Why is UK giving Chinese £3million to play football?
They have world’s second biggest economy, so …
GEORGE Osborne has sparked fury after gifting £3million to the Chinese to increase ‘awareness’ of English football.
The Chancellor said that the money would promote the Premier League and train up future football stars and coaches in China.
But MPs condemned the giveaway – announced by Mr Osborne as part of a five-day tour of China – as a ‘tragically daft’ waste of money.
China, which has its own space programme, is the second largest economy in the world after the United States. The International Monetary Fund recently said that China had now toppled the US in one measure: on purchasing power, with the Chinese economy worth £11.54trillion compared to the US’s £11.41trillion.
Britain’s economy is only the fifth largest in the world. On purchasing power, we are down in tenth place.
Critics also said that British grassroots football needs the cash more – while the Premier League is already awash with funding. The Premiership recently signed a record-breaking deal for TV rights, raking in £5.14billion from Sky and BT for showing games of the top football teams. Local
‘Money should not be squandered like this’
grassroots football gets £40million from the Government, with money spent on improving changing rooms and upgrading pitches, as well as coaching.
Ukip MP Douglas Carswell said: ‘Given that the Chinese government has hundreds of billions of dollars of cash reserves and George Osborne’s government is skint, it’s a little bit odd that we are paying £3million as a gift to the Chinese government to train football coaches. It’s tragically daft.’
Steve Rotheram, who sits on the Culture, Media and Sport committee, said MPs will grill Mr Osborne over the deal next month. The Labour MP for Liverpool Walton added: ‘We desperately need more money for grassroots football here. In areas like mine, grassroots football is suffering because of massive cuts to local authority budgets. What good are Chinese coaches for kids in areas like mine?’
Labour’s sports spokesman Clive Efford said Mr Osborne’s time would be ‘far better spent getting the Premier League to pay the money it should be putting into grassroots sport in England’, and Dia Chakravarty, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Politicians like to tell us we no longer give aid to countries like China but then they bankroll ludicrous schemes like this.
‘hard-pressed families will not be happy with this own goal by the Government. They work hard for this money and it shouldn’t be squandered like this.’ The money to China does not come from the Department for International Development but still counts towards Brit- ain’s target of spending 0.7 per cent of our national wealth on overseas aid. An official aid programme with the country ended in 2011 but since then, aid money has been funnelled through the Foreign Office on programmes to do with human rights and climate change, rather than alleviating poverty.
It is classed as Overseas Development Assistance, a measure used by the OECD to calculate how much wealthy nations spend on aid to usually poorer countries. The Government insists the funding is ‘in Britain’s national interest’.
Mr Osborne said it would pay to train 5,000 coaches in China and increase Chinese awareness of and investment in English football. The Chancellor spoke to young players in Urumqi, north west China, on a football coaching programme called Premier Skills, which began in 2008 and is run in 25 countries by the British Council and the Premier League.