£3.3 million for our youth!

Greenwich Council are making excited noises about the £3.3 million in youth funding that they've received from the London Development Agency. You can read about it on their web site here or at the News Shopper site here.

£3.3 million is a lot of money, an awful lot of money.

But consider this, it's only a fraction over the £3.1 million that Greenwich Council spend each year on publicity.

Len Duvall, London Assembly Member for Greenwich, says that "my previous experience in working with young people means that I am well aware of the huge benefits the funding will bring."

Chris Roberts, the Council Leader, boasts "providing platforms which can enable young people to prosper and achieve is a priority that Greenwich places great importance on."

If our Labour Leaders are so aware of the benefits of a one off injection of £3.3 million and our young people are such a priority to them then why don't they cut the publicity budget down to the average of Bexley, Bromely and Croydon who manage to spend a total of £2.5 million between them?

That would free up £2.4 million every year! Imagine the "huge benefits" we could see from that!

That won't happen though, it's evidently not that important to them.

They'd rather spend the money, in part, publishing Greenwich Time trying to convince us that they run this borough in a reasonably competent manner.

And of course they've got to fund those big posters on the back of our buses telling us how good our children's exam results, when in reality even a cursory look into it reveals how poorly our schools are doing under their leadership.

"Providing platforms which can enable young people to prosper and achieve" might be important to Greenwich Council, trying hard to convince us that they're doing a great job so as to keep themselves in power is evidently the real "priority that Greenwich places great importance on."