David Cameron under fire for hiring £42m luxury jet for central Asia tour

12 comments

1. Cameron reminding us of that good old fashion 2010’s sleaze that his own government was so good at.

2. A shameful display of contempt for the tax payers who end up buying this for him.
   David Cameron’s favourite (and completely meaningless and arbitrary) phrase was, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
   Iraq war = wrong thing to do
   Stealing from tax payers to get a jet with an onboard sommelier = wrong thing to do

3. Just one look at flight radar and spotting the Citations, Phenoms, etc etc, it’s simply a smear piece. If he finds it himself, fine, he’s got the money (how he got it we kinda know,). Something something… He’s loaded so can fly privately. Happens the charter sent him a £45m jet. They probably enjoyed the publicity.

4. Money from the working class and middle class being used to fund the lifestyles of the wealthy elite. Welcome to modern Britain,

5. The jet is worth £42m, it’s not the cost to the taxpayers. And honestly, if a country can’t keep up appearances like being able to charter a jet for its foreign representatives, then it’s a pretty pathetic country.

6. I ride a £300k London bus every day of the week, sometimes up to 6 times a day!!!!

   Up to 10 times a year, I ride in a Ryanair plane which on average costs $27.1m.

7. Instead of being constantly under fire why can’t politicians just be fired for batshit out of touch bollocks like this?

8. Unpopular opinion. A holder of one of the great offices of state should travel with a degree of comfort and good working space. Only Britain has this weird, poverty view where we beancount about something as reasonable as this and work out how many seconds it could power the NHS

9. I’ve abandoned the Guardian now because of bias like this. One could argue that the cost to the taxpayer is excessive (I don’t necessarily agree), but headlining the value of the aircraft instead of the cost to the taxpayer, while factually true, cannot be justified as anything but a deliberate attempt to mislead readers.

   The Guardian don’t seem to have any journalistic integrity left.

10. It’s hard to know how to respond without knowing the alternative.

    Considering he has a team with him, a private jet seems correct for our chief diplomat rather than flying on air Mongolia, air tajekstan, air Kazakhstan, etc. as he goes around 5 places in 10 days.

    However I don’t know if this plane is like triple the price due to comfort, that would piss me off. Also if we’re paying for fancy wine, fuck that

11. I’m just surprised he’s visiting every central Asian country. Aren’t they pretty insignificant? I thought he’d be visiting Singapore or Saudi Arabia or something.

    Side note, being a high ranking politician is great if you want to travel the world. Cameron himself went to 60+ countries as PM and 51 visits to Belgium alone!

12. I would be ok with this if this little voice in the back of my head wasn’t saying ‘ What about the planes that Johnson spent a fortune on getting them painted!’
    They were for diplomatic use if I remember correctly