Monday, August 11, 2025

Starmer’s Teeny Tiny Decimal ‘Oops’ – HotAir

August 11, 2025
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You know, I was never any good about those wifey ’rounding errors’ when I had a Nordstrom’s close by and looked really good in something I tried on and shouldn’t have. 





And then bought it.

Kind of like Keir Starmer paying Mauritius to buy something that the Brits already owned – the Chagos Islands.

As the chain is also home to Diego Garcia, one of the most strategic military bases on Earth, there has been an enormous amount of controversy over the mealy-mouthed politicians’ woke dealing with the Chinese-friendly Mauritanians.

At the end of May, the weaselly Starmer rushed through a deal to ‘return’ the islands before anyone in Parliament could stop him. It seemed pretty underhanded at the time, for all his excuses.

Insult to injury, it turned out he negotiated a deal with the extortionists for some £3.4B over the course of the 99-year lease, which seemed like a helluva payout for a country on its financial knees already to be paying to the country getting the islands.

Starmer likened the £110M or so a year payments to the ‘running cost of an aircraft carrier, minus the aircraft.’ You can hear him with all the figures right here in his own words.





Starmer did the math, so shaddup, already.

But even I would have never attempted to pull off something like this sloppy and outrageously outrageous fiscal sleight of hand.

He did #mathz, not math, and got caught as a Freedom of Information request submitted by Conservatives was finally answered by the Labour government.

And, whoa, boy – people are pissed.

You see, there’s not a little wiggle room in the figures or a little fudging of the numbers between what Starmer publicly stated and what the figures actually are. 

There’s a whole decimal point move to the left difference.

This is not good. That Labour ministers had refused to release the figures to Parliament is even more disgraceful.

…An official document produced by the Government Actuary’s Department shows the cost of the deal was first estimated at 10 times Sir Keir’s figure, at £34.7bn, in nominal terms.

It explains how the cost was lowered by the Government using inflation estimates, then reduced again under a controversial accounting method sometimes used for long-term projects.

The total cost, which ministers refused to release to Parliament, is equivalent to 10 Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, or more than half the annual schools’ budget.

Sir Keir now faces accusations that he misled Parliament, because he told MPs in February that cost estimates between £9bn and £18bn were “absolutely wide of the mark” and suggested the true figure was lower.

The document shows that civil servants were first instructed to lower the cost of the deal on paper to £10bn, to account for an estimated annual inflation rate of 2.3 per cent over 99 years.

Then it was reduced again by between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent per year using the Treasury’s Social Time Preference Rate, a principle that money spent immediately has more value than funds earmarked for future spending.

The final figure was calculated to be 90 per cent lower than the cash value of the payments the UK will make to Mauritius over the next century, in what critics say was a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.





What bald-faced, lying sneks.

Starmer was super defensive with everyone going carefully over the available treaty paperwork and especially those who were nervy enough to start toting up back-of-the-envelope figures based on what they’d seen, telling them how ‘wide of the mark’ they were. 

Labour now has to duck for cover, as most of these folks doing calculations were still a tad short of the horrendous real sum by £5B or so.

£35B will now be added to an already £50B deep budget deficit hole that has stretched British social services to the brink.

Why are they stretched and by whom?

Wait until those migrants are still in four-star hotels as more British subjects languish, falling even further behind and see what happens in the streets.

‘…So, this man either doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Or he calculatedly does know what he’s talking about, and he chooses not to tell the truth….’





That would be devastating to anyone but Starmer.

I believe, after watching the protests this weekend, most of England is already firmly in the Prime Minister ‘chooses not to‘ camp.

The signs are everywhere.


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