Airline tax

[BEagle]

According to todays Times:

"MILLIONS of pounds raised each year from the £5 tax on airline tickets will be siphoned off to fund a huge aid package for Africa under plans being drawn up by Gordon Brown.

The Chancellor will take the rare step of ring-fencing part of the £900 million a year raised in air passenger duty to fund his scheme, designed to end poverty in Africa."

This is outrageous! Personally I am totally opposed to sending any more money to Africa as it will simply end up in the coffers of corrupt leaders and their cronies. Send a tractor, generator, irrigator - fine. But NOT money!

Governments using tax extracted from airline passengers to promote their own political policies is totally unacceptable.

[Engineer]

From the article (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1676578_1,00.html)
MILLIONS of pounds raised each year from the £5 tax on airline tickets will be siphoned off to fund a huge aid package for Africa under plans being drawn up by Gordon Brown.
Did not read that actual money was being sent so may be your assessment of the situation is a bit premature.

The idea of using an airline tax was also discussed on this thread (http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?threadid=178403&highlight=tax)

[chippy63]

I thought that the intention was debt forgiveness, provided that the debtor countries would agree to use "good principles of governance" - that new talisman of the Browns of this world. Funny, he doesn't seem to apply it closer to home, when you read of the shambles in the Child Support scheme. Anyway, I digress.

There appears to be no evidence that any form of cash or debt forgiveness will have any positive effect on the bad governments in Africa. If there is, I would be glad to see it. Geldorf's quixotic efforts earlier in Ethiopia simply resulted in large supplies of aid supplies being collared by Mengistu and handed out to his clients rather than the intended recipients. Again, a bit like Brown's clients receiving handouts for doing non-jobs....but again, I digress.

When you see cash changing hands, you will often see it spent very wisely. Mengistu bought some strike aircraft within months of cashng a cheque for 30 million ($ or pounds, can't remember).
I believe that the president of another country down there found it handy to buy an executive jet after receiving his wedge.

Brown, Blair, Geldorf, all seem intent on examining the symptoms, rather than on trying to cure the major problem, which is decades of snouts in the trough. Read the recent disclosures on Nigeria- $200+ million plundered. Note how Ghana and Malaysia were pretty much on a par economically in the fifties.

More to the point, note how Mugabe continues to be tolerated by Blair- mainly, I suppose, because he can't get the US interested in another expeditionary adventure. There's a lot of very sloppy thinking, which is not going to solve the problem.

Bear in mind that the recipients of financial aid or debt forgiveness are rarely those whose sad plight is seen in the media. Brown, Blair, and Co. are guilty, in my view, of deeply cynical manipulation of the underlying facts. No change there, then.

[Curious Pax]

Don't quite see why the Times regards the Airline tax as being 'siphoned' off to fund Africa, regardless of the rights and wrongs of how that particular issue is dealt with, unless they are trying to imply there's something dodgy about the whole thing. To the best of my knowledge when the tax was introduced nothing was said about the proceeds being dedicated to a particular item, so presumably it was just in the big pot of tax income which Gordon gets to allocate as he sees fit.

It's a bit like saying that income tax is being siphoned off to pay for new roads and hospitals! :confused:

For me one of the problems around which countries in Africa can get the support in whatever form is whether to recognise the here and now. In some cases (and I believe Nigeria is one) although vast sums have been plundered in the past by previous dictators, the current government appears to be much better in that regard. I wouldn't try and argue that they are perfect by any means, but any significant improvement should be encouraged in the hope that things will improve further still. Trouble is that the reputation of the earlier dictators sticks in our mind, but may not always be an accurate reflection of how things are now.

[doo]

http://www.eursoc.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/850/Taxing_On_The_Runways.html