There’s two topics currently obsessing the media. The British Steel Industry and Overseas Aid.

So it was only a matter of time, and sufficiently shitty journalism, before someone put 2 and 2 together and came up with the reactionary, knee-jerk, middle-class, right wing result of 172 million.

Because that was the ‘extra’ overseas aid that we, the British people, and Me, the only British tax-payer, sent to help in foreign lands, over and above the 2 billion we promised to send. And that ‘paltry’ and apparently ‘accidental’ sum (“oh shit, I accidentally paid a hundred and seventy two million quid into the personal bank account of an African war-lord so he can build a new heli-pad to help his drug import business; sorry”) would be sufficient to keep the Port Talbot steelworks open for another 6 months. It currently loses 1 million pounds every day.

So the Mail on Sunday, that bastion of bollocks, decided that their campaign to restrict overseas aid payments should be allied to the steel industry’s woes and linked in a facile, tenuous, trivialising but hard-hitting way.

A way that is very tabloid, very wrong and does injustice to both causes.

The possible closure of the Port Talbot steelworks would be a catastrophe in socio-economic terms for the region. Port Talbot, the town, IS the steelworks. If that goes, the jobs go, the money goes, the economy goes, taking the shops and the entire town with it. Disaster. Yet do we renationalise the company and subsidise an industry destined never to break even again? Or do we close it down and spend probably more than a million pounds a day in welfare benefits and re-training and sorting out the economic mess but not the deeply wounding psychological and emotional impact on every worker and their families?

The overseas aid money, stupidly pledged by Cameron (had a good day, did Dave, in the run-up to the election: a promise of 0.7% of GDP in overseas aid PLUS the stupid, divisive and positively daft Euro referendum) is actually ok. We are a ‘rich country’ even though none of us feel particularly rich and all the news is generally bad. But where does our 2 billion go? And how is it monitored?? It is sent to ‘aid agencies’ in Europe to be distributed. The aid agencies pay their inevitable team of ‘executives’ millions each year in salaries and to keep them flying round the world looking at ’causes’. Eventually, some of the money filters through to the countries where it is desperately needed. But these countries are generally very corrupt. Which is why they need aid in the first place. And thus the money stops at their ‘governments’, providing luxuries for the priviledged few whilst the intended recipients never feel any benefit whatsoever. Once our money has left here it is completely unaccountable. I would love to know the actual percentage that eventually reaches needy causes. Cos it ain’t very high.

Don’t want to talk about football. Which makes the Port Talbot crisis seem ‘uplifting’ by comparison.

Happy Monday; if ya live in fucking Leicester

A xxxx