................... Click for Source
................... Click for Oxfam's take on it
I bet there are some brainwashed here who would defend this lot ....
Govn spouted about 'transparency' and the freedom of info law - then tries to obstruct
Allegedly (Oxfam) £800 a family of 4 per annum is the inflated cost of food due to that lot.
P
..EU farm money lands on U.K. gentry...
....list showed it was not small farmers who necessarily benefited most from Brussels' largess but big agribusiness companies and - since this was England - the landed aristocracy and royals, including Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and a castleful of dukes and earls.....
..."What are we getting for our money?" said Jack Thurston of the Foreign Policy Center, a former political adviser to the government and one of the leading campaigners for increased transparency. "It is public money, but is it doing something that is valued by the public? ...
...Topping the British list of EU farm aid recipients was Tate & Lyle, the sugar company, which received nearly £120 million, or $227 million, last year, according to the Rural Payments Agency. Nestle UK received £11.6 million.
Such corporate subsidy was irritating enough for Britain's generally urban and left-of-center press. It appeared to illustrate what it had suspected all along, that it was those farmers cultivating England's counties on an industrial scale who monopolized the money from Brussels.
The deepest scorn was reserved for the payouts to the upper classes. The Duke of Westminster, owner of swathes of prime real estate in central London, got £448,472. {pipme or more like fkme :- £51 per/hr 24/7/365 (£799,000 in last 2 yrs therefore an increase of 28% last yr)}
The Duke of Marlborough, scion of the Churchill family and Blenheim Palace heir, received £511,435. Other benefactors, according to Oxfam and the press, which went through the data, were the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Plymouth, the Marquess of Cholmondeley and the Earl of Radnor.
Meanwhile, the queen was paid around £546,000 to help run her estates at Sandringham in Norfolk and Windsor Castle.
Prince Charles, whose wealth was on display at his Windsor wedding on Saturday, received £224,000 in extra help for his farm work.
The Scottish and Welsh authorities, fearing legal action for publishing private information, have so far spared their farmers. But the Duke of Buccleuch, possibly Britain's largest private landowner who calls a large part of Scotland his own, presumably anticipated the PR backlash and, according to The Sunday Times, acknowledged that he had received around £700,000 from Brussels in 2004.
Britons may be excused for thinking they had slipped back in time a few centuries. The list "read like a roll call from Debrett's," opined The Guardian. To put it bluntly, said Penny Fowler, who ran Oxfam's campaign, of Britain's total annual subsidy of nearly £4 billion, "small-scale farmers didn't get much at all."
...... The activists who triggered the outbreak of openness were emulating a U.S. campaign, which, according to Liz Moore of the Washington-based Environmental Working Group, in 2001 forced the revelation that U.S. government subsidies were being paid to thousands of dead American farmers, as well as to celebrities and businessmen, and even to a basketball star......
................... Click for Oxfam's take on it
I bet there are some brainwashed here who would defend this lot ....
Govn spouted about 'transparency' and the freedom of info law - then tries to obstruct
The right to thieve our dosh .....swayed in part by the throaty opposition of the Country Land and Business Association...
Allegedly (Oxfam) £800 a family of 4 per annum is the inflated cost of food due to that lot.
P