OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | After Elon Musk in US, will UK too join New World Order with Mission DOGE? | Farrukh Dhondy

“He looks down now at his battered shoes

And raising his head he looks at the stars

They tell him he has nothing -- so nothing to lose

Hey, ditch the self-pity, hide those bruises and scars…”

From Compulsive Chores or Must Calendar, by Bachchoo

The election of Donald Trump through the “democratic” collegiate process specified by the American Constitution, which enables a candidate who gets less than 50 per cent of votes to become President, has been hailed as the New World Order.

That is perhaps appropriate. Trump is the first criminally convicted President of the United States. He has sensationally “pardoned” the criminals who attempted a coup on January 6, 2021. A new rule of law?

Claiming Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal is megalomania, but yes, certainly a “new world order” as it hasn’t been done before. And Trump’s tariff-led trade war is not unprecedented, but could be the trigger of the economic NWO.

In Trump’s boasts about saving American taxpayer’s money there is a massive dimension of hypocrisy. Elon Musk has been given the task of DOGE -- the Department of Government Efficiency. According to the (so far?) free American press, Musk has characteristically spent the last month chasing and cancelling the expenditure of the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Some of the money he has intercepted can certainly be characterised as wasteful and even ridiculous handouts to dictatorial or corrupt regimes, but the press is now complaining that he is swatting the flies in the room and leaving the elephant standing without a scratch.

The New Republic, a US news magazine, has highlighted the fact that “even a cursory look at the Pentagon’s budget would immediately reveal billions in waste and graft”. The article by Indigo Olivier lists, at first, the discovered bribery and corruption that goes towards the settlement of the Pentagon’s armament contracts. One item on the list involves a 15-year prison sentence for a Navy contractor who bribed dozens of Pentagon officials with cash, luxury items and prostitutes in one of the “largest corruption scandals in American history”.

Musk hasn’t touched the Pentagon’s budget as he and certainly Donald Trump could then be seen as endangering national security.

But the scandal of curtailing foreign aid and ignoring the Pentagon’s waste and corruption is part of the New Hypocritical Order and is being criticised as such in the non-MAGA media. Result? Donald Trump has had to publicly state that the Pentagon’s budget and expenditure are due for a thorough examination.

Really? Watch that space.

Inspired by Musk’s mission statement, one British publication, a weekly called The Spectator, has launched a project which it labels “a war on wasteful spending”. Its clever-cloggy journos are calling their exposure campaign the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, or SPAFF -- which in idiomatic English means frittering away money. Great bants guys!

The Spectator is dedicatedly right-wing. It has a deputy editor called Toby Young who has set himself up as a panjandrum of “free speech”, which means banning any socialistic pronouncement and championing right-wing propaganda.

For instance, one of their writers, an immigrant from America called Lionel Shriver, who constantly writes anti-immigrant and anti-asylum-seeker articles, once wrote against lumping all British Asians together. Fair enough. I wrote a letter to the Spectator agreeing that the Pakistani bus conductor from Bradford is not socially or financially lumpable with, say, Rishi Sunak or his millionaire (or is it billionaire?) wife and, just so, the Spectator’s writers, including a cry-baby journalist called Rod Liddle and an out-an-out Islamophobe and crusader for right-wing bigotry Douglas Murray, should stop using the blanket phrase “the Left”. There are many, many shades and differences in this so-called phalanx. Did the Spectator, with the supposed scion of free speech as its deputy editor, publish the letter? Has the Pope converted to Islam? Do bears emerge daily from the jungle to use public lavatories to defecate?

Nevertheless, in the first article of the SPAFF campaign they highlighted several ludicrous projects on which the British government spends taxpayers’ money, all of which, in my unsolicited opinion, are worthy of critical scrutiny.

The survey rightly names these projects “inane, insane and indefensible”. Here are the first items in the SPAFF list: £21.5 million to transform Ethiopia’s tax system; £26 million to “build tax capacity” in the developing world; £23 million to improve financial management in Rwanda. Under the same consideration, their columnist Rod Liddle pointed out other instances of SPAFFing by the British government: A study into the health of shrimp in Bangladesh; lectures about gender differences to Kenyans; £9.5 million spent on encouraging the civil service of the Democratic Republic of Congo to be more diverse and inclusive; introducing modern art objects, including Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, to Afghan women…

Yes, SPAFFistic waste and the Spectator’s cover cartoon featured Keir Starmer and his Cabinet shovelling money into a dark hole.

Hang on!!! These projects were not approved and the money wasn’t spent since Keir Starmer and the Labour Party were elected in mid-2024? They were approved by the Tory governments of the 14 previous years.

And who served as a minister for various departments in those Tory governments? A Mr Michael Gove. And what does he do now? Why, he’s the editor of … The Spectator!

I’ve written a letter to the magazine pointing this out. Will these great apostles of free speech publish it? Is the Pope a Zoroastrian?