rocks exist, and Biden is still a complete muppet.

Bloated budgets, overpaid civil servants, and pretentious metropolitan projects have become habitual to modern governance. It is a natural byproduct of the gradual degradation of government moving away from paternalism and toward maternalism.

The pandemic response exposed as much. If our bombastic, blonde-haired ex-PM Boris Johnson were Mario and the go-karting track on which Mario drives represented the journey toward a high-spending nanny state, then the pandemic was the speed-boost token. Need we not remind you of the coffee cup rozzers who patrolled public parks.

I quite like to think of myself as the banana peel in this Mario Kart analogy…

Within the last 40 years, the UK government’s total managed expenditure (TME) has nearly tripled. In 1981-82, expenditure totalled £438.1 billion. In 2020, it was well over a trillion - £1.101 trillion, to be exact. Spending in the 80s targeted the key sectors - infrastructure, defence, housing.

But now, well, we’ve ventured to the outright satirical:

Gender lessons for Mexican coffee farmers

A press release earlier this month from the British Embassy in Mexico City revealed that British taxpayers are contributing to a “complete revision of the concepts of gender” among Mexican coffee farm workers.

The project is being undertaken by the UK Partnering for Accelerated Climate Transitions (PACT) group and funded by the Foreign Office and the Business Department (BEIS) as a part of the International Climate Finance portfolio, in which the UK is investing £11.6bn to March 2026.

A local Mexican academic, Professor Cesar Flores, involved in the project claimed that the “observance” of revised concepts of gender “can have a positive impact in the development of projects of carbon sequestration”.

Festival Of Brexit

In 2018, then-PM Theresa May announced that the government would fund a year-long festival to celebrate Britain leaving the EU. The festival was originally dubbed “The Festival Of Brexit” before fragile SPADs and civil servants complained and prompted a name change to “Unboxed”.

It became a far cry from its original purpose. The £120 million taxpayer-funded festival featured drag queens lecturing families and hosted talks on “decolonising your garden”. The Unboxed Festival, as it was rebranded, organisers hoped to reach an audience of 66 million. Reports revealed it reached 238,000.

NHS “networks”

In August, a government report revealed the NHS blew more than £1 million on hundreds of staff “networks”. These taxpayer-funded “networks” hosted events on transgender issues, sexuality, and racism.

Within this purview, NHS officials held 'tea and rainbow cake' picnics, a special session about pronouns, and a Filipino martial arts performance.

The TaxPayers' Alliance found there are now at least 493 networks operating across the UK health service, which have taken up approximately 36,000 hours of staff time a year.

Retiring farmers/Paying not to farm

In May 2021, the then-Environment Secretary declared that British farmers wishing to leave agriculture will be offered a lump sum of up to £100,000 regardless of their profit performance. He added, “the generational nature of farming . . . means that a younger generation often feels a great sense of duty to carry on the family tradition, but that might not be right for all”.

At the start of this year, the government unveiled a new “recovery scheme” that would see taxpayers pay farmers “re-wild” their land. They announced the latter as they continue the development of HS2 - an enormous high-speed railway project that would see houses demolished and swaths of countryside excavated.

Covid Test and Trace App

In October 2021, a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) revealed the NHS test and trace system and app collectively cost taxpayers an eye-watering £37 billion in funding. That amount equals almost a 1/5 of the entire national health service annual budget.

Reports further stated at certain times, just 11% of contact tracers were working, with the figure never rising beyond 49%. The program included hiring over 2,000 consultants to deal with calls and queries. Some of these call handlers later confessed that they didn’t take a single call and were paid around £4,500 anyway.

According to the National Audit Office, £76 million was spent on the NHS Covid-19 app alone. This mirrored the exorbitant amount paid by the Canadian government for their almost identical CanArrive app ($54 million). The lack of competence became all the more clear when a Canadian tech company recently cloned the same type of app in under 48 hours and said it would cost them under $1 million to build.

Overpaying civil service

In late 2020, The Taxpayers’ Alliance carried out an investigation - analysing over 4,000 Freedom Of Information Act requests and thousands of government contracts and databases - that disclosed senior civil servants banking at least £42 million in bonuses in 2019.

They also discovered officials spent thousands on luxury flights, restaurants, steakhouses and even a day at the zoo. A government spokesperson on behalf of Whitehall departments at the time said, “we are committed to delivering the best value for money, cutting waste and inefficiency and ensuring every pound of taxpayers' money is spent in the best possible way”.

Grants to study “pregnant men”

In November 2021, the Mail On Sunday discovered the government spent in excess of £3 million on transgender research, including projects charting the experience of “pregnant men” and the fate of trans people in Lebanon. These projects were both funded by the UK Research and Innovation quango, which is financed by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to support “academic investigations”. The former “academic investigation” included investing £668,224 of taxpayers’ money in a four-year project run by Leeds University entitled “Pregnant Men: An International Exploration Of Trans Male Experiences And Practices Of Reproduction”.

The Covid Briefing Room

In March 2021, the Cabinet Office, under a Freedom Of Information Act request, was compelled to release the costs for their Covid Press Briefing Room. Breakdowns showed that the main workings of the room cost £1.8 million, with broadband equipment and “long lead items” costing up to £230,000. Government spokespersons claimed the room would host regular White House-style press conferences. The first press conference was held on 29 March 2021. Less than a month later, they scrapped these plans. Reports later revealed they used the room to watch the new Bond film.

Unused face masks

In August 2020, court documents revealed that the government wasted more than £150 million on 50 million face masks that did not meet NHS safety standards. Part of the problem was that the personal protective equipment (PPE) ordered from Ayanda Capital had “ear loops rather than head loops”. It later emerged the man responsible for striking the deal served both as an adviser to the UK Board of Trade and a senior board adviser at Ayanda. During the controversy, a government spokesperson said “there is a robust process in place to ensure orders are of high quality and meet strict safety standards, with the necessary due diligence undertaken on all government contracts."

“Ethiopian Spice Girls”

In December 2016, an all-female pop group designated “Ethiopia’s Spice Girls” received £5.2 million from the government’s foreign aid budget as a part of the Yegna project. This was on top of the £4 million they received via the government-funded Girl Hub in 2013 - a project now rebranded as “Girl Effect”. The group obtained the funds in 2016 through a contract to develop their “branded media platform”, which “champions girls and creates a national conversation about their challenges and their potential to overcome the problems.”

Bonus: Trudeau’s Flying Chef

We couldn’t leave out the smarmy-smile-wielding dictator-in-chief (also prime of minister of blackface) Trudeau …

In 2018, documents tabled in the Canadian parliament on government expenditure detailed that Trudeau paid $17,000 for a Vancouver-based celebrity chef to fly with him to India on a nine-day state visit using taxpayer money. The chef, Vikram Vij, was reported to have helped prepare a pair of Indian-inspired meals at the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi. Trudeau defended his actions by saying the visit “was focused on strengthening the historic ties between our two countries, and promoting economic opportunities that will create good jobs for Canadians.”

One might be forgiven for thinking bringing your own chef to cook Indian food in India is more of an insult than part of a larger effort to “strengthen historic ties”. But maybe that’s just me…