Here’s something our major charities don’t often mention

Luckily for our major charities (and their well-paid bosses), there are always a few disasters – war, famine, drought, disease etc – going on in the world at any time. So they can come on our TVs or do hugely expensive advertising campaigns or direct mailings or chug us to guilt-trip us into giving them lots of our money.

But there’s something our major charities don’t usually mention – the sometimes tens of millions of pounds and even hundreds of millions of pounds they already take from us by getting our government to hand over great chunks of the taxes we pay.

After all, would you still be tempted to give �5 a month or �10 a month or whatever to perhaps the greatest bleater of all – Oxfam – if you knew that �162.1m of Oxfam’s �367.9m income already came from your taxes?

Or would you be so enthusiastic about donating to Care International if you were aware that �24.9m of its �39.2m income was coming out of the tax money you handed over to pay for things like the NHS, schools and the police?

Or how about the worthy-sounding Christian Aid? It gets �27m of the money you might have thought went to pay for public services in Britain.

And if you’re a Catholic, don’t worry, your favourite charity CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) pockets �11.1m of taxpayers’ money.

I could go on, but I assume readers get the picture. Just these four anti-poverty charities are being given over �225m a year of our money and yet they come begging for more without mentioning how much they already get.

I suspect that if people knew how much of their hard-earned money was already being poured into the eager hands of these ‘supposed ‘charities’ they’d be a little more wary about giving them even more.

And I suspect that these charities are well aware we might be rather less generous if we knew to what extent they’re being funded by our taxes and that’s why they keep rather quiet about the whole issue of our Government-enforced ‘generosity’. After all, if an Oxfam collector was to say something like, ‘excuse me, we already take �162 million of your money, money that could have been used to provide better public services, but would you mind sparing another fiver a month as we really need it, honest’ they’d be unlikely to elicit too many donations.

(Talking of charity – or rather lack of – it’s been about a month since any reader bought a copy of my book DON’T BUY IT! and a few weeks since anyone bought GREED UNLIMITED. I was telling a journalist about this the other day and they were surprised at the extraordinary difficulty I was having trying to get readers to show some small support for this blog by putting their hands in their pockets to buy a book or two)