- If you took 4,000,000,000 pound coins and put them on top of each other in a pile, it would be almost eight thousand miles high.
- If you layed out £4bn in five pound notes from John O' Groats to Land's End, you would have to make piles of more than 100. In fact, each pile would be more than the average weekly wage in the UK
This is bad enough, but when you then consider that the cost of scrapping these jets is £200m, it becomes all the worse. What's more is the fact that this £200m seems to be going to some bloke with a crane, who drags these planes out onto some concrete and then smashes them up.
Imagine the piles of £5 notes the length of the country, and then imagine the government paying somebody £200,000,000 to walk that length with a flamethrower burning all of the money. That sounds ridiculous, but what is the sum total of these actions? The British taxpayers £4,200,000,000 worse off, the government with no new planes, and some lucky person with a ton of money for doing, let's face it, something which frankly didn't need doing.
Not only that, but can you imagine being a BAE engineer, who's worked on these jets for the last eighteen years, night and day, encountering problems and coming up with solutions, finally finishing the first of these jets, and then seeing it destroyed by some bloke with a crane? It would be heartbreaking.
My solution: I would be willing to buy the Nimrods from the government for £1 per plane. This would leave them £200,000,009 better off, and I would have the beginnings of my own airforce. Genuinely, apart from the bloke with the crane, who is worse off?
