10 things you could do with £3.5bn.(Cost of renovating Westminster).
This week, MPs that gave us 10 years of austerity and steadily falling living standards, have voted to spend £3.5 billion renovating the House of Commons.
I don’t know about you but that seems like a ridiculous amount given they have reduced spending on practically everything else(well, to be fair, not their own wages which managed to dramatically increase in real terms).
So, let’s see what else that sort of money could be spent on.
- We could build 5.5 Scottish Parliaments. The Scottish Parliament cost £414 million in 2001 which would be around £641 million nowadays. That means we’d have six in total, one for each working day and an extra one we could lend to the MPs at Westminster.
I bags the spare half.
- Invest in 35,000 local authority homes with an upfront cost of £100,000 each. This is without factoring in the money the local authority would recoup in rents over the years. We could let MPs live in some of them for a reasonable rent to save the country some of the money we spend on subsidising their second homes.
- Construct at least 4 super hospitals. The newly opened Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow cost £842 million to build. The MPs should be over the moon with this plan as it will give them 4 more things to barter for chlorinated chicken after our post-Brexit bonfire of the regulations.
- 21,875,000 baby boxes at a cost of £160 a pop. Now, I know that there are some people who hate the thought of the Government giving children a good start in life, but there are fewer than a million babies born in the UK each year, so this plan would only cost a fraction of the Westminster refurbishment cash. Although, if we used the whole amount, we could give every child born in Europe four baby boxes each as a wee parting gift.
- 2.5 Queensferry Crossings at a cost of £1.35bn each. Ok, I appreciate that half a Queensferry Crossing is fairly useless, but, then again, the alternative is refurbishing the House of Commons.
We could have 2 and a half of these.
- 1129 Enercon E82 wind turbine installations at an average cost of £3.1million per project. Probably better to invest that type of money in clean, renewable power sources than in crumbling, antiquated seats of power.
- The training of 102,941 infantry soldiers at an approximate cost of £34,000 per soldier according to MOD estimates. Then we could go back to killing subsistence farmers(I mean terrorists) the old-fashioned way.
- Give £875 to the 4,000,000 children who are living in poverty partly due to decisions made in the Houses of Parliament. Give them it in three daily instalments for merely turning up and falling asleep, so that they can experience what it’s like to live half a week working as a hereditary peer.
- Pay for 126,977 three year English undergraduate degrees at the current average cost of £9,188 per year. It would be better than burdening the youth of the country with crippling debt due to decisions made by MPs who mostly all benefited from a free education.
- Cover the cost of 406,976,744 prescriptions in England and Wales at the current cost of £8.60 a prescription. Then we could all get some free sedatives to try and help us forget about the amount of money they are just about to spend on Parliament after forcing a decade of austerity on the rest of us.
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