The charities that are more like quangos: Taxpayer funding may account for half of the top 50's annual income by Steve Doughty Social Affairs Correspondent for the Daily Mail

Scale of state subsidy to largest charities may run as high as £6.5 billion

Some may be receiving around nine tenths of income from public

 sector

Report states eight of top 50 charities are really public bodies

Think tank: 'Taxpayers should know when charities rely on their money'

The country’s biggest charities are getting so much money from the taxpayer that some are effectively part of the government, a report on the funding of voluntary organisations warned yesterday.

It said the scale of state subsidy to the largest charities is often hidden but may run as high as half their income - £6.5 billion a year according to the most recently available figures.

Some – including Mencap, Leonard Cheshire Disability and Action for Children – may be receiving around nine tenths of their income from arms of government and the public sector, the report said.

Others do not identify the amount of money they get from the taxpayer, particularly those that operate services paid for by the public sector. 

One, Marie Stopes International, fails to say in its most recent accounts where £86 million paid for abortion and contraceptive advice services came from.

And some organisations that are registered as charities are really state-run quangos in disguise, the report from the Centre for Policy Studies said.

It said eight of the top 50 charities are really public bodies, including the Arts Council, the Big Local Trust which distributes National Lottery good cause money, the British Council which promotes British culture around the world, and organisations running academy schools.

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Transparency Begins at Home Report from the Centre of Policy Studies

This gay-friendly makeover of the miners' strike is deeply patronising, Telegraph

This gay-friendly makeover of the miners' strike is deeply patronising

 Modern culture is obsessed with the idea of gays giving straights a moral makeover. Apparently gays are really politically switched-on and super-fashionable – not to mention dab hands at interior design! – and so they are encouraged to grab straights by the scruffs of their badly dressed necks and turn them into better people. You see this trope everywhere these days: in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy; in the Aussie reality TV show that sent a busload of drag queens to “educate” the beer-swilling inhabitants of South Australia; in Glee, in which pretty much every storyline involves a monosyllabic jock having his prejudices corrected by a shy, erudite gay kid. The TV Tropes website describes this kind of character as the “Magical Queer”, who has “all of the wisdom in the world because he is gay” and who is often charged with “bringing culture to his heterosexual brothers and sisters”.

  

Well, now the “Magical Queer” is being sent back in time to give a moral makeover to historical figures. Consider the striking miners. These angry, blokeish fighters for jobs and pay of the Eighties are clearly seen as being a bit too macho for our soft, caring times, and so they are being made over in an attempt to make them more palatable and sympathetic to modern sensibilities. Who is making them over? Gays, of course! There have in recent years been two major mainstream movies about the miners’ strike, and it is surely not a coincidence that both of them have had strong gay themes. We’re witnessing the gaying of the miners’ strike. (There have actually been three mainstream movies about the miners’ strike – we’ll get to the third in a moment.)

I grew up in the 1980's and although I remember the miner' s strike, I don't remember any Gay activists having a great impact  on  the strike. 

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