Celebrity Chuggers

From the Guardian

Caitlyn Jenner and Harry Redknapp have both accepted thousands of pounds in return for backing a fake charity set up by Channel 4 in a sting operation.

In a Dispatches documentary, Celebs For Sale: The Great Charity Scandal, to be broadcast on Monday evening, the two well-known faces are revealed to be part of a widespread practice of paying celebrities for public support.

So what? The hippy-looking chuggers on the street get paid. The people who call you to ask about raising your donation get paid. Do you think the websites for large charities are done by volunteers out of the good of their heart rather than professionals on full pay (I've interviewed for charities and all but Oxfam offered market rate). Do you think WH Smith don't profit handsomely from charity Christmas cards? Why shouldn't Caitlyn and Harry do likewise?

A lot of stars use their charity appearances to promote their new single, new tour, new book coming out. Their agents put them forward to raise their profile rather than out of the goodness of their heart. What's the difference between that and just getting a wad of cash?

That ban on taxpayer-funded charities lobbying the government...

… is not so much loopholes as a gate without a fence.

From the BBC:

Organisations given UK government grants will be banned from using the money to try to persuade ministers to change the law or increase spending.

A new clause will be added into all new and renewed grant agreements to ensure funds are spent on good causes, rather than on political campaigns. Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock said "the farce of government lobbying government" had to stop.

Voluntary groups said the rules could threaten their freedom to speak out. Critics also said the restrictions, which come into effect in May and will only apply to grants from central UK government departments, could be hard to enforce.

Many people, including lawyers, somehow believe that money can be earmarked, streamed and traced. It can't*.

For example, 'charities' which are ninety per cent taxpayer funded can still use the other ten per cent of their income to pay for lobbying and spend the ninety per cent on whatever the government asks them to spend it on. So this measure achieves nothing, apart from perhaps restricting the amount that such charities can spend on lobbying slightly - the question is, as usual, was the measure supposed to achieve anything or is the loophole intentional?

And how do you define lobbying? If a 'charity' pays for advertising to sway public opinion, knowing that politicians will bow with the wind, is that still 'lobbying' in the narrow sense?

The only solution is to prevent charities in receipt of a single penny of public money whatsoever from doing any 'awareness raising' or advertising whatsoever. Unless of course 'raising awareness' is the whole point, like for example road safety campaigns (reminding kids to look left and right, warning against the dangers of drink driving etc). But these things are so basic, the government can do it themselves without resorting to an overpriced quango.

* It riles me for example when somebody wins a few quid on the lottery or something, and people ask them "What are you going to spend it on?". That lottery money just goes into the pot. Instead of giving the usual answer "Buy a house/buy a car/go on holiday" it would be just as correct to answer "I will spend it on normal household expenditure and then save up my normal salary to buy a house/buy a car/go on holiday"

Charities

From The Sun

BRITAIN’S biggest OAP charity has accepted £6million a year from an energy giant in return for pushing expensive tariffs to the elderly, The Sun can reveal.

Age UK recommended a special rate from E.ON which saw pensioners typically pay £1,049 for a year’s fuel — £245 more than on the firm’s cheapest 2015 rate.

...

The energy giant has been paying Age UK at least £6million a year in return, around £41 for every person who signed up.

From the Guardian

Except he’s not a chauffeur (although he certainly looks like one to me, driving Camila around, in a car), because there’s the other driver who is paid £30-40,000 a yea ... shhhh, keep quiet about that. And Annie, 34, who has been entirely dependent on Kids Company for years. And the swimming pool (OK, not such a big one, but undeniably a swimming pool), and the pomegranates in the bowl, and the massive telly in the lovely art deco house for disadvantaged children – and for Camila when she fancies a swim, or possibly a pomegranate.

From the Telegraph

How is it that organisations that secure only 10 per cent of their income through charitable giving are able to represent themselves as “charities”? Very easily, it seems. Analysis published in 2015 by the Centre for Policy studies found at least 24 per cent of total funding of Britain’s largest charities comes from public finances. Because of lack of transparency, the figure may be as high as 49 per cent.

