Last week I treated Daily Sceptic readers to examples of ghastly taxpayer-funded projects under Labour.
You may remember that several were very international in their remit, such as £903,433 for 'Towards Indigenous Seed Data Sovereignty for Climate Resilience: Safeguarding Seed and Wild Plant Heritage in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago'.
In today’s article I will show you 10 examples of, in my view, pointless international research that we are paying for.
With Labour slashing international aid earlier this year, one could almost be convinced that the UK was clamping down on foreign spending.
But universities tell a completely different story (as well as the billions UK taxpayers are charged for migrant accommodation and open-border-promoting charities).
Here’s what else we’ve been paying for and the staggering sums involved. These are all 'active' (in other words, currently ongoing) projects:
£1,014,696 – Resettling the Colonial Lens: Photography and the (re)making of Malaysia's New Villages
Photography was a key medium through which the British colonial state sought to document the Malayan Emergency (1948-60). This was particularly so for resettlement. Under this counterinsurgency scheme, almost half a million rural residents of colonial Malaya, most of them of Chinese ancestry, were forcibly moved into hundreds of resettlement camps – later re-labelled 'New Villages' (NVs) – in an attempt to undermine support for the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). However, resettlement in late-colonial Malaya has been largely overlooked in the now vast critical literature on the relationship between photography and colonialism.
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This kind of thing pissed me off to no end.
Unbelievable. Incredible waste of our money.
I’ve read through all of this but I was unable to determine what any of this so-called research is supposedly about. The project descriptions are basically word-salad with certain key phrases thrown in (decolonisation, art, disability etc) and I can’t help thinking that the real meaning is: Pay (certain well-connected) people for doing whatever they want without expecting them to produce anything tangible in return.
Exactly
Check out the “It’s a living” Monty Python sketch for a pithy encapsulation of this kind of gravy train
Plus the ‘pay’ covers a few months interesting and not challenging stay in Africa or Malaysia – good vacation and adds colour to an otherwise arid CV
An interesting and useful article. Thanks.
The dominant class in a marxo-fascist regime like our is the state bourgeoisie, which is the class that, because of the vast increase in state interference in society since the War, has displaced the entrepreneurial middle class. The problem is that the state bourgeoisie is a dependent class that lives off the tax-payers in a relationship of parasite to host. Our situation is that the state bourgeoisie seeks to extract (exploit) as much wealth as possible from the tax-payer host, and one way of doing this is to produce “studies” like those listed in Charlotte Gill’s article. And notice how the state bourgeoisie cloaks its parasitism in bogus “moral superiority” by trying to attach words like “justice” to its exploitation!
These are the sorts of projects which lead to absolutely worthless PhDs, undertaken merely so the title of “Dr” can be used by the recipient, lending them a veneer of academic prowess.
Lots of money absolutely wasted just so that some slacker can be “Dr”. Never be fooled by titles and awards, many of them are worthless.
As long as ridiculous NGOs keep employing such people however, they will continue to spawn.
Uh-hu… But, but, Stammy, Larmer and m’lord Hermetic say that we owe this to the world because we have to make reparations for our past misdeeds.
“The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.” -Erasmus, 1509
One tiny example of establishment grift.
Take this and multiply it by a number with plenty of zeros behind it and you’ve got a sense of the scale of establishment corruption.
I can’t see me getting on with someone who thinks such activities are a good investment of public money.
Good for you.