Huge entertainment is being provided by various governments as they now try to get vaccines for their unfortunate subjects to protect them against Xi Pingpong’s Chinese plague.
But before we look at that, just two quick points:
it is now becoming ever more clear that the Wu-Flu was accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to slovenly hygiene practices at the Institute which proudly boasts that it has over 2,000 different coronavirus samples which it is studying
once the virus got out, the dirty, corrupt, lying, devious Chinese (ably assisted by the equally corrupt, lying, self-serving scumbags at the ludicrously misnamed World Health Organisation) tried to cover up the impending disaster. Most damning was that China banned all travel within China while China (backed up by the WHO’s advice against an international travel ban) allowed hundreds of international flights out of China to spread the virus and devastate Western economies
And now for some entertainment – how the EU and China are ‘vaccinating’ their populations.
Les trois grands f*ck-ups français?
F*ck-up français – 1
All EU countries were free to use the emergency procedure for approving and buying vaccines that the UK Government used. But rather than acting in a supposedly ‘selfish’ way like the British Government, the 27 other EU countries decided to show their great European “solidarité” and let the EU bureaucrats run their vaccine approval and purchasing efforts.
Unfortunately, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) wasn’t even scheduled to meet to consider vaccine approvals until 29 December 2020 – several weeks after the UK’s MHRA had already approved the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine.
Then there was another not insignificant problem – a small, arrogant, granny-banging, frog named President Macron. He wanted the EU vaccine programme to be a moment of “gloire” for the great French pharmaceutical industry. For the vertically-challenged frog Macron, France would heroically rush to save the whole of Europe with French pharma company Sanofi’s miracle vaccine. So Macron did everything he could to ensure that the EU bought mostly Sanofi’s vaccine and definitely didn’t put in orders for the hated rosbifs‘ AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine. Now the EU finds that Sanofi’s French vaccine doesn’t work properly and won’t be ready till the end of 2021. So the EU is desperately short of vaccines.
I reckon that about 5,000 to 10,000 EU citizens will die unnecessarily from delays in vaccinations. Their unnecessary deaths are the direct result of the EU bureaucrats efforts to satisfy the demands of the puffed-up, arrogant little, granny-banging, preening froggy president. Perhaps their families should sue the useless Macron?
Highly entertaining!
F*ck-up français – 2
Oh, and let’s not forget – it was France using French companies which helped the Chinese build and operate the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Institute was the first Biosafety Level 4 facility in China and it was slovenly hygiene practices at the French/Chinese Institute of Virology which allowed the Chinese plague to spread in the first place.
Thank you arrogant, preening, incompetent, unhygienic France for yet another wonderful contribution to human civilisation.
F*ck-up français – 3
So far a piddling 516 French have received jabs compared to around 240,000 in Germany and over one million in Britain according to health ministry figures.
The slow rollout is being blamed on mismanagement, end-of-year staffing shortages, and a complex consent policy to avoid litigation in a vaccine-sceptical country in which 60% of the population say they won’t get a jab, according to the latest poll. The vaccine consent form is 45 pages long.
Only French doctors can currently administer doses and the government has ruled out opening “vaccinodromes” in stadiums or sports halls.
France has also vehemently denied it has fallen behind neighbours because it wanted to hold out for a homegrown vaccine. One developed by French-owned Sanofi and Britain’s GSK is only expected to be ready later in the year.
As for approving the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine from the hated British, the Froggies seem to be trying to find every possible excuse to delay approval of a vaccine that has already been approved in many other countries. Dominique Le Guludec, head of France’s medical regulator, said there was still insufficient data to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca. “We prefer to wait another 15 days if necessary to have all the data we need on safety and efficacy,” Le Guludec told BFM TV.
Likely result? Lots of dead Froggies. Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Chinese vaccine – me thinkee gleat big fl*ck-up?
But there’s also some interesting vaccine news from the country that gave us the Chinese plague.