It seems to me that if we can thank Kids Company for anything, it's that it's shone a light on charities, something that is long overdue.

Fun Online Polls: Charity spending & Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How much of their income do major UK charities actually spend on charitable causes?

Next to nothing - 21%
A quarter - 41%
Half - 25%
Three quarters - 8%
Nearly all - 5%

It appears that taking major UK 'charities' as a whole, 'about half' is the correct answer, some do worse, some do better.

I think there are two separate issues here. The people at the top - an army of trustees, directors, advisors, auditors and lawyers - just help themselves.

And then there is the issue of fund raising. See my earlier post. A charity ends up as a profit maximising organisation, so if they can spend £9 on fund raising to generate £10 in donations, they will do so. Little wonder that some charities spend most of their 'income' on fund raising.
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This week's Fun Online Poll...

It appears to me that most of the candidates in the BBC's list of finalists have not done anything remarkable this year and/or have a distinct lack of personality i.e. they will do or say nothing to upset their sponsors or The Establishment i.e. the BBC.

So let's do the decent thing and have a Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award. Please vote for the candidate who has achieved least in the last twelve months; does not appear to utter anything apart from platitudes; and/or who appears most often in advertisements. Failing that, just vote for somebody you've never heard of (half of them, in my case).

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar. Just to lighten things up, you are allowed one vote per day if you feel that more than one person meets all those criteria.

Fun Online Polls: Most relevant measure of inequality & Charitable spending

The results to last week's Fun Online Polls were as follows:

Which is the most relevant measure of poverty or inequality?

Total income minus tax and housing costs - 66%
Total assets - 24%
Total income - 9%
Total assets excl. value of main residence - 1%

That is a pretty clear result, and surely the correct one. I can see why 'Total assets' came second, especially if you assume this to mean 'total value of land owned' i.e. the equal and opposite of 'total income minus tax and housing costs'.

And as we well know, the way to reduce this kind of poverty or inequality is not more downwards redistribution via the welfare system. That will not help those being totally f-ed over by the system, i.e. working tenants. The best way is to have less upwards redistribution via the tax system, i.e. tax output and employment a lot less and tax land values a lot more.
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To this week's Fun Online Poll:

How much of their income do major UK charities actually spend on charitable causes?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Once you've cast your vote, read the surprisingly well researched article in the Daily Mail.

"It is having the best of both worlds" confirms Sir Stephen

because of the benefits of being a charity which is really a business, and the sometimes almost equal benefits of a business saying it is really a charity ...

Sir Stephen Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (Acevo), urged Jeremy Hunt not to water down regulations that would encourage more private companies into the NHS. The regulations, drawn up as part of the Health and Social Care Act, which came into force in April, require local health bosses to put almost all services out to tender. When the reforms ran into opposition there were reports that they might be watered down.

So, "private companies" ...

Last night Sir Stephen said: “I unashamedly believe in a greater role for charities in providing public services and have actively argued for this. Acevo believes that a level playing field in NHS commissioning means that charities can step up to the plate to deliver a wide range of services ranging from hospice care to mental health.”

suddenly become "charities" ....

Charity boss lobbied Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, over NHS privatisation, documents show

"The amounts that some people working for 'charities' get paid are frankly outrageous"

says £50,000 pa for 2 days per week Charity Commisssioner, William Shawcross adding "if I only had more time to do so I'd probably discover a really significant proportion of the 'charities' I regulate are actually businesses taking the p .... taking advantage of the tax benefits of being a 'charity'" .... and continued "trustees should consider whether very high salaries are really appropriate, and fair to both the donors and the taxpayers who fund charities.  Disproportionate salaries risk bringing organisations and the wider charitable world into disrepute."

What about Quangocrats?

Responding with the sort of outrage that suggested that they were being unjustly compared to 'bankers' Sir Stephen Bubb, chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO), told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Mr Shawcross's remarks were "deeply unhelpful" and "wrong".

