We want to give teenagers more of a say about what services are provided for them using government money

… Ms Beverley Hughes, the disgraced former UK Immigration Minister and current Children’s Minister, proving once again that socialists cannot comprehend whose money they are wasting.

This time she is shovelling £55 million from gainfully employed folks like ... well, like me really, into the pockets of “deprived” young people.  Never mind whether a woman guilty of misleading the British public on national television is appropriate to such a position of trust, I don’t want her to blow one penny of my money to the four winds in this way:-

Teenagers from poor families in England are set to receive up to £12 a month government subsidy to spend on sports and other worthwhile activities, the children’s minister, Beverley Hughes, said today.

The funding will come via credits on smart cards, which can be redeemed against local leisure services, drama clubs and art or dance classes.

Ms Hughes said under the scheme all young people will receive £12 credit when they are first issued with the “opportunity card”.  But 13 to 16-year-olds entitled to free school meals will get an additional £10-12 per month.

The minister said this should help young people from deprived backgrounds to enjoy the same opportunities as their more affluent peers, but denied this amounted to the state providing pocket money for poor children.

Now, it so happens that the cost of a one-way adult ticket on a schedule flight to Kingston, Jamaica is £596.  I know this because I have just checked on Expedia.  Our £55 million, therefore, would buy 92,282 tickets for future Jamaicans, give or take an odd arm or a leg (I rounded up to the next whole person).

But, wait … our Bev doesn’t stop with pocket money for the deprived.  Oh no, she’s established “an opportunity fund worth £30,000 created for each local authority to set up youth cafes and sports leagues.”  Well, there are four-hundred local authorities just in England.  That’s another 20,134 tickets to Jamaica.

But wait again … Bev, who just can’t help sloshing the dosh around, “also announced that £40 million would be provided to councils over two years from April 2006 to help them develop new ways of ensuring they provide the youth services young people want.”  Isn’t she kind?  With other people’s money?

Of course, that £40 million buys another 67,114 tickets to the Caribbean sun.  But we haven’t finished yet.  No, you see Bev has tied her pocket money to those taking free school meals.  Well, if they are in the land of fried banana and political shootings they won’t need free school meals.  I calculate that’s a saving of at least another £6,825,000.  So, another 11,451 happy new Jamaicans … and this is beginning to look good.  We’ve clocked up a total of 190,981 returnees and not a penny of extra taxes have been spent.

But we’ve hardly scratched the surface.  The government’s big spending bias for the ineducables of the inner cities is multi-layered and simply, staggeringly vast.  But even this pales beside the billions in savings on the wider educational budget.  Then there are the savings in maternity benefit, housing benefit, unemployment benefit, benefit benefit and every other kind of benefit, along with some giga-reductions in police expenditure, legal aid and court costs, prison costs et al.  There are the savings to the NHS that flow from a more peaceable populace in general.  There are, perhaps most of all, the savings from scrapping the hundreds of thousands of public-sector non-jobs most of these people would occupy. What would the Guardian do for money?

There is, all told, more than enough to settle a handsome, one-time pay-off upon each and every one of our warm and, of course, always vibrant friends.  It could be waiting for them on the other side of the check-in right now.  All it needs is for Bev’s boss to see the light.

Oh yes, and one last saving to savour.  With scarcely any underclass remaining, without the “need” for white guilt and every other form of bullying, cultural marxist windbaggery, we could retire the Labour Party from British politics.  Amazing what you can achieve with a few of Gordon Brown’s stealth taxes.