Currently we have all sorts of people Lord Ashcroft and Russian billionaires who George Osborne wants to get money off. They are able to do this by channelling their cash via their UK business interests.

Labour is sadly shooting themselves in the foot by not taking action on this or fair votes sooner.

In Europe, what arethe laws protecting people from Gentrification, Homelessness, and the right to live in your land. Here in America we are losing our homes to the wealthy. They also use eminent domain, a law that allows business to steal homes from home owners.

Tell me about Human Rights laws in the EU. I am drafting a Constitiutional Amendment. The war on Reaganism/Thatcherism lingers.

In Solidarity
Thanks Mates.

All that I can see so far is a row of people who would set up impecable charities/good works foundations with immensly appealing names (e.g., Foundation for Lost Babies, Happy Life Association)designed to attract the eye of the uninformed. All taxpayers would be pushed towards nominating some organisation or other; these would aim to be the others named by the majority who don’t know their way around the charitable field. The objective of my row of people would be to run their organiations inoffensively, and collect a nice lifetime salary plus pension as Directors of them.

Lets work on the idea until we cynics are convinced.

I don’t think I could support that. Nice as it sounds to encourage people to support charitable bodies, the whole thing about donations is that you give freely, from each according to his ability – the widow’s mite is as important as the philanthropist’s millions.

I would also fear for charitable bodies’ other fundraising abilities. Even moreso than the National Lottery I think this proposal if implemented would discourage people to give outside of this system.

I don’t think it would re-engage people and communities any better than now – what does that is much more “viral” in the marketing sense – of people persuading others within their own sphere of influence to support causes voluntarily, to be convinced by the cause. And I think there are better ways of doing that that having some quasi-compulsory donation system. It seems to me that things like social networking sites get people to join causes, then eventually one would think to donate to causes they see are active and worth supporting outside of Facebook or whatever. I could see this being a bit like letting the customer behind you in Tesco have your ClubCard points because you don’t have a ClubCard – it’s a “you’ve got nothing to lose” sort of trasnaction.

But if it does go forward as policy, then I think you have to define more tightly what you might mean by “non-profit”. ie Do you genuinely mean charitable works that do not generate money and rely solely on donation to do necessary good works or would you include social enterprises – the often so-called “not for pprofit” sector which are trading businesses that do in fact aim to make a profit but use that profit for good works in some way? And if the latter how far would you go – social enterprises that have investors who share in the return even if less than they would out of a fully commercial profit distributing corporation?