Exactly two years ago today, David Cameron launched the Conservative Manifesto — one of those rare moments in the Tory campaign where it all seemed to make sense. Cameron begged for a hearing: he was serious, he said, about changing government. It was about realizing that ‘Big Government isn’t the answer to the problems’ and that people outside government — like charities — were. This is why the charities debacle today is not just another Budget blunder. As I say in my Telegraph column, if Cameron tolerates the taxman’s proposed assault on philanthropy, he’ll be admitting defeat on what he described that day as his ‘fundamental tenet’.
The best-paid 1 per cent contribute 28 per cent of all income tax, and probably an even higher share of charitable donations. When charities go fundraising, they’re all clamouring for the wallets of a smallish pool of people. So is the taxman. He has watched this jealously, hating the way these philanthropists can write off their charitable donations against tax. Now the Treasury has decided to move against them, and the battle is on. Cameron used to have posters brilliantly and clearly describing this battle: ‘social responsibility not state control’.
But in office, the fist of state control is winning. Take overseas aid donations.
The agenda to massively increase international aid suggests that state control is alive, well and giving your money to a charity of its choice. The target — 0.7 per cent of GDP — ignores the fact that we as a country meets this target already because the British public are already Europe’s most generous donors. They won’t be, if they think the taxman is taking this money through the tax system. Cameron actually wants a law whereby Big Government will be extracting £400 from the average household to send overseas. Cynical Tory MPs have long referred to the Big Society as BS, and some think even Cameron didn’t believe in it enough to have it as a thread woven through his government.
The government machine never had any intention of relinquishing the controls that Cameron spoke about when he launched his manifesto in Battersea Power Station. In office, he has relied too heavily on this government machine — and he may now end up spearheading Big Government’s attack on his Big Society and its funders. As he travels back from East Asia, he’ll have to think hard about whether to rough out this latest cock-up, or to tell his Chancellor that this time it really is intolerable. The raid on philanthropists is the precise antithesis of what Cameron claims he came into politics to do.
Barack Obama, during the campaign, warned a reporter that ‘I actually believe my own bullshit’. Does Cameron believe in his own BS? We’ll soon see.
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