Posts tagged ‘Gift Aid’

A half-formed Gift Aid thought

Browsing through the letters page of yesterday’s Telegraph (generally the third – and last – useful thing in the paper after Matt and Alex) whilst at my parents for dinner, I came across this:

SIR – If the Government is considering backtracking on its proposed cap to tax relief for higher-rate taxpayers who donate to charity, it will lose what little credibility remains.

Gift Aid is morally dubious. By what right am I forced to donate my taxes to a charity which I might disagree with?

George Osborne, the Chancellor, should show courage in facing down the pressure groups that represent these charities.

Joseph Adam-Smith
Patna, Ayrshire

Little comment is required about the first paragraph except to note that I’m fairly certain that the credibility of this government has already long since disappeared.

It was the second paragraph though which caught my attention. Whilst Mr Adam-Smith is quite right to point out that, with Gift Aid, some money is more then likely to go to causes which he might not agree with, he doesn’t appear to have followed this thought through to its logic conclusion.

Anyone familiar with the fake charities concept will already know that millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money has been shovelled into the hands of groups such as ASH, Alcohol Concern, CASH (amongst others) which do nothing but lobby the government on ‘our’ behalf.

All of which though is peanuts compared to the amount of money which the government steals from us each year in order to fund its own bloated existence. If Mr Adam-Smith can’t find something in that to complain about I would be very surprised.

Thus he would, I feel, be far better off worrying about the approximately £750bn elephant standing on his chest rather than the £1bn spider riding on the elephant’s shoulder.