Shedding light on the charities' statist scam

Conrad Quilty-Harper (what a great name!), data mapping reporter (long overdue, but kudos all the same) for the Telegraph has a great post today on how Chris Taggart's  OpenCharities.org is shining a spotlight into the Charities Commission's cave of Adullam.

The website features information on more than 150,000 charities which has been copied and reposted in a more usable form from the Charities Commission for England and Wales website. . . Here’s a link to the full data set hosted on Google, the data on a map and the data as a 20MB comma-separated file, courtesy of Taggart. Note that there are some caveats: there is currently no spending and income information for the larger charities (e.g. Oxfam, or the UK’s largest charity, the British Council), and about 13,000 charities are missing. Taggart hopes to fix these problems soon and update the site, so make sure to keep checking the site for updates.

I'll be damned. I thought the British Council was a quango. Indeed, alongside the BBC, the oldest quango of them all. How the hell does a public corporation get to enjoy the status of a charity as well?

This shit's been going on for a long, long time. A charity should be funded only by voluntary donations - if it receives tax-payer's money there is nothing voluntary about it, and it should not muddy the waters of charity.