Here at the WMTPA we strive to highlight the various ways that our public servants, often in local government, continue to plough our money in the wrong direction.
With the services we pay for flagging, too often our representatives in local and central government get carried away with the sort of expensive and grandiose schemes that they hope will later be viewed as the positive legacy of their time in office. Consequently, the sometimes mundane, but always very real needs of the communities they serve are liable to be become lost or neglected in favour of such glamour.
Dudley South MP and Science Minister Ian Pearson has announced plans for a new British space programme which proposes sending our astronauts into space for the first time. Mr. Pearson would preside over the multi-million pound project, which would presumably see us feebly playing catch-up with American experts in the field.
But we are told that the UK needs to “stay at the forefront of the space sector”. This sentiment is framed as though, in the grand scheme of things, and sitting alongside a failing NHS and prisons that are busting at the seams, this is a priority for the government.
Well at least we’d be at the forefront of something, eh? All be it something of little consequence to our everyday lives and the things that we actually want and need…
Mr. Pearson truly is on a different planet if he thinks that those buckling under the strain of the various levies and stealth taxes imposed by his government should be doing so to send men to the moon for the benefit of “business”. Just how detached from the real world has Pearson become to suggest this lunacy? 
Public reaction (as one might expect) has ranged from outraged to affronted. It seems that in the opinion of the many, sophisticated and expensive space research really isn’t of high importance – at best a novelty, at worst a huge and sustained drain on the public purse.
Space research may well be of benefit to certain businesses due to the development of new technologies, this is something I’m sure few of us are capable of denying, but isn’t it time that Mr. Pearson returned to Earth and realised that in Dudley South, as well as in the country at large, there are over-stretched taxpayers and the realities of poorly managed public services that would be much more deserving of this sort of cash?
If Mr. Pearson dreams of sending men into space, this should remain his own personal fantasy, and politicians like him should not be allowed to draw upon our hard-earned tax pounds to fund such dangerously expensive frivolities.
If our tax pounds aren’t paying for our services, they should remain in our pockets, and if space exploration is such a good coup for business then perhaps they could be called upon to fund it? Whatever the case, there is little doubt that in proposing this Mr. Pearson has revealed just how skewed his priorities are. More’s the pity for the people of Dudley.