Entirely justified, demanding jobs, highly competitive

He said the average salary for a charity chief executive was £58,000 and the higher salaries were "entirely justified".  "The big national and international charities are very demanding jobs and we need to attract the best talent to those jobs," he said. "I know some of the people who are on these so-called excessive salaries who have taken pay cuts to run a charity."

Who cares what ordinary donors think, they don't contribute much anyway ..

Sir Stephen denied the high salaries could put off donors.  "This simply isn't an issue for donors. Donors are more concerned about the outcomes, the performance and the efficiency of these organisations," he added.

Update : 8 August - If you pay charity bosses peanuts you're going to get monkeys

Duncan Green, Oxfam GB's senior strategic adviser, is keen to point out, amongst other things, that "For every £1 donated to Oxfam, 84p goes directly to emergency, development and campaigning work. Just 9p is spent on running costs," and he also informs us that Oxfam consists of "a 700-shop retail chain, with 5,000 employees and 20,000 volunteers and a £360m budget."   

Hmm - unfortunate juxtaposition of the day, or not ....

Charity News

Charities journal Third Sector has an interesting piece up Analysis: Senior pay - a fair price for good leadership? about securing the right people at the head of the organisation ..

Surveys consistently show that the public does not approve of high salaries for senior staff in charities; indeed, last November's poll of 1,000 people by the consultancy nfpSynergy showed that 33 per cent of respondents thought charity chief executives should not be paid at all.

However, for what they see as very good reasons indeed, the Charities, where they can, prefer to overlook supposed public preferences for the way Charities should behave, taking the opposite view that :-

 ..... "The days are gone when you can get someone who performs well at a range of tasks, such as lobbying politicians, and rely on them to take a small salary on top of their commercial pension," [as]  "You can't get people with the right skills nowadays unless you pay, because we're in a commercial market."

The article includes a link to a handy chart showing the results of this policy.

Third Sector has looked at the annual accounts of the top 150 charities by income, as listed on the Charity Trends website run by the Charities Aid Foundation, and created a list of the 100 charities that paid their top earner the most in 2011 or 2012.

The results reveal a wide variety, ranging from the charitable independent hospital that paid about £1m a year in 2011 to more mainstream charities and professional bodies paying between £120,000 and £130,000 a year.

Thirty of the top 100 earners were paid more than £200,000 a year and nine were paid more than £300,000. The mean average pay across the top 100 was £208,000 to £216,000 a year (a median of £165,000).

An interesting take on the whole thing comes from Ian Joseph, managing director for charities and not-for-profit at Russam GMS, a company that specialises in providing interim managers for charities, who  "thinks some of the amounts paid by the charities in the study are unusually high [and]  I think in the examples of a private hospital and Nuffield we have to ask whether they are really charities.

"I'm not saying that they are or they're not, but it raises a question about how you apply the public benefit test." before making clear that [he] has no problem with major charities paying six-figure salaries in general. "Senior executives have myriad stakeholder groups that they have to satisfy," he says. "They often have to generate income without selling anything and they have to manage a large number of volunteers. Running a charity is often far more complex than running a private business."

Juxtaposition Of The Day

Spotted by Bob E in/at The Guardian:

In case that's whetted your appetite, the actual stories are here and here.

How to encourage charitable giving

A reader's letter by a quangocrat in today's FT signs off with this:

If the current government has decided that it wants to lessen this [subsidy], it will result in a massive loss of funding for charities, at a time when many of them are already struggling to survive. Fashions in philanthropy may change, but people’s desire to give to causes they believe in will never go away and the government must continue to support this.

John Low, Chief Executive, Charities Aid Foundation*

Twat.

You might as well say "people's desire to have sex will never go away and the government must continue to support this" or "people's desire to play golf/collect stamps/race pigeons will never go away and the government must continue to support this". If the desire isn't going to go away, by definition, there is no need for the taxpayer to subsidise it.

