Of charity, tax, and social business.

A pity that - so far, at least - there's been so little debate around Frank Field's (second) Allen Lane Lecture, delivered this week, in which he proposes a 10% surcharge on incomes over £150k, which could be totally offset by charitable giving. Frank can always be trusted to come up with original ideas; you might recall the joke that Blair hired him to "Think the unthinkable, Frank" - and he did, and when Blair saw his ideas, he said "But, Frank, this is unthinkable! " and Frank felt he had to resign. Well, how unthinkable is this idea? What purpose would be served by raising an additional £3.6 billion a year in tax revenues and then allowing it to be spent on charity? What kind of charities would wealthy people be likely to support? Would their choices be better for poor people than the choices made by government? It isn't clear to me from the written version of Frank's lecture (I wasn't there on the day) whether there would be anything to prevent someone putting their contribution into, say the endowment fund for a public school of their choice, or a church... So thus far, I'm a sceptic, but maybe Frank can convince me.

Moving on, BBC Today listeners yesterday morning will have heard Muhammad Yunus, defending the social business model and contrasting it with the notion of charity. His key criticism of charity is that the charitable $/£ can only be spent once, whereas business - if successful - is self-sustaining. He's right, but only if your concept of charity is the traditional ameliorative one -'Charity as ordinarily practised, the charity of endowment, the charity of emotion, the charity which takes the place of justice...' (Joseph Rowntree , approx 160 years ago). The foundations which focus on social change can hold their own on Yunus' territory - money spent on achieving longterm change is money invested - not spent and, once spent, wasted. And Yunus should know about that kind of philanthropy, because - as he acknowledges in his new book - if it hadn't been for a couple of US foundations (Rockefeller and Macarthur, as I recall from my browse in Borders), Grameen would not have got off the ground.