The British government has handed around £4 million in foreign aid to the brutal Communist regime in North Korea since the Tories came to power in 2010. Despite Kim Jong-un threatening “all-out war”, the government says it has “no plans” to terminate the funding.
The Daily Mail reports the dictatorship received taxpayer-funded assistance worth £740,000 in 2016 alone – an increase of 167 per cent on 2015.
Britain’s “international development” budget, which currently stands at around £13.34 billion, is growing increasingly controversial, with money falling into the hands of rogue states like North Korea, wealthy countries with space agencies and their own foreign aid programmes, and even Islamist terror organisations. Yet budgets for police, prisons, and social care are coming under pressure at home.
North Korea – a one-party Communist dictatorship with retains a vast network of concentration camps where political prisoners are starved and tortured and children born into slavery – may be on a collision course with the U.S. President Donald J. Trump confirmed that week he would send “an armada” into nearby seas to deter planned nuclear tests by the rogue state.
Technically, North Korea remains at war with South Korea, the U.S., Great Britain and the other nations which repelled a Communist invasion of the south in 1950. Although a ceasefire governed by Korean Armistice Agreement has held since 1953, a number of deadly incidents have occurred since then.
President Trump has taken a harder line on the regime than recent administrations, insisting the regime in Pyongyang has “gotta behave”. Trump has accused former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama of being “outplayed” by Kim Jong-un and his late father and grandfather, who previously ruled the country.
“You read Clinton’s book and he said, ‘Oh, we made such a great peace deal’ and it was a joke. You look at different things over the years with President Obama,” he said recently. “Everybody has been outplayed.”
Jong-un, for his part, has threatened “catastrophic consequences” if the U.S. takes military action against his dictatorship.
Lawmakers in Hawaii, which, at least theoretically, lies within the range of North Korea’s Taepodong-2 missiles, requested funding to upgrade its civil defence infrastructure earlier this month.
According to Public Safety Committee Vice-Chairman Matt LePresti, this has been left effectively untouched since 1985.
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