* The CAF appears to be a glorified book-keeping service/clearing house for charitable donations which are forwarded on to the actual intended charities. Note 6 on page 43 of their 2011 accounts makes for interesting reading.

The number of staff whose total emoluments (salary plus benefits excluding pensions contributions exceeded £60,000 during the year is as follows:
...
£100,001 - £110,000 - 1
£110,001 - £120,000 - 1
£120,001 - £130,000 - 2
£140,001 - £150,000 - 1

Noticeable by their absence

Below are excerpts from a random selection of articles about the proposed restrictions on tax relief for donations to charity.

What strikes me is that the people bleating the loudest are all the tax dodgers, fakecharities, money launderers and quangocrats. None of these sources has managed to get a single quote from a genuine non-taxpayer funded actual real life charity, have they?

City AM: Investment manager Brewin Dolphin and accounting firm Baker Tilly spoke out against the proposal while business secretary Vince Cable said he was “sympathetic” to concerns.

Osborne is also under pressure from the Arts Council and Universities UK after a survey showed almost nine out of every 10 charity bosses said gifts from major donors will be severely hit if tax relief is capped at £50,000 a year, or 25 per cent of an individual’s income, whichever is higher... Iona Joy, head of charity effectiveness at think tank New Philanthropy Capital, said: “The government has made a mistake – don’t confuse philanthropists with tax dodgers.”

The Metro: Of 120 chief and senior executives asked, 88 per cent said it would have a 'negative impact' on what they receive from major contributors. A further three per cent said ministers should have consulted them before introducing the measures, while 78 per cent called on George Osborne to ditch the cap, the Charity Aid Foundation (CAF) survey found.

Evening Standard: Oxford and Cambridge universities have joined the increasingly bitter row over Chancellor George Osborne's controversial cap on tax relief for charitable donations... Meanwhile, Arts Council England warned at least £80 million in regular donations to its organisations was at risk, while a new £55 million "matched funding" scheme with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) could also be in jeopardy.

BBC: Philanthropist Marcelle Speller, who set up the website localgiving.com, told the BBC she had put £2m into the project adding: "I think it's rather galling to feel that the last four years and that money has now been seen as a tax dodge."

The chair of Arts Council England, Dame Liz Forgan, said: "We think at least £80m worth of regular donations to some of our largest organisations could well be at risk."... Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of Universities UK, said universities raised £560m from "philanthropic gifts" in the last year, which went towards bursaries, scholarships, facilities and research. They were the "preferred cause" of big donors, so expected to be hard hit, she said.

Daily Telegraph: But charities told The Daily Telegraph that the Government’s aggressive rhetoric would be interpreted as an attack on all giving at a time when many organisations are already struggling to cope with cutbacks in state funding.

Unicef, the children’s charity, said that the government’s approach was already hampering urgent efforts to raise funds for a million children facing food shortages in West Africa. Sir Nicholas Hytner, artistic director National Theatre, said the plans made “no sense” and that he had already received a call from a wealthy individual who was seriously reconsidering a £250,000 donation...

John Caudwell, the billionaire founder of mobile phone retailer Phones4U who last year gave £1.8 million to an appeal backed by Daily Telegraph readers for a monument to members of Bomber Command, said: “Those charities are there doing the Government’s work for them. If the Government did their job properly these charities would not be needed. The fact that a rich person may get around about 20-odd per cent of their donation relieved, they are still contributing to good causes 75 per cent. Who is going to pick up the tab if they stop giving?”

Last night, Dame Stephanie Shirley, who runs a group called Ambassadors for Philanthropy and has herself given away £60million, accused the Government of "a cack–handed assault on philanthropic giving". Dame Shirley said the charity sector stood to lose "hundreds of millions of pounds a year".

Even charities with a large number of regular donations from people on more modest incomes said they would be hit by the clampdown. Karen Rothwell, director of marketing at the RSPB, said the move was a “big blow” to its efforts to recruit bigger donors to help funds one-off projects to protect threatened species. Meanwhile Cambridge University said it was watching the situation “with concern” describing philanthropy is the “bedrock” of its success as a world leading university."

