Captain Tom's daughter

[Sneezeless]

Who would have thought it?

Yes, exactly!

I recently had a similