Great Britain: £1,000 per Dog per Year

GREAT BRITAIN

There was a time when the French regarded themselves as Citizens, the British as Subjects, and the Americans as Taxpayers. The lines are no longer clear. Americans this year got a small reduction, De Gaulle long ago made subjects of the French, and those noises in London last week were unmistakably the shrill, surly shrieks of the wounded taxpayer at bay. CASH “FRITTERED AWAY” ABROAD, reported the Daily Telegraph. Sputtered the Daily Mirror: “What the taxpayers of this country want to know is: Who is going to be fired as a result of this?”

To Americans, the source of pain was all too familiar: a 297-page report by a parliamentary committee investigating overseas military spending. Sweeping the bases, the committee found Benghazi about to be closed, Hong Kong indefensible, Gibraltar all but useless, Singapore disorganized, Malaysia too powerful, and the new Indian Ocean airbase at Gan dismayingly expensive (“The contract estimate has been revised on five occasions”). At all these bases, charged the committee, the armed forces have squandered the taxpayers’ money on illusory projects. At Hong Kong, the army “surrendered” valuable land to the local government, which not long ago sold an acre of it for nearly £1,000,000 for the Hilton Hotel. And in Singapore, “an establishment of 115 dogs (including 102 dog handlers) costs a total of £110,000 to maintain, or not far short of £ 1,000 per dog per annum.”

As for the navy, the committee says, it is overstaffing its fleets in order to live up to its recruiting slogan: “Join the Navy and see the world.” Furthermore, a suspicious number of ships have been making unscheduled stops in lively Hong Kong under the pretext of needing “minor repairs.”

The R.A.F. is no better. On Gibraltar, “only part of one squadron was operational, yet the R.A.F. personnel numbered about 1,200.” In Singapore, the R.A.F. maintains a full brass band, at a cost of £85,000 a year. Wrote the Daily Mirror when it found out: “We all know that showing the flag and the mighty oompah, oompah, oompah of the military brass band is a jolly good thing. But who thinks a pile of brass is really worth £85,000?”

British Subjects might. British Taxpayers don’t.