Defence charities have snubbed the News of the World by refusing to accept millions of pounds in donations in protest at the alleged hacking of dead soldiers’ families’ phones.
...
Paul McNamara, the paper’s fomer defence correspondent, said he had to make “50 phone calls” to charities before Barnado's, the Forces Children's Trust and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity agreed to take donations.
Timmy, of course, makes the obvious and ancient point that "money doesn't smell"...
Pecunia non olet*, after all.
What the people who used to run the paper did is one thing and that the paper has now closed would seem to be at least in part a compensation for that. Yet that last issue of the paper did raise £3 million for charity and it’s that money that is being refused.
Personally I’d take money from pretty much anywhere, judging neither the source nor the reason for donating, looking purely at the good that could be done with it. Clearly it’s me that’s out of step though.
These charities may well be snubbing the News of the World but it is the beneficiaries themselves who will suffer—you know, those brave troops who are supposedly the raisin d'ĂȘtre of these organisations.
I don't know how many wounds could be stitched up for £3 million—or how many prosthetic limbs, or psychological counselling sessions—but I bet it's a lot.
It's so fucking pointless too: if these charities had any common sense they would have taken the money as compensation for the damages done to their clients by the News of the Screws—you know, like the damages payments that those assorted pointless s'lebs got out of the paper—which the charities were keeping in trust in order to try to right the wrongs done by these evil people, blah, blah, etc. (Do be careful not to condemn the government that sent your brave beneficiaries off to die on the basis of total lies at this point, of course.)
The most egregious thing is that, apparently, charity funding is being colossally squeezed and, we are told, any moment now, hundreds of charities will collapse and millions will starve on the streets. At best.
But, apparently, these defence charities can afford to turn down £3 million that could have helped awful lot of people; obviously, they cannot spend their funds fast enough or something...?
And just remember, next time that any of these organisations tell some tragic story in order to solicit a tenner from you, they turned down £3 million from News International—which makes them either stupid or wasteful.
Either way, it means they'll get nothing from me...