The Chinese claim their Sinovac/Sinopharm vaccine is totally wonderful and much cheaper and easier to handle than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines as it doesn’t need the -70c refrigeration. Yet, while eagerly trying to flog their great Chinese vaccine to other countries – particularly to basket-case sh*t-holes like Crapistan – the Chinese Communist Party has bought between 100 million and 200 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Why would the devious, lying, corrupt, disease-spreading Chinese pay loads of money for an expensive, difficult-to-handle foreign vaccine when the Chinese supposedly had their own cheaper, easier-to-handle vaccine readily available?
There are two possible explanations:
Explanation 1 – the Chinese intend to use the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to protect top communist and military figures because they know their own Sinopharm vaccine is (like everything else Made in China) totally crap and there’s no way important Chinese Communist Party members are going to allow themselves or their families to be injected with a Chinese total crap vaccine. The good foreign vaccine will be used for China’s rulers and their families. Ordinary Chinese will get the Made in China crap vaccine
First a small point – I do not believe the Government statisticians and supposed health experts’ claims that in most UK larger towns and cities, one in every hundred people is infected with Xi Pingpong’s Chinese plague. I simply don’t believe that, if you walk down a reasonably busy town or city street, one of every hundred people there are currently infected with Covid-19.
I don’t know whether:
half or more of the supposed carriers are false positives
other cold and flu viruses are causing a ‘positive’ result
the PCR test or lateral flow test or whatever they’re using is inaccurate
there is cross-pollution of the samples
the sampling methods being used are causing an exaggerated result
or there is some other cause
But with all the face-mask-wearing and social distancing and self-isolating and other precautions people are taking, I simply do not believe that one in every hundred people are carrying the Covid-19 Coronavirus.
Moreover, I do not believe the constant refrain of the NHS being overwhelmed. While I believe there are quite a lot of Covid-19 cases in our hospitals, I had also understood that there was a dramatic drop in seasonal flu cases due to the measures being taken to control the Chinese plague. But this is never mentioned by the politicians and the ‘experts’ as they wreck our economy and millions of people’s lives to save us from ourselves.
Basically, I do not believe we’re being told the truth.
However, I do believe that, once the Wu-Flu crisis is over, the same lies and shock/horror statistics and controls and other coercive methods will be used against us supposedly to “save the planet”. As the great George Orwell warned:
Having tasted the pleasure of total control over our lives, there’s no way the politicians and experts and technocrats and bureaucrats will ever relinquish it. What we can expect to see is the ‘retired St George syndrome’ – having killed the dragon, St George has nothing to do to give meaning to his life. So he invents new dragons to slay.
That’s what our rulers will do after vaccines defeat the Chinese plague.
Maybe it’s time to take a Christmas break?
Back on Monday 4th January 2021.
In the meantime, here’s America’s next president wishing you all a great Christmas if he can remember when Christmas is and what Christmas is.
(left-click once on the image then wait for a few seconds and left-click once again to see the great Joe ‘China’ Biden – soon to be the second most powerful man in the world – expressing his deepest thoughts)
The great Xi PingPong is, of course, now the most powerful man in the world as he has bought the whole Biden family with the millions Xi has shoved into the Biden family’s bank accounts;
“Record cold temperatures don’t mean the Earth isn’t warming”
On the news yesterday, I heard that somewhere in China had registered its coldest day since records began. Meanwhile in the USA, snowfalls in 2019 and 2020 have started earlier than they have for at least the last 40 years. This year Australia is also having its latest snowfall ever – at the start of the Australian summer. Meanwhile this year Delhi in India had its coldest November for 71 years.
Obviously this was not what the Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Disaster, Extinction Rebellion idiots predicted. So they’re fighting back writing articles with ridiculous headlines like “Record cold temperatures don’t mean the Earth isn’t warming”.
But if the deluded, scientifically-challenged Warmies can get away with claiming that “Record cold temperatures don’t mean the Earth isn’t warming”, then that poses a possibly interesting question: every time the Warmies and their sycophants at the BBC and C4 News say some month or year is really really hot, why can’t I claim that “Record warm temperatures don’t mean the Earth isn’t cooling”?
What about it Warmies?
