Ryan Bourne in yesterday's City AM:
According to the UN, Britain is ranked 156th out of 165 participating countries for “kids’ rights”. If you think this is a genuine reflection of the welfare and rights of children here relative to other countries – including Venezuela and Saudi Arabia – who are ranked higher than us, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Then again, what are we to expect from an organisation whose Human Rights Council recently appointed a representative from Saudi Arabia to its 2018-2022 “Commission on the Status of Women”, which is “exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality”? In Saudi Arabia, women are still banned from driving.
But no doubt we can look forward to that Commission criticising Britain’s so-called “gender pay gap”, as representatives from Sudan and Algeria did in our 2012 Universal Review. This featured other delights, such as Russia criticising “police brutality” in the UK, Vietnam denouncing our “austerity”, Cuba urging us to protect economic and social rights, and China discussing the freedom to protest...
Why are British taxpayers funding this nonsense?
It's a good question and I don't know the answer. I'd ask the same about our membership of NATO.
Wednesday, 6 September 2017
Conscious UN-coupling
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6 comments:
It is a good question and I don't know the answer either.
It's like paying the BBC licence... more and more of us wonder why we fund organisations who think we are stupid
Why are British taxpayers funding this nonsense? It’s Parkinson’s Law, or my variation on it, namely: “The lower your IQ, the higher you’ll climb in British society.” And it’s the low IQ people at the top who take silly decisions like agreeing to fund the UN.
Same goes in the US. As Dean Baker (head of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research) put it, “In elite Washington circles, ignorance is a credential”.
AKH, get back to us if it occurs to you.
G, there is a sort of trend here, BBC/UN with all the political correctness stuff. That said, I do like a lot of the documentaries they show on BBC4. You grit your teeth for the inevitable "global warming" bit that they manage to shoe horn in at the end if possible, but hey, we're all biased in one way or another and you learn to adjust for it.
RM, the UN was originally a great idea (like the Common Market or NATO) but has outlived its purpose (like the EU and NATO).
"Why are British taxpayers funding this nonsense?"
That's easy: the people who pay the taxes aren't the ones who get to say what they are spent on and the people who get to spend the taxes don't care, by and large, because it's not their money.
We probably join in these things to be polite, whereas jonny foreigner does it to give him a platform to be rude. Foreign folk are generally quite rude.
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