Chameleon Magazine

 💸🔒Here’s a riddle for modern Britain: who earns less — the prison guard risking his life every day, or the foreign national offender he’s paid to watch? Spoiler: the inmate wins. Because when you crunch the numbers, each FNO costs the taxpayer around £47,000–£54,000 a year, while the average officer’s salary limps along at £32,000.

That’s right. The people keeping order make less than the people causing disorder. Welcome to the UK’s budget circus, where bars, bureaucracy, and bad diplomacy combine to burn through £600 million a year keeping foreign offenders comfy in British custody.

🧾 The Arithmetic of Absurdity

Let’s do the math — because apparently no one in Whitehall has.

• Around 10,000 foreign national offenders are in UK prisons.
• Each one costs roughly £50,000 annually to house, feed, and manage.
• That’s more than a private school fee, a new Tesla, or, for that matter, a full salary for a prison officer and their overtime.

And it’s not because the guards are overpaid — it’s because our system is designed to store people expensively while we “negotiate their removal” with countries that keep pretending not to know them.

Planes are ready. Agreements exist. Yet the UK still pays through the nose to maintain its revolving door of incarceration diplomacy — half punishment, half paperwork, full farce. ✈️📄

Imagine being the officer pulling 12-hour shifts for less money than the prisoner eating three government-funded meals and watching the negotiations drag on. It’s less a justice system, more a taxpayer-funded endurance test.

🔥 Challenges 🔥

Why are we still paying luxury rates for people who should’ve been flown home months ago? Should Britain start billing the offenders’ home countries, or are we just too polite to send the invoice? 🇬🇧💰

💬 Drop your take in the blog comments — not just Facebook. What’s worse: the cost, the policy, or the sheer incompetence?

👇 Comment, like, and share if you think £600 million could be better spent than on imported inmates and exported excuses.

The sharpest comments will make it into the next issue of the magazine. 🧠📰