Gormless, gutless Guterres speaks
The useless United Nations has also been spurred into action. On Saturday 12 December 2020, just a few days ago, the (IMHO) pig-ignorant, self-serving, gutless, socialist, globalist waste of skin, UN boss Antonio Guterres, demanded that governments around the world should all declare a state of climate emergency until the world has reached net zero CO2 emissions:
I guess this is the same useless UN which warned us 31 years ago (in 1989) that – yup, you guessed it – the world was facing a global warming climate emergency/disaster:
Hot, cold, hot, cold, hot….
And while we’re on the subject of impending climate disaster, let us not forget that the very same research-grant-grabbing ‘experts’, who since 1989 have been fiddling their figures to lucratively warn us the Earth was warming catastrophically, were mostly the same experts who just 15 years earlier were confidently predicting a new disastrous Ice Age with crop failures and mass starvation:
I imagine the mainstream media rather hopes we’ve all forgotten their hyperventilating warnings about us all freezing to death. Here’s what the Guardian was once predicting::
And here’s the Washington Post:
Will we get fooled again?
Are we really going to let these unelected, power-hungry globalist scumbags peddle their fake climate emergency nonsense yet again as an excuse to impose ever more restrictions on our lives?
The answer to that question is unfortunately – YES!
That’s especially the case in the UK where Boris wants to grandstand at some wankers’ climate conference he’s chairing in 2021. And I suspect that our PM Bonking Boris knows that his little Boris won’t get access to Princess Nut Nut’s temple of love unless he grovellingly agrees with all the climate change or global warming or climate disaster or whatever it’s called this week rubbish that Princess Nut Nut, with her university degree in something like art history and theatre studies, as far as I understand reportedly believes.
Sky News Australia – don’t you love them?
So, where can we get just a little sanity? Certainly not from any of the UK or US mainstream media. So let’s have a quick look at Sky News Australia:
It’s the time of the year for giving. And one group of people who rather hope we’ll all give generously are Britain’s many charities. So, let’s have a quick look at what really goes on in Britain’s charity industry.
Over 200,000 charities raking in over £85bn!!!
The 185,000 charities registered in England and Wales pulled in £83,801,516,308 in the latest financial year. Then there are probably another 24,000 charities in Scotland raising about £850m and a few more in Northern Ireland, though the Northern Irish charity regulator apparently hasn’t quite got around to counting them yet, to be sure. All in all, there are probably well over 200,000 registered charities in the UK. So there is a registered charity for every 300 UK residents. And these 200,000+ charities are raking in comfortably over £85bn a year.
Moreover, this figure of 200,000+ charities doesn’t include about another 200,000 or so additional charities which don’t need to register with any of Britain’s three charity regulators as they’re either too small (e.g. a local scouts group or a charity taking in less than £5,000 a year) or exempted from registration.
But if you add up:
all the animals we want to save – elephants, rhinos, donkeys, cats, dogs, newts etc etc
all the diseases we want to cure – cancer, Alzheimers, malaria, MND etc etc
all the problems we want solve – poverty, homelessness, mental issues etc etc
There’s no way you will reach 200,000+ worthy causes. In fact, you’d probably struggle to think of more than 500 causes to donate money to. This suggests that there is massive duplication, triplication, quadruplication and worse with loads of charities all doing very similar things.
For example, the Charity Commission lists 620 cancer charities alone and more than 200 charities working with homeless people just in London. That means lots of lucrative jobs for charity industry insiders and an awful lot of the £85bn we donate going into the obviously worthy bank accounts of lucky charity industry insiders.
The ‘voluntary sector’???
Charities like to be thought of as working selflessly in the ‘voluntary sector’. And it’s true that there are probably over seven million good folk who do dedicate some of their time to charity work. But in just England and Wales, there are an astonishing 1,467,941 charity employees and probably another couple of hundred thousand more in Scotland and Northern Ireland making charity one of Britain’s largest industries. About an almost unbelievable one in every 20 working employees in the UK is employed by a charity.
Spawning like flies on a turd?
