British aid to Albania is an insult to us all

This nation continually refuses to deploy its own resources to protect itself from decay and pull itself out of the pit of stagnation.

It whistles like a joke popped out by an aspiring stand-up comedian at a Night at the Apollo: ‘how can you tell that the untold numbers of Albanians illegally crossing the channel are actually economic migrants? Because we’re paying them not to come’.

The famed Soviet historian Robert Conquest drafted three laws of politics to explain how the West’s institutions became so corrupted, inefficient, and idiotic in their attempts to tackle the bread and butter dilemmas that a nation has to confront.

The law most applicable here is the third: ‘The behaviour of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.’

The British state, once the envy of governmental organisation, has become a laughing stock to both native and foreigner. Its recent strategy to tackle a surge in illegal immigration from the Channel is seemingly cooked up by a covert army of enemy agents laughing to the point of asphyxiation for being able to pull this off.

For all the strategies cooked up by Government ministers and mulled over by senior level civil servants, it would have been a better plan to do nothing at all, rather than what it has decided to do. Whitehall believes that the silver bullet against the werewolf of illegal channel crossings is to parachute millions of pounds into Albanian infrastructure.

The hope is that the money spent on infrastructure, be it roads, schools, or hospitals, will stimulate a rise in living standards within the Balkan nation so that its young men are disincentivised for traversing themselves across an entire continent and into a Travelodge bed. The prayer (which I’m sure is secretly uttered by some sitting in the halls of power) is that the money is actually spent on infrastructure.

Just as Britain donates some of its military muscle to prevent illegal migrants from pouring over the Belarussian border into Poland, this nation continually refuses to deploy its own resources to protect itself from decay and pull itself out of the pit of stagnation.

British infrastructure is in a dire state of disrepair and borderline criminal neglect. No new reservoirs have been built in thirty years, leaving our growing population defenceless against droughts, the British Dental Association reports that nine out of ten practices are not accepting new patients, and the NHS (which our civil liberties were suspended to save) has hit a record high backlog of seven million.

But so long as Albania gets a new hydroelectric dam for Christmas, and Ukraine receives more shiny toys for its arsenal delivered by an endless conveyor belt footed by the taxpayer, then at least this story has a happy ending.