How spineless can you get?

Announce spending cuts of only £13 million one day and then quickly change your mind a few days later after a bit of shroud waving and outrage from the “charity” that is getting it’s funding chopped :

The government has been accused of performing a partial U-turn over funding for a charity that gives free books to children.

Booktrust had been told it would lose all £13m funding for its bookgifting programmes in England, but ministers now say funding will continue.

The charity provides packs of books to parents when their babies are first born, and again at later stages in their development.

The project started in 1992 and has received money from the government since 2004.

It is funded separately by the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Last week Booktrust was told by the Department for Education that funding for bookgifting programmes in England – Bookstart, Booktime and Booked Up – would be cut by 100% from 1 April 2011.

But Booktrust chief executive Viv Bird told BBC News that, in a conversation on Sunday morning, Education Secretary Michael Gove had “committed his support for Booktrust book-gifting programmes so that every child will continue to have access to the gift of a book”.

She said that the charity would hold talks with the government in the new year about the level of continued public funding.

A joint statement from the DfE and Booktrust said the department would “continue to fund Booktrust book-gifting programmes in the future”.

It said: “Although the current contract will end in April, the department are talking to Booktrust about how to develop a new programme which will ensure that every child can enjoy the gift of books at crucial moments in their lives while ensuring we develop an even more effective way of supporting the most disadvantaged families to read together.”

Booktrust describes itself as a charity.

Looking at it’s 2009 accounts it had income of £16.5 million, of which just £4632 was donations with the rest coming straight out of our pockets via the government.

Hardly a charity in my view and certainly not in anyone else’s either given those donation numbers.

All this probably goes some way towards Novembers shocking government borrowing figures which show no signs of any spending cuts at all (emphasis mine):

Having said that, the more immediate danger is fiscal. During November, the Government borrowed an astonishing £23.3bn – the highest total for a single month since records began. While tax receipts were 3.1pc up on November 2009, government spending was no less than 10.9pc higher. And you thought we were in the middle of a fiscal squeeze!

These November figures are no one-off. UK borrowing this year has been higher than during 2009-10 in three of the past four months. With inflation stubbornly high, and policy-makers now being forced to admit the inflationary problem is real, concerns about price pressure could spread to the gilts market, making it more difficult for the UK to sell the swathes of non-indexed sterling instruments it uses to finance its burgeoning public sector debt.

How the fuck are they going to get a grip on spending running over by £23.3 billion a month when they can’t even manage to stop £13 million of fake charity annual funding?

Oh yes that’s right – they are just going to tax us all back to the fucking stoneage whilst keeping the gravy flowing to the entitled unwashed.

And I thought we had kicked the socialists out back in May?

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