You might have thought that with more than 200,000 charities and more than 1,500,000 employees, Britain had pretty much every problem known to humans covered by at least one and more usually many charities. How wrong you would have been. Around 5,000 new charities are registered each year. That’s about 100 new charities every week – about 20 every working day.
Lucky charity industry insiders gobbling ever more of your money?
The main charity regulator for England and Wales until recently claimed that around £8 of every £10 donated gets used for ‘charitable activities’. But a study of leading cancer charities by Manchester Business School found that, in 1997, just 65% of money raised was spent on the cause, compared to 90% in 1992.
Across all charities, the average was 67% spent on charitable causes in 1997, compared to 80% five years earlier. I suspect that now at most probably only around 50% of the money we donate gets anywhere near to causes that we intended it to be used for.
In many of the charities I’ve looked at when writing my book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL, less than half the money donated went anywhere near the good causes to which it was intended. In one memorable case, a charity’s three founders paid themselves over £270,000 in consultancy fees – about £90,000 each – while using just over £14,000 on the purpose for which their supposed ‘charity’ was supposedly funded. And that’s far from being an isolated example.
The more charities there are, the more of our money they seem to use to pay themselves. Moreover, the more they have to compete with each other for our money, the less of our donated money is actually used for genuine charitable purposes.
Ten out, one in?
Charity has become an out-of-control monster gobbling up every more of our money to feed itself and leaving ever less of our money to be used for genuine charitable purposes. Instead of busily registering ever more new charities at a rate of around 100 new charities every week, our hopelessly misnamed ‘charity regulators’ should institute a “10 out, 1 in” policy – allow one new charity to register for every ten charities that close down.
But that would never happen as it would mean fewer lucrative jobs for our ever more greedy, holier-than-thou, well-paid charity industry gravy-train-riders.
Some readers might remember a rather famous (infamous?) article on 20 March 2000 in the Independent in which a certain Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, predicted that within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”
There are also some rather entertaining comments by readers.
In the same article, Dr Viner’s predictions were backed up by a few other supposed ‘experts’ including a certain David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in (appropriately named?) Berkshire who was quoted as saying: “ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes – or eventually “feel” virtual cold”.
Here’s a bit more from the 20 March 2000 Independent article:
Record skiing seasons?
At the time, many ‘experts’ were predicting the end of skiing in the Alps as winters became ever warmer due to supposed Global Warming. It does appear that there was some warming in the Alps in the 1990s, but since then, in fact since Dr David Viner’s great prediction of warming and no snow, temperatures in the Alps seem to have fallen significantly:
And there have been some record skiing seasons in the Alps – especially 2012/3 and 2018/9.
As for not knowing what snow is – here’s this week’s weather prediction from the Daily Express:
‘Temperatures across the UK are set to plummet below freezing with an increased threat of snow showers from this evening. According to BBC Weather, the UK will continue to be engulfed by “cold air from Greenland” before a new weather system closes in from the Atlantic later this week. BBC Weather’s monthly weather outlook said: “December has started cold and unsettled. Some of us have already seen the first snowfall of this winter, including lowland parts of eastern England.’
Here we go again?
You’d have thought that the ‘climate experts’ would have been more than slightly chastened by their predictions of no snow being shown to be total crap. But not them. They’re back again making the same ludicrous predictions they were making 20 years ago. Here’s an article from this week’s Guardian on 7 December 2020:
If you look at the text below the headline of the 20 March 2000 Independent article and the 7 December 2020 Guardian article you might see some similarities. Both claim that activities like snowball fights and sledging could soon become impossible due to a lack of snow. In fact, the test from the 20 March 2000 article and the 7 December 2020 article is almost identical.
But there is some good news. Whereas the Independent warned us in March 2000 that within a few years snowfalls would become a thing of the past, the latest prediction from the Guardian quoting Met Office ‘experts’ now gives us until the end of his century – another 80 years – before “snowfalls become a thing of the past”.
Perhaps in 80 years’ time the Guardian and the Independent will be confidently predicting that by the end of the next century “snowfalls will become a thing of the past”?
