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[personal profile] ffutures
I saw this poster tonight:



Apart from the fairly crude attempt to make people feel unpatriotic for wanting a system that should hopefully make it harder for politicians to get away with starting wars, the central premise seems to be the idea that spending money on this process will somehow impede improvements in the Army's equipment.

Except that all of the evidence suggests that sheer incompetence at every level, especially in the bits of the government that currently handle military procurement, are the main things stopping such improvements - ridiculously complicated finance deals that end up costing billions more than they need to. £250 million is a drop in the ocean by these standards.

I'm currently not too keen on the reform guys either, since they are sending me WAY too many emails, but so far they haven't insulted my intelligence to this extent.

Looking forward to the referendum, or whatever they end up calling it.

Later: Looking at their web site doesn't make it very clear who is behind this, but the person named (William Norton) appears to be a solicitor associated with the Conservatives, if it's the same person. Not much of a surprise...

Date: 2011-03-10 11:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ci5rod.livejournal.com
A large part of the referendum cost doesn't count either, since it's the cost of the local elections that would be happening on that day anyway in some of the country.

To generalise hugely, the No campaign are the right-wing Conservatives, funded by Ashcroft, doing it all with expensive and glossy centralized advertising. The Yes campaign are mostly LibDems and some Labour (those that weren't busily trying to sabotage it in the Lords, at least), doing it by email and phone canvassing because that's cheaper. Which would be why the No campaign spent some of their money on getting a court ruling that this is political campaigning, so subject to TPS rules.

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