If they want to give, let them

I went to a packed charity party this week. Before I had taken a sip of my warm white wine, a leading campaigner started attacking the Duke of Edinburgh's recent speech to the Charities Aid Foundation. But this steely, thoroughbred Englishwoman didn't stop at the speech. The Duke, she exclaimed, had once attended a charity event and kept the case of rum he had won in the raffle.

He can certainly stir things up. But is he right to argue that Britain has too many charities - 170,000 of them - and that they ought to be regraded so that those that, say, restore steam engines or country houses are last in line for tax exemption.

The Duke of Edinburgh dredged the past to find philosophical grounds for his thesis that the term 'charity' has become too elastic, with almost anything allowed tax exemption under the category 'purposes beneficial to the community' - provided the charity commissioners concur. He quoted St Thomas Aquinas's formula for the seven corporal alms-deeds: 'to visit, to quench or to feed, to ransom, clothe, harbour or bury'; and the spiritual alms- deeds: to 'counsel, reprove or console, to pardon, forbear or to pray'.

If these definitions were ever adopted, the term charity would be restricted to those with the traditional objectives of providing food, shelter, clothing, health care and education: and Eton, Harrow and Gordonstoun, falling into the final category, would be allowed to slip through, too.

The point about giving to charity is that it is voluntary, prompted by any number of cues and stimuli, not all of which are rational. Of course, a donation to relieve starvation, disease or disability is a more humanitarian act than handing over cash to support decrepit donkeys. But should we pass judgement on what is a good cause and what is not?

Who is going to play God? What bureaucracy will be needed to handle the mass of appeals? Why shouldn't people bequeath their goods to a cats' home or to the National Trust if that is what they truly wish? Why dampen or scorn this impulse, however dotty, to do good?

As a child I used to collect money for a local group that rescued horses from slaughter, and put them in fields to graze out their last days. I wouldn't do it now because I prefer to donate to organisations that help people. But that was what tugged at my heart-strings then, and perhaps it trained me to be more charitable. And even if I no longer support maltreated animals I am glad that other people do.

Those 170,000 charities speak to me not of a sector that is out of control (though the quality of management and their accountability must be highly variable) but of something vibrant and diverse; one hallmark of a free society, of people wanting to help.

Charity fundraisers say they are often amazed at how people will dig into their pockets: just as the cry is raised that we are suffering from charity fatigue, we see another outpouring of aid, whether for Romanian orphans or the victims of Rwandan bloodlust. They also say that many of the new charities being set up are responding to local and clearly visible needs: a hostel or treatment centre for young drug abusers or teenage drifters, a dining club for Bangladeshi pensioners. And just consider the number of Aids-related organisations that sprang up in the Eighties. Should we seek to meddle or control too strictly this desire to help?

Further, while it is clear that the market in charity donations is as imperfect as the average human being - funds that go to the ever-popular Guide Dogs for the Blind, for example, are needed much more desperately by the NSPCC - should we not tremble at the thought of a thorough review of tax concessions? The Inland Revenue says that relief from income tax and capital taxes on gifts is worth pounds 740m a year to charities. Changes along Prince Philip's lines would only benefit the ever-greedy Treasury. If

people want them, let thousands of preservation trusts bloom, helped by tax relief.

A MEMO to editors and television networks. With World Cup football about to start, please remember that there are millions of us out here who hate the sport. To me it is a matter of delight, not national shame, that there

is no British side in the

competition.

A lot of us football-haters are women, who want to watch other sorts of programmes. The recent Broadcasting Standards Council report, Perspectives of Women in TV, found that the main area of female complaint was the amount of sports programming, especially at weekends. They wanted more variety.

But, as an avid newspaper reader who wouldn't touch a fantasy football league competition with a bargepole, I am also fed up with articles gloating about how football, and the male ritual of going to matches, has become so respectable and middle-class. It is a matter of wonder to grown men that going to a football match no longer involves encounters with drunken yobs or threatening police. It remains a matter of amazement to me that people support football clubs. Oh, for a football- free zone over the next four weeks]