How can anyone take these self-serving idiots and liars seriously?
Here he is – the laughing Chinaman. This is the man mostly responsible for covering up the Covid-19 plague and (deliberately?) allowing it to spread around the world while brutally controlling it in China:
And here he is with his obedient sidekick from the utterly corrupt, ludicrously misnamed World Health Organisation:
And here he is with the next US president:
So far this (IMHO) murdering, totalitarian scumbag is responsible for 67 million cases of the Wu-Flu of which more than 1.54 million have died. Not bad for a few months work. Though Xi’s hero, Mao Tse Tung, is believed to be responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 33 million and 60 million:
So, Xi has a long way to go before he reaches his hero’s much more impressive score.
Tip of the iceberg?
But it seems that the 1.54 million deaths may be just the tip of the iceberg. Before Xi’s Kung-Flu was unleashed on the world, the World Food Programme had forecast that around 80 million people would be at risk of starvation in 2021. Following the economic destruction caused by Xi’s disease and the lockdowns imposed by governments around the world, the World Food Programme has increased its forecast of people at risk of starvation from 80 million to 270 million. That’s another 190 million people whose lives will be devastated by China’s desperate efforts to cripple the West and become the world’s leading economic and military power.
Who is going to pay?
According to the World Food Programme, Xi’s disease has cost countries outside China $19 trillion. China’s economy has, of course, been booming as China supplies the world with (usually faulty?) PPE and (usually faulty?) Covid-19 testing kits.
So, who is going to pay for all this destruction? Who is going to supply the food for the starving 270 million? Who is going to provide all the foreign aid to help poorer countries recover? And who will pay for vaccines for the billions living in poorer countries?
Corrupt, disease-spreading China will, of course, offer a few countries loans at staggering rates of interest, after bribing corrupt local politicians, in return for giving Chinese companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party control of strategic ports, airfields, agricultural land, water resources around the world:
And when the recipients of Chinese loans can’t repay their debts, the Chinese will take over whatever strategic assets they want. But China doesn’t do foreign aid. The Chinese aren’t stupid. When China lends out money, it expects its pound of flesh in return.
That just leaves us in the West
So prepare yourselves for a tsunami of virtue-signalling by our holier-than-thou elites demanding that it’s the West’s moral and humanitarian duty to:
increase foreign aid to help the starving millions
make it easier for supposed “refugees” (actually mostly parasitical, mostly uneducated, mostly unemployable, mostly criminal, mostly violent migrants) to emigrate to the West
grant citizenship to the tens of millions of illegal migrants already living in the West (who will then vote for globalist, lefty, rapemigrant-hugging political parties)
pay for vaccines for all those countries that can’t afford to buy them
Naturally, none of the elites in the West will ever suggest that, as it was the corrupt, lying, disease-spreading Chinese who gave us the Wu-Flu in the first place, it should be China that pays for all the damage and destruction the Chinese plague has caused and also it should be China that pays for the vaccines necessary to protect the poor from the Chinese Wu-Flu.
Anyone who watches TV will already have been bombarded by a torrent of ads from our supposed charities with their well-paid, well-pensioned bosses trying to guilt-conscious us into increasing our donations this year to help those affected by Xi’s Wu-Flu. But just wait till our politicians also jump on the virtue-signalling bandwagon and force us to shovel ever more billions into the pockets of Third-World kleptocrats supposedly to help the poor whose lives have been devastated by Xi Pingpong’s Chinese plague.
And for anyone who hasn’t seen it, here’s a jolly little Christmas video I made a few years ago about what really happens to our foreign aid:
In this blog I’m going to do something that might upset a few readers. I’m going to look at what the Salvation Army really does with the hundreds of millions of pounds of your money it gets every year:
The Salvation Army is probably one of Britain’s most trusted organisations. It’s a bit of a national icon like the Queen. It’s an organisation towards which most people feel admiration, affection and pride.