FakeCharity attempts The New Maths. Chaos ensues.

A reader's letter from today's Evening Standard:

If the Government has a problem with tax evasion through charities, the charity sector would be entirely supportive of the necessary regulation to dispel any taint attaching to donors.(1) but we asked the Treasury for examples of how people evade tax through abuse of charitable donations and it has refused to give any.(2)

The 57 community foundations(3) that fund small local charities and voluntary groups across the UK stand to lose around 20 per cent of their donations if this measure goes through, and we estimate that if you add together those who would be discouraged from becoming donors, the charitable sector would be £1 billion worse off, while the HMRC would gain only £200 million.(4)

You have to ask what's better for Britain.(5)

Matthew Bowcock, Community Foundation Network.(6)

1) Ah yes, they'd love that, wouldn't they? The Righteous getting to decide which other charities are Righteous enough - see (6).

2) Why should it?

3) What's a "community foundation"? I'll get to that.

4) There's a missing £800 million there, isn't there? That's the money that would simply stay in taxpayers' pockets, if they want to give a smaller amount to a genuine charity without tax relief then people are free to do so, it is only donations to front organisations which would be significantly affected. And actually, his maths is crap. If 40% taxpayers give £1 billion gross less to charities, then HMRC would end up £400 million better off, because the charities only get half the tax relief and the taxpayer keeps the rest.

5) Yes, that's what I'm doing. And there's no such place as "Britain".

6) Ah... The Community Foundation Network. It runs the Fair Share Trust, which is funded by The Big Lottery, i.e. the government and Local Giving which vets local charities to see whether they are Righteous enough, sort of like a self-appointed Charity Commission but with even less democratic accountability... see (1).

Now, for the money shot, it got £6.7 million in "donations and grants" and Note 3a tells us that £6.1 million of that was from Comic Relief, with another £283,000 from The Big Lottery Fund and £210,000 from The Office of the Third Sector. So it's all government/official funding, if you count the BBC as part of the government, which I do.

Or to put it another way, The Community Foundation Network gets practically no donations from the general public, or at least not directly.

No, chuggers are not 'just salesmen'

Obo concludes his post on chuggers with this:

Everyone I know hates them. But really, they're just salesmen, doing a hard sell. They're no different from the guy knocking on your door with his "we're just in the area" double-glazing pitch. They're just salesman. And the product they're selling is a salved conscience.

Which gave me the opportunity to say something I've been meaning to say for ages in the comments:

As to chuggers, this is where the analogy with private business breaks down.

If you pay a salesman £20,000 and he drums up business with a net profit margin for you of £21,000, then he is worth employing. But to get your £21,000 net margin, the salesman has to make gross sales of £100,000 or £200,000 or whatever.

So the salesmen's total income is still only a small percentage of your total turnover or total costs.

Apply the same logic to charities, and you end up with the ludicrous situation that 90% of their gross income goes on fundraising (seeing as they are all scraping from the same barrel) because the profit margin from a donation IS the donation.

e.g. my sister once had one of these jobs, she said "As long as the donations I can get in are more than my salary plus overheads, then they will keep employing me".

So if that charity can employ ten people on £20,000 each (incl. overheads) and they manage to drum up £210,000 donations in total, the manager of that charity considers this to be a storming result. Actually it's complete and utter bollocks, and a massive destruction of wealth.

If we cut out the middleman, the business of these charities is actually creating employment opportunities for young people. They 'keep them off the streets' by giving them a bucket and a brightly coloured T-shirt and then, er, sending them back on to the streets.

So it would be far more honest for them to say that the actual purpose of the charity is to channel money to young people who have been frozen out of the jobs market (a worthy aim in itself), and that for every £1 you give them, they pass on 10p to another worthy cause (be that RSPCA, Friends of the Earth, Macmillans, whatever).

