Answer to spending is in YOUR hands
I was in hospital yesterday for an appointment going back almost a year.
To pass the time I was reading various articles on the noticeboard.
Did you know there is now an ‘amnesty’ on returning apparatus borrowed from the hospital?
Can you believe that hospitals were doling out crutches with no thought of ever getting them back?
CEC were also providing 3,000 mobile phones half of which were not in use and maintaining over 500 plots of land the council didn’t own.
On the run-up to the general election all parties will be telling us how much money they will spend on all kinds of wondrous projects the bigger the spend the more people will vote for them which is undeniably true.
Every government comes into office promising all kinds spectacular new projects (See HS2 for details).
Sadly, once they have been in charge for a few months they backtrack like mad but one of the first things they do is to increase MP’s salaries clearly they don’t want to reveal this before the election.
Give it a couple of years and we are all back where we started with a government/council that performs as badly as the one that went before.
So… I am going to show you something now that will change this forever.
It’s not a gimmick it is an idea so simple you will wonder why we have not employed it from the getgo.
Let us make it compulsory for politicians never to use the word ‘money’ without adding the prefix ‘your’ before it.
You will be amazed at the change this will make.
Not only to the politicians but to public understanding of government finance.
Hence ‘My party plan to spend over £500k on consultants will become ‘My party plan to spend £500k of YOUR money. Governments and councils do not have money they only have OUR money.
So, let us insist they add the word ‘YOUR’ as an automatic affix to their vocabulary when discussing finance.
Considering the daft words and phrases they invent e.g. “Lessons have been learned, Director of Place, Silos, etc. just adding the word ‘YOUR’ should be a doddle.
So, what’s the hitch, why don’t they just do it?
The answer is simple… they do not want the public to realise that money does not come from some hidden cupboard in Westminster but from us.
It comes from taxpayers so why don’t they sayso?
They do not want us to make that connection lest we become more involved and understand that the only source of that money is us.
I challenge Cheshire East here and now to add the word ‘your’ to every reference to ‘money.’
It would make politics a lot more honest and the public more aware and forget about a magic Cash Fairy.
When potholes are done so shoddily, they need constant repair you will see where ‘YOUR’ money goes and you will become a lot more interested in public affairs.
I shall say this one more time: There is no such thing as ‘public’ money it’s ‘your’, money so why not say so?
It would make politics more honest and residents more aware.
Given enough time I do believe this would transform politics for the good of us all.