Nice try Jacqui, but you ain’t fooling nobody

Dear Jacqui Smith,

Your policies really are a bit naff, aren’t they!  After the fiasco over police pay, you were probably relishing the chance to get into your stride with an announcement for a new immigrant tax to help pay for public services.  Not exactly very Labour-esque, is it!  You and Gordon are obviously a little desperate to appeal to the population’s concerns about immigration, but this policy is truly awful, and to demonstrate why it is so awful I think we need a quick maths lesson:

Your scheme for an extra £20 on visa applications is supposed to raise £15 million a year.

There are around 22,500 state schools and 1,6oo NHS hospitals in this country.

If £15 million is divided equally between those schools and hospitals, schools will receive an extra £14,004,225 a year and hospitals will receive an extra £995,856 a year - £622.41 per school or hospital.  Sounds wonderful.

But hold on a minute. 

If you divide the extra hospital funding by the number of hospital beds in the UK (around 180,000), each bed will receive an extra (drum roll please) £5.38 a year.  That’ll cover some new flowers, I suppose.

And if you divide the extra school funding by the number of pupils in state schools across the UK (about 7.8 million), it works out as (drum roll please) £1.80 per pupil a year.  That will just about cover a pad of A4 paper.

Council chiefs say they need an extra £150 million, and judging by these sums I’m not surprised, but I suppose every little helps!

Better luck next time, eh?

Yours smugly,

A.Tory