Student Loans Frozen — but Government Has Spent 200% of Student Grant on Wars and Foreign Aid

http://bnp.org.uk/2009/07/student-loans-frozen-%e2%80%94-but-government-has-spent-200-of-student-grant-on-wars-and-foreign-aid/

Citing “financial austerity” measures, the Government has frozen all student loans while at the same time announcing that it has spent 200 percent of the total student grant budget on foreign aid and the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The freezing of the student grants was announced by university minister David Lammy, who received his own education courtesy of an Inner London Education Authority choral scholarship. He said that “difficult economic times” had necessitated the step. At the same time, tuition fees will increase by two percent to £3,290 per student, he added.

Mr Lammy’s announcement came on the same day that the House of Commons Defence Committee published figures which for the first time revealed official estimates on the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which have seen extensive British involvement based on a pack of lies supported by both Tory and Labour parties.

According to the report, the annual cost of UK military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year alone reached £4.37 billion. The recently announced foreign aid budget for this year topped £6.6 billion – meaning that in the current financial year the Government has spent twice as much on wars and foreign aid than it has helping British kids go to university at home.

Those figures do not include what has been spent on foreign aid and the illegal wars in previous years. The total cost for the Iraq conflict has been £7 billion, while in Afghanistan the total cost of Britain’s involvement is estimated to be some £7.1 billion, boosted by a massive £3.5 billion pounds in the current fiscal year and £2.6 billion last year.

The total foreign aid budget, as detailed on the website of the Department of Foreign Aid and International Development (DFID), for the years 2006 to 2008 totalled £20.126 billion.
In addition to these outlays, the Government has also spent untold billions bailing out its bankster friends following their borderline criminal activities in the American subprime housing market. All of this has added up to generate a government budget deficit projected to top 12.4 percent of gross domestic product this year – a devastating exposé of the utter incompetence and mismanagement of the current ruling regime.

As usual, it is British people who are called upon to shoulder the burden caused by these disasters. Students are an easy target upon which the Government can focus for the first of its major cuts to try and balance its books. Figures from the universities indicate that an additional 60,000 school-leavers face being turned away from university in September due to the decline in funding from central government which has reduced the number of new places available.

The new cuts mark the second time in less than a year that students have been targeted for ’savings’ by the Government. Last October the then Universities Secretary John Denham admitted that he had failed to calculate the costings properly on the family income threshold for receiving a partial grant. As a result, the threshold had to be hurriedly reduced, causing tens of thousands of students to be faced with additional unplanned for debt.

* The British National Party demands an end to these extravagant, unnecessary and wasteful foreign handouts. Not a penny should be spent on anything outside of Britain until the needs and requirements of British people at home have been met.