Ok, so let me understand this. My tax pounds went to fund a trip by some foreign office mandarins and associated hangers-on of Bangladeshi extraction to go to Bangladesh to extol image of United Kingdom to Bangladeshi's? The mind boggles as to why on bloody earth are my tax dollars being used for this totally insane, inane and idiotic endeavour. What was the benefit? To get students in our educational courses?
Tell me something, how on earth can one of the poorest and most corrupt countries have so many students which can pay foreign student fees of tens of thousands of pounds in the UK? and most of them will stay back in the UK. How many Bangladeshi undergraduate and postgraduate students has this kind of programme attracted? I can understand going to China or India (see the picture here which I took in Lucknow, India). And as it so happens, there were only 2 blog posts here on the entire trip and only 1 occasion to visit an existing university.
I went to the website here, and I cannot still understand what was the point of this trip? So assuming 10 people, at £3000 per business class plane ticket per head, 1 week trip, with £500 per day expenses all in and then say 10,000 per head honorarium (for 8 people), that comes to approximately £130,000. Now, on a normal investment basis, compounded every 1 week, with one additional similar trip per year, over 5 years will give me £993,576.12. That's a million quid roughly. If my back of a fag pack calculations are right, how is the FCO and Ms. Haq going to justify this jolly?
So this was funded by the Foreign Office. What Foreign Policy objectives did this fulfil? I am totally unclear about that as well, reading the blog did not enlighten me either.
No comments:
Post a Comment