What have you done for charity asked a jolly tweet earlier this week? My answer? Rather more than I wanted to. I've worked really very hard and paid a lot of tax. Some of that tax has gone on Gift Aid (see my earlier blogs on the outrage that is Gift Aid). That's what I've done for charity.
Why is it more than I wanted to? Because all the money that has poured from taxpayer pockets into charitable pockets hasn't been used in ways that I much like. That's partly because a good number of charities do things that I don't consider to be priorities for a debt ridden state such as ours (supporting donkeys abroad and obsessing over red squirrel numbers).
I'd prefer that we paid out much, much less in Gift Aid, and were we to find any spare cash as a result, to spend it on better primary school education. But it is also because too many of the charities that do, on the face it work in areas it is hard to disapprove of, behave so badly (paying hundreds of staff more than the taxpayer pays George Osborne), and with such entitlement that it is time for a discussion about the strings attached to the taxpayer money they get their hands on too.
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We've been having this conversation here for some years now, but it has been thrown into pretty sharp relief by the death of Olive Cooke. Charitable fund-raising these days is, as Libby Purves points out in The Times, a big and merciless business.
Make one donation on your phone, respond to a chugger or waver during a cold call and that's it: you are committed to "life on that organisation's pitiless radar". Charity is, says Purves "up on a moral high horse, exploiting guilt and monetising pity, often spending lavishly on senior staff and flashy offices, addicted to sanctimonious political lobbying".It "is becoming a monster".
Indeed it is. At the beginning of the coalition term, Osborne had a go at reining in Gift Aid (the thing that really allows all this). He has more power now. It's time for another go.
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