I'd probably be far more generous if they put it like that, because I do feel very bad about youth unemployment, tuition fees, high house prices and all that stuff.

George Osborne - at least he's on the side of tax avoiders and large businesses!

Exhibit One

I don't like Inheritance Tax, and I don't like tax breaks for charities either, but let's accept that the system is the way it is; we have Inheritance Tax and if you leave things to charity in your will, unlike other beneficiaries, the charity pays no Inheritance Tax.

Georgie is going one better (see here at 13:19): "From April 2012, people leaving 10% or more of their estate to charity will enjoy 10% reduction in inheritance tax, benefiting charities by £300 million."

OK, so maybe somebody just left you £1,000,000 in his will and the nil rate band for IHT was allocated to other beneficiaries. You're looking at paying 40% x £1,000,000 in IHT = £400,000 IHT and netting £600,000 unless you can do something clever, like varying the will within two years.

So you get in touch with your mate at a tame charity and chat about allocating £100,000 to his charity. In return you end up paying 36% IHT on £900,000 = £324,000 and netting £576,000. Hey! You'd only be £24,000 worse off but your mate's tame charity would be £100,000 better off!

So you agree with your mate at the tame charity that you'll split the difference and he'll bung you £50,000 in a brown paper envelope; his charity ends up £50,000 better off and you end up £26,000 (compared to the position if you hadn't varied the will and made this gift).

Exhibit Two

Unlike most in the Blue Wing of the Home-Owner-Ist party, Georgie is relatively liberal about lifting restrictions on new construction, at least as far as it pertains to new commercial premises. To back this up, they've agreed that local councils can keep all the extra Business Rates income for 25 years. All good stuff so far.

But as a populist nod to the land owners, inefficient owner-occupier businesses, NIMBYs, Greenies and other enemies of progress, they've extended Business Rates reductions for 'small businesses'. This is supposed to 'help' small businesses (it does no such thing of course, it 'helps' their landlords and owner-occupying businesses which are inefficient).

Now, don't these two measures more or less cancel out? If a local council has a choice of allowing some big commercial units to be built which will be let to branches of multinationals, then the council gets to keep all the Business Rates, but if the local council says that small units should be built instead, to be rented to 'small local businesses' then the council gets to keep nothing, because there will be little or no Business Rates payable on those new units.

The same sort of logic applies to demolishing small units and replacing them with bigger ones. The chances are that small businesses will find it harder to find premises in future, and hence will end up paying higher rents...

Unless that's the whole point?

Bono Charity Fun

From The Metro:

An organisation co-founded by superstar Bono to fight poverty in Africa has come under fire for donating only a fraction of its income to charity.

The non-profit One campaign received almost £9.6million in donations in 2008 but handed over only £118,000 to good causes. Figures show that the group also spent more than £5.1million on executive and staff salaries.

One insisted that it was focused on lobbying, not funding charities... Spokesman Oliver Buston said: 'We don't provide programmes on the ground. We're an advocacy and campaigning organisation. There is a rich and vibrant debate in the UK media about aid that doesn't happen in the US media. This was an attempt, perhaps in hindsight not the best way, to get our message across.'

Mr Buston added that One employs nearly 120 people worldwide and so the £5.1million spent on wages would result in an average salary of about £42,500...

Free Market Fun

There was a programme about food on Channel 4 yesterday called FOOD. Their roving reporter visited a Kenyan bean farmer, who seemed to be doing OK, and told us solemnly that out of the £1.99 we pay for a packet of Kenyan green beans in the supermarket, the farmer - after being ruthlessly exploited by the monopolistic UK supermakets, the evil airlines with their carbon footprints etc - gets about 16p, or about 8% of the purchase price.

We can look at that figure in two ways:

1. Out of £1 spent in the supermarket on UK farm produce, how much does the farmer get? At Sainsbury's, a kilo of potatoes costs about £1.50, and the UK average ex-farm price of 1,000 kilos of potatoes is £161, so the UK farmer receives about 9% of the supermarket price.

2. If you donate £1 to 'charity', how much does your intended recipient get? The charity knock off half for fund raising and admin; another half goes on bribes to officials and ends up in Swiss bank accounts; half of what's left is wasted on overpaying for projects; and those projects are often white elephants, so let's knock off another half again and assume that the intended recipient gets a tangible benefit worth 6.25% of the sum you gave.

So I'll continue buying the Kenyan green beans, thank you very much. I get the tasty out-of-season beans and the farmer and his workers get more money than if I'd given the £1.99 to a 'charity'.

Fun Online Polls - Pakistan flood relief and Jill Dando

That's a surprisingly clear cut result on a very high turnout (thanks to everybody who took part):

Have you donated (or will you donate) to charities collecting money for the Pakistan flood relief thingy?

No - 86%
Yes - 9%
Other, please specify - 4%

Some of the comments over at the poll are very un-PC, so I couldn't possible repeat them here: in second place is Disgruntled Yorkshireman and the gold medal goes to Henry Morgan.
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In the context of nothing in particular, something else crossed my mind at the weekend - I'm too young to remember JFK being shot, but I vidily remember Kim from reception walking through the tax department to announce that Jill Dando had been murdered.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: Can you remember where you were when you heard that Jill Dando had been murdered?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Cheryl Cole née Tweedy & Pakistan

You really are a cynical bunch. The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll question, "Did Cheryl Cole née Tweedy really have malaria?" were as follows:

Who's Cheryl Cole née Tweedy? - 69%
Nah, she just wanted an excuse for a few weeks off work - 21%
Yes, she caught it while doing something for charity in Africa - 10%

FYI, Cheryl Cole née Tweedy is the little Geordie lass with dimples who's on the telly and in celebrity mags a lot. And the official version is that she caught malaria while doing something for charity in Africa.

So in future, when the do-gooders start wailing on about what a terrible killer malaria is, just remind them that Oor Cheryl came down with the disease on or about 6 July 2010, but by 16 August 2010 she was back on top form, flying out to Los Angeles to appear in a new telly program.

It's interesting to note that the Yanks don't seem to have any sort of immigration restrictions for people carrying potentially infectious diseases, and for those doubters who reckon she was ill with an eating disorder (NewSpeak for 'starving herself to death to comply with some modern fad or other'), the later reports informs us that "rather than devour the food and feed her dramatically decreased appetite, Cheryl chose to chain-smoke and down cocktails instead."
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Staying vaguely in the same theme, this week's Fun Online Poll asks "Have you donated (or will you donate) to charities collecting money for the Pakistan flood relief thingy?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fakecharities launch new campaign...

... on behalf of, er, fakecharities.

Further to my occasional series 'I'm surprised they are that blatant about it', the FT writes up a press release from The Charities Commission:

Public sector cuts could create a "financial black hole" for thousands of charities that receive a high proportion of funding from the government, the charity watchdog warns today. The Charity Commission's concern underlines the wide ripple effect of Treasury austerity, which is likely to be felt across swaths of the economy that are not part of the public sector but have a close relationship with it...

Dame Suzi Leather, who chairs the Charity Commission, warns that in spite of economic recovery: "Our research shows that the financial recovery for charities may lag behind that of other sectors."

Since when is the Charities Commission the cheerleader for, rather than watchdog of, 'charities' in general or fakecharities in particular?

What sort of 'research' did the Charities Commission carry out? A couple of 'phonecalls to sound out which charities might like to appoint Dame S as a trustee for a modest annual fee when her contract runs out, only to be told that their budget for overpaid meddlers was already maxed out?

Ah... from the press release (link as above)... "The key findings of the survey of 1,010 charities, carried out by MVA Consultancy...". Their website in turn explains that "MVA Consultancy provides advice on transport to central, regional and local government, agencies, developers, operators and financiers....", i.e. they are a fakeprivatecompany, who are
(a) living off Ye Olde Taxpayer and
(b) claim to specialise in transport, about a million miles from 'phoning round a few charity mates.