Inside the Salvation Army
In my blog and in my book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL I have criticised many charities for being just huge, greedy, wasteful, self-serving, bureaucratic corporate organisations with too many employees, too many over-paid and over-pensioned bosses and too little money spent on real charitable activities. But I have always felt that the Salvation Army was in some way different and better than most other charities and therefore ‘off limits’ for any investigation or criticism. I had the impression that the Salvation Army was a bit old-fashioned but still a worthy cause mainly staffed by selfless volunteers doing valuable work to help the homeless and the needy.
At least, that was what I thought until yesterday. Yesterday I got the usual Salvation Army Christmas appeal letter and I’m sure you’ve all seen the TV ads with the Salvation Army helping homeless people:
Out of curiosity I Googled the Salvation Army to look at their annual reports. I didn’t like what I saw.
The Charity Commission, the body which is supposed to regulate the £77bn a year 168,000+ charities in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own charity regulators and another 30,000 to 40,000 charities) used to claim that under their wonderfully effective management of charities around £8 of every £10 donated (80%) was spent on “charitable activities”.
Let’s look at the latest figures from the Salvation Army. In the latest full financial year, the Salvation Army raised £238m and spent £233m. Of the £233m spent, just £149m went on what the Salvation Army called “charitable activities”. So, just £6.40 of every £10 donated (64%) to the Salvation Army was spent on what the Salvation Army classed a “charitable activities”. If the Salvation Army had managed to reach £8 out of every £10 raised being spent on “charitable activities”, that would have released another £37m for “charitable activities” – £37m a year is quite a lot of money.
Are they really “charitable activities”?
At the risk of boring readers senseless, let’s take a couple of minutes to delve a bit deeper into what the Salvation Army did with the £149m spent on supposedly “charitable activities”.
Church and Evangelism Programmes – The Salvation Army spent over £49m on what they call “Church and Evangelism Programmes”. The Salvation Army report explains – This represents Christian worship and the teaching and promotion of the Christian message at our corps, regionally and nationally. Expenditure has increased primarily due to staff pension costs and planned maintenance costs on properties.
A cynic might question whether Christian worship and teaching the Christian message, increased staff pension costs and planned building maintenance really were “charitable activities” of the sort that donors expect their money to be used on or whether these were just running expenses that should never have been classed as “charitable activities” in the first place.
Training Programmes – £6.5m was spent on Salvation Army staff training. I quote the Salvation Army report – This represents the costs of William Booth College which trains people to become Salvation Army officers and runs education and learning programmes for employees and officers.
Of course, staff training is necessary. But is it really a “charitable activity”? Or is it just a normal running cost for any large organisation?
If we take a slightly harsher approach to the Salvation Army’s £149m spent on supposedly “charitable activities” and take out the £49m used for Church and Evangelism Programmes, staff pension costs and planned building maintenance and the £6.5m spent on staff training at the William Booth College from spending on “charitable activities” and include them under organisational running costs, then we end up with the Salvation Army spending £233m in the latest financial year of which only £93.5m – £4 of every £10 spent (just 40%) – used for what most people (and especially most donors?) would consider to be genuine “charitable activities”. And that isn’t a great use of our money!!!!
I have a feeling that the Salvation Army does what many charities do – put lipstick on a pig to make themselves look better by classifying loads of costs as “charitable activities” when these costs are actually just organisational running expenses which have nothing at all to do with what most of us would describe as “charitable activities”.
Volunteers? No pay, no way!
The other image I had of the Salvation Army was that it was mainly staffed by well-meaning, possibly rather middle-aged, middle-class volunteers. This may be true. I don’t know how many volunteers work with the Salvation Army each year. But I do know that there are a possibly surprisingly large number of quite reasonably paid employees.
In 2019, the Salvation Army employed 3,031 people. As some were part-time, this equated to 2,634 what are called “full-time equivalents”. These 2,634 full-time equivalents were paid £71.3m – that’s an average salary of £27,000. The 2,770 full-time equivalents employed in 2018 were paid salaries of £65.1m – an average salary of £23,500. I wonder why the average Salvation Army employee salary shot up by 15% from £23,500 to £27,000 between 2018 and 2019? And I wonder whether most people, who donate money to the Salvation Army, are aware that they are paying £73.1m a year for the not ungenerous salaries of 3,031 full-time and part-time employees?
Now let’s quickly look at the Salvation Army big bosses. The Charity Commission requires all charities to list the number of employees being paid £60,000 or more a year specifying how many employees there are in each £10,000 band above £60,000 a year. In 2018, the Salvation Army had 36 employees being paid above £60,000. In 2019 this rose by 22% to 44 employees being paid over £60,000 a year in 2019. In 2018, the Salvation Army didn’t have any employees being paid over £150,000 a year. In 2019 one lucky individual reached this exalted status.
Conclusion?
I’m sure the Salvation Army does lots of valuable work helping those in need. But I’m far from convinced that enough of its £233m a year spending goes to what most of us would consider as genuine “charitable activities”.
Moreover, I’m more than slightly perturbed by the number of paid employees in what I had imagined was mainly a voluntary organisation and how fast these employees’ salaries seem to have risen between 2018 and 2019.
Personally. I was disappointed by what I found. I had always thought of the Salvation Army being somehow less greedy, less bureaucratic and more altruistic than many other charities. But it seems I was wrong.
‘Tis the season for gimme gimme gimme charity TV commercials.
In one of my many idle moments I came across this blog I wrote in 2015 about the charity “Crisis UK” aka “Crisis at Christmas”.
Five years have passed since I wrote the blog below. So, many things might have changed since then. Or maybe many things haven’t changed. I don’t know. But anyway, here’s what I wrote five years ago:
As Christmas (the season for giving) approaches, most of us are being bombarded by gimme gimme gimme letters from some of Britain’s over 200,000 charities. Among the pile coming through my door was one from “Crisis at Christmas”.
I have given to them in the past. But since I researched and wrote my book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL, I’ve become a bit more careful about whom I give my very limited money to. So, before putting a modest cheque into the Crisis at Christmas envelope, I had a quick shifty through their financial accounts. And I really didn’t like what I saw.
The charity Crisis UK was founded in 1967 in response to the Ken Loach film Cathy Come Home shown the previous year, and a publicity campaign highlighting the plight of homeless people. Crisis launched their Crisis at Christmas campaign in 1972.
There were three things that worried me when I looked at how Crisis uses and (IMHO) abuses our money:
1. Too little used for ‘charitable activities’?
According to the Charity Commission on average our charities spend £8.50 of every £10 donated on supposed ‘charitable activities’. Of course, I know that’s complete bollox as many charities include things like consultancy fees paid to the founder, money hosed into charity bosses’ families’ bank accounts, administration costs and all kinds of political campaigning as ‘charitable activities’ when they clearly are not. But let’s put that aside for the moment and compare like with like – the financial report from Crisis with the financial reports from other charities.
Whereas the average charity reportedly spends £8.50 of every £10 donated on ‘charitable activities’, Crisis spends only £6.79. That’s a pretty big difference:
If Crisis could match other charities, that would leave an extra £4m a year less for management and bureaucracy and thus £4m a year more for ‘charitable activities‘
2. Highly-paid staff?
You might have thought a relatively small charity dealing with the homeless in the UK would pay its employees less than charities operating in some of the world’s most dangerous countries? Well, you would have been wrong. Whereas the average employee cost (salary, social security and pension) at charities like Oxfam, Red Cross and Save the Children are in the range of £20,000 to £26,000, the average employee cost at Crisis is a much more generous £37,183:
Ooopps!
3. Highly-paid boss?
Crisis won’t tell us how much their boss is paid. They just do the legal minimum of reporting that he or she or ze is in the salary band of £100,000 to £109,999 (so let’s assume they’re getting in the middle of that range – £105,000). Crisis has about 251 FTEs (full-time equivalent employees). Yet the Crisis boss is being paid at pretty much the same level as the boss of Oxfam (4,855 FTEs) andmore than the boss of CAFOD (444 FTEs):
So the Crisis boss is being paid a similar salary as bosses of charities with many more employees possibly operating in many more countries. Does that seem right to you?
Conclusion 1 – Does Crisis deserve our money?
I have phoned and emailed the media department at Crisis asking why so little money is used on ‘charitable activities’ and why Crisis employees seem to be so expensive. But sadly I have not yet had a reply.
However, from what I’ve seen, I’m not wasting any more of my money on Crisis at Christmas and its (IMHO) over-paid employees and boss.
Conclusion 2 – Why does Crisis even exist?
But hold on a minute. I’ve just seen a TV ad for Shelter. I wonder what the £60m-a-year Shelter does? Oh, Shelter seems to be doing pretty much the same thing as the £25m-a-year Crisis:
So, if we merged these two charities, we could probably save around £7m in administration, fundraising and management support costs. That’s £7m more that could be used for real ‘charitable purposes’. What about it Shelter and Crisis? Oh, you don’t want to merge as that would mean lots of highly-paid bosses and bureaucrats losing their jobs and bosses losing the chance of their seats in the Lords or OBEs or whatever gongs they’re after.
So, there’s another reason not to give a penny of your money to either Crisis or Shelter. They’ll just waste too much of it on themselves.
Incidentally, the average employee cost at Shelter is £34,992, well above the main international poverty charities like Oxfam (£22,327), but comfortably below the £37,183 of those lucky people at Crisis.
Homelessness in Britain is clearly very lucrative for Britain’s two best-known homelessness charities’ fortunate employees.
And don’t forget, among the UK’s 200,000 or so charities there are plenty more like Centrepoint and St Mungo’s and Homeless Link and Streetlink and Depaul UK also claiming to be working to solve homelessness.
I’d like to thank a reader for making me aware of the word “Kakistocracy”. A kakistocracy (/kækɪˈstɒkrəsi/, /kækɪsˈtɒkrəsi/) is a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens.
The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century. It apparently comes from the Greek ‘kakistos’ which is the superlative of ‘kakos’ (bad).
Does kakistocracy remind you of anyone?
As Gerry Rafferty might have sung “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle without a clue. Yes, I’m stuck in the middle without a clue”.
Can our politically-correct police get any worse?
And while we’re on the subject of kakistocracy – a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens – any Sunday Times readers will know that the once reliable once newspaper (which has banned me from writing comments) has been doing a big splash this weekend on the uber-politically-correct boss of the Met police – Cressida Dick.
Cressida ticks loads of diversity boxes. She is, as far as I understand, both female and a lesbian:
Unfortunately she’s not BAME nor from our favourite religion. But then Cressida’s assistant commissioner Anil Kanti “Neil” Basu does at least tick the BAME box:
So, even more diversity. And as you all know, diversity is good for you.
Sadly Anil Basu isn’t from our favouritest religion. Though he has reportedly gone on record as saying that there’s absolutely no need for people from our most admired religion to integrate or assimilate into British society:
And, if I remember correctly, Anil Basu has also claimed that the fastest growing terror threat in the UK was from right-wing groups and absolutely not from crazy Izlumists:
I believe you, Anil Basu. But there might be some cynics who think you’re talking a load of politically-correct, Izlumophiliac nonsense. Still, if you keep on spouting politically-correct, Izlumophiliac crap, maybe you’ll soon get promoted and get a few gongs just like your boss Cressida?
Here’s how Cressida’s and Anil’s police deal with an illegal Black Lives Matter protest during the Chinese plague lockdown:
Here’s how Cressida’s and Anil’s police deal with an Extinction Rebellion protest:
And here’s how they deal with an anti-lockdown protest:
Maybe it’s time to sack the (IMHO) utterly useless, politically-biased, UK-hating, progressive, globalist-pawns Cressida Dick and Anil Basu and get some real coppers running our police?
Made in China
And here to cheer us all up are two Chinese men taking a solidly-built, high-quality Made in China elevator:
The lying, corrupt, disease-spreading Chinese will apparently be building our next generation of nuclear reactors. No doubt these Made in China nuclear reactors will be just as solidly-built and high quality as the lift doors in the above video.
David Craig, on January 7th, 2021
