Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph devoted its lead front page story, plus its main editorial, to the subject of the National Lottery Bill. When enacted, the Government will have a much bigger say in determining how money raised from the Lottery will be allocated.
When first created in 1992, the primary purpose of the Lottery was to raise monies for worthy causes not otherwise funded by state revenues, such as sport, heritage, and the arts.
Upon being elected in 1997, New Labour changed the remit of where Lottery funds could go so as to include health, education, and the environment, into which areas they have increasingly since flowed.
As was predicted at the time, the effect of New Labour’s decision has been a substantial reduction in Lottery money going into the areas it was created to help. As the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday:
‘In 1996-97, … the lottery gave £291 million to good causes. Last year it was down to £216 million. The amount spent on health, education and the environment has grown from £231 million in its first year, to a peak of £433 million last year. Since 1997, £360 million of lottery money has been spent on heart disease, cancer and stroke care, while £300 million has gone on “healthy living centres”’
Both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, which today runs a two-page feature on New Labour’s plans for the Lottery Fund, are both highly critical of New Labour for diverting it from the areas the Lottery was created to help into plugging gaps in public services supposedly financed by taxes and national insurance.
But should the state have ever got involved at all in charitable funding in the first place?
As is well-known, the prime Lottery punters are the lower social classes, not noted for their patronage of the arts and national heritage, or even sports.
As the Mail notes in its report, ‘since the Lottery started, the percentage of Britons taking part in sport has not increased at all.’
Instead, it seems Britons prefer to remain inveterate couch potatoes, topping the European league table for nightly hours spent glued to the box and devoting precious few to reading.
As ever, the prime beneficiaries of state largesse would appear to be the middle classes. For example, £78 million of Lottery money went towards the costs of rebuilding and refurbishing the Royal Opera House, a venue not exactly noted for drawing to it to the social classes who patronise the Lottery.
Far more disturbing than reports of the National Lottery failure to fulfil its original purpose has been the apparent manifest failure of income tax to fulfil the purpose for which it was introduced.
This, as all good students of English history know, i.e. anyone born before c. 1960, was to finance the military.
William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax early on in the nineteenth century, as a purely temporary expediency to help fund the British war effort against Napoleon, and spare the lower orders a disproportionate share of the costs as had formerly fallen upon them when revenues for this purpose had come primarily from indirect taxation.
Evidence of the failure of income tax to fulfil this vital function comes in the form of an announcement by the National Audit Office, that was also reported in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, that there are now ‘serious shortcomings’ in the readiness of our forces for operations.
Since coming to power, New Labour has deployed the armed forces in several substantial engagements, while simultaneously cutting military budgets.
Should not those who wish to gamble be left to take part in On-line poker, leaving those who like a night at the opera to pay their own way, without subsidy from benighted working-class gamblers?
This way the state could be left free to concentrate on its core business of defending the realm and preserving internal order.
As for the zealots in New Labour, always eager to get their hands on the public’s money so as to expend it ways they think they know best how to, they would do well to recall the words of warning delivered by their patron-saint, Lord Beveridge in 1948:
‘The making of a good society depends not on the State but on the citizens, acting individually or in the free association with one another, acting on motives of various kinds, some selfish others unselfish, some narrow and material others inspired by love of man or love of God. The happiness or unhappiness of the society in which we live depend upon ourselves as citizens, not in the instrument of political power which we call the State.’
[Lord Beveridge, Voluntary Action (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1948), p.320.]
Comments (4)
Good work. I like your site. their senses slowly: http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Charles_Mackay , It's the other lousy two percent , A false friend and a shadow attend
Posted by Mark Moore | November 16, 2005 7:23 AM
Posted on November 16, 2005 07:23
The Big Lottery Fund is actually trying harder to involve people directly in grant making. Its People's Millions initiative, which launched earlier this month, will allow people to vote for the projects they think should receive money.
The website is here -
http://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/programmes/pmillions/index.htm.
It is tiresome the way some keep going on about that grant to the Royal Opera House, which is just one of many thousands that have been made since lottery funding started. The 'lower social classes' have benefited from many other awards - such as the £30m that has gone to war veterans - the problem is that these grants do not get any publicity, as they do not serve the Mail's bureaucrat-bashing agenda.
Posted by Jonathan Watson | June 26, 2005 5:25 PM
Posted on June 26, 2005 17:25
You comment that a beneficiary would be the Royal Opera House, and rightly mention that this is not a venue normally frequented by 'the social calles who patronise the Lottery.'
However, with this I would add a small proviso; I think it important to remember that the Royal Opera House might not attract such clientele not because of cost, but rather because of content. Too often class distinctions are made and it is presumed that those who don't patronise the 'finer' arts, have no choice and are financially unable. I was shocked to see the price for a Football match ticket, and with cigarettes over £5 a pack, I fail to see cost as the inhibitor any longer.
Posted by M C | June 23, 2005 10:23 PM
Posted on June 23, 2005 22:23
Letting the people decide where to choose where their money goes, of course, is to be scorned at. Far better to let an unaccountable, unqualified quango continue to hand out tens of millions to organisations that have contributed extremely little or cannot contribute anything to civil society. Thus it's far better to forget about war veterans (what nasty, victimising lives they must have led) than to forget about approved "victims" (wherever in the world they might be). Only by imposing this, you see, can the animal instincts of the unwashed, uncivilized demos be avoided and in place installed the ever-deft, sensitive hand of bureaucracy.
Posted by AW | June 17, 2005 11:02 AM
Posted on June 17, 2005 11:02