Surprise, surprise

We've known for a while about fake charities, various blogs and groups have highlighted their activities over the years there's even a fakecharity site, which appears no longer to be regularly updated, but the information it contains is still valid.
Still, the numbers shown there only appear to be the tip of the iceberg as a report shows...
Mail.

Thousands of charities are barely disguised fronts for state-backed campaigns, a report warned yesterday.
It said 27,000 groups rely on the taxpayer for more than 75 per cent of their income – with individual donors providing less than half the funding for the entire voluntary sector.
Many of the charities lobby for the pet causes of politicians, according to the Institute of Economic Affairs. The environment, public health, foreign aid, inequality and women’s rights are areas that have been ‘particularly blessed’.
Christopher Snowdon, the report’s author, said government departments should be banned from using public money for advertising campaigns and called for the abolition of unrestricted grants to charities. ‘Government funding of politically active charities, non-governmental organisations and pressure groups is objectionable,’ his study said.
‘Firstly, it subverts democracy and debases the concept of charity. Secondly, it is an unnecessary and wasteful use of taxpayers’ money.
‘Thirdly, by funding like-minded organisations and ignoring others, genuine civil society is cold-shouldered in the political process.’
The IEA said that charities such as the School Food Trust – created by the Department of Education following Jamie Oliver’s school dinners campaign – act as ‘special advisers to the Government and are essentially part of the bureaucracy’.

Dear Lord, 27,000? I knew it was bad, but I would never have guessed that it was quite so many suckling at the taxpayer teat. To my mind, it's not the job of the government to be giving my money away to any special interest group, if I want to donate to them I will and the vast majority of the groups represented quite frankly deserve to go to the wall. You have Alcohol Concern, ASH, Smokefree NorthWest, Smokefree North East, D-Myst, etc. ASH is one of the most powerful fake 'charities' in the land and directly dictates Government policy yet only raises £11,000 in direct donations. Yet, genuine charities like the RNLI get nothing (nor I suspect do they want government support)

The real reason though is that politicians have slipped so far down in the trust league that any initiatives they start are now held in extreme suspicion, so they opted for 'trusted' charities to try and tell us what to do. Judging by some of the causes supported, it's fairly obvious that the political classes still haven't a clue about what people want, which is mostly less of the political classes telling us what to do. Nor do they see anything wrong with throwing our cash at a 'good' cause. 'Good' causes being anything that fits their ideas on what we should be made to do, without actually being any proof of doing good at all, merely hectoring us to change our ways.
There are some who believe that any 'charity' that receives government funding should lose its charitable status and a little health warning tagged onto their name when they make a pronouncement, something like "Paid by the UK government to tell you what to do."
The best idea though is to simply give them nothing at all, let them stand on their own feet by public subscription/donation. I rather think most will go under.