Ministry of Deference

January 19, 2007 England, Wales No comments
! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.

It was announced the other day that RAF Cosford has lost its bid to keep the DARA (Defence Aviation Repair Agency) training centre to RAF St Athan in South Wales.

It has been mentioned that the winning consortium contains QinetiQ (formerly DERA – Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) which is 21% owned by the British government and it has been suggested that this may have influenced the decision.

However, what hasn’t been mentioned is that around 18 months ago, RAF Cosford was told that it was not allowed any public money to refurbish facilities but RAF St Athan was given £184m of public money by the Welsh Assembly to build the super hanger which clinched the deal for St Athan.

Bearing in mind that Wales is running at a multi-billion pound budget deficit which is plugged with English taxes, this means that effectively English taxes have paid for the facilities that have enabled St Athan to take the business off RAF Cosford.

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