"High childcare costs forcing poor families to turn down work"

From The Metro:

Parents spend almost a third of their incomes on childcare – more than anywhere else in the world, say the Save the Children and Daycare Trust charities... Fiona Weir, of the charity Gingerbread, said government plans for childcare are a ‘ticking time-bomb for welfare reform’...

Ho hum.

Save the Children, total income £203 million, of which half was from various governments, primarily UK government, the EU, the US government and the United Nations (2009 accounts).

Daycare Trust, total income £1,115,450. They received £349,352 from the Dept of for Education; £120,000 from London Councils and £16,907 from the Equality and Human Rights Commission for "Policy, research and other projects" (2010 accounts).

Gingerbread, total income £3,125,643, of which £1,576,203 was payments from DWP for "back to work" type stuff (including income for training people to run "back to work" schemes) and £891,361 was grants (almost certainly from the government) (2010 accounts).
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As to the substantive issue, they are all missing a right old trick here. From the point of view of an individual, it is only worth working if

[wages minus income tax/benefit withdrawal] > [costs of travel, childcare minus subsidies].

So hiking the subsidy is much the same as reducing income tax on lower earners.

Further, from the point of view of society as a whole or the taxpayer in particular, the calculation is different. Is it better, for example, for three mothers to stay at home with their young children (not paying a penny in income tax) or for one of them to work in a nursery looking after all of the kids and the other two mothers to go out to work?

Assuming the latter (which is up to personal choice, of course), then up to a certain level of subsidy for childcare, there is no net cost to the taxpayer, as long as the income tax etc. paid/generated by the three working women is equal to or greater than the amount of the subsidy, it's just a sort of clumsy tax refund.

I'm not sure what that optimum level of subsidy (or personal allowance) is, but it's almost certainly higher than what it is presently.

FakeCharities, FakeProtests

As we know, one hallmark of an authoritarian government is 'spontaneous' displays of public affection for the regime, e.g. the burkah'd woman cheering on the successful 'revolution' in Iran in 1979; the kids waving flags when Tony Blair entered Downing Street in 1997; or school children being asked to depict Obama in various heroic poses to celebrate his inauguration in 2009.

The present UK government has gone one better and organises protests against itself in order to lend apparent justification for it then doing what it planned to do anyway. Prompted by a throwaway comment on Douglas Carswell's 'blog, I've had a closer look at those G20 Protests in London yesterday:

From The Grauniad:

They hoped for ten thousand but in the end more than three times that number turned out on London's streets today for the biggest mass demonstration since the beginning of the economic crisis. The Put People First march was organised by a "rainbow alliance" of 150 trade unions, church groups and charities including ActionAid, Save the Children and Friends of the Earth. The theme was "jobs, justice and climate" and the message was aimed at the world leaders who will be gathering for the G20 summit here next week.

Right.

1. Trade Unions. Need I say more than union modernisation fund?

2. Church groups, especially the Church of England, are more or less part of the State anyway (tax-exemptions, subsidies, right to appoint senior members to the House of Lords etc)

3. ActionAid received £11.2 million from 'Governments, EU' (see pie chart on page 18 to the 2008 accounts). Admittedly this is only 16% of its income, but read on to page 19, "ActionAid’s accounts only show part of the total contribution from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) to the ActionAid family – the full picture is contained in ActionAid International’s financial statements" or to page 36, where they admit that they hid another £1 million from the Big Lottery Fund and Comic Relief under the heading 'Companies, trusts and NGOs' rather than 'Governments, EU' in the pie chart on page 18.

4. Save the Children "receive grants from UK and foreign governments, multilateral bodies such as the European Union, and international agencies such as the United Nations" worth £65.4 million (see page 2 to the 2008 accounts), which is 40% of its income.

5. Friends of the Earth are the archetypal fakecharity-cum-fakepressuregroup, whose raison d'être is to lobby the EU while being largely funded largely by the EU, see EUReferendum for more.

NB, ActionAid and Save The Children also get a lot of money from the Disasters Emergency Committee ('DEC'). According to its 2008 accounts, this particular body does in fact raise most of its money from proper voluntary donations, but then it dishes them out to fakecharities again.