David Lammy has an opinion piece in The Times and John Healey in The Telegraph this morning as Labour tries to spin the Chagos deal as a win for UK security. Junior armed forces minister Luke Pollard was sent out to face the broadcasters...
Pollard repeated the spin that the cost of the deal is £3.4 billion “calculated using the Treasury’s rules” and the same system is used to calculate the cost of “nuclear decommissioning.” The cash cost is actually £30.3 billion:
Downing Street’s communications where in chaos yesterday when they could not deny that the total sum would be counted towards defence spending. When Healey boasts that the cost is less than 0.2% of the defence budget that is an admission the surrender is eating into defence costs…
Pollard also failed to explain why the United States, which runs Diego Garcia, isn’t paying towards any of the costs of the surrender deal. A massive freebie…
He claimed the deal is good value because the French pay £85 million to rent a base on Djibouti. On territory already owned by: Djibouti, not France…
“Net present value” calculations presented here are almost never used by the government to explain costs or funding. Spin that won’t fly…
Speaking on Times Radio, former Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke about overdiagnosis of mental problems:
“Let’s distinguish those who are really severely mentally ill, diagnosed with things that require prolonged medical and diagnostic treatment. My wife and I talk about this a lot, because she’s a retired GP, about the fact that you can be sad without being ill. You can be momentarily depressed because your boyfriend or girlfriend’s just thrown you and you’re not mentally ill. You can even have mild issues, which can be dealt with with the right kind of support, but it doesn’t make you mentally ill. So we’ve got a real task, I think, to get the psychology, if you like, of this over. But there are things where you definitely need medical intervention, and there are other things where you need good friends, you need good connectivity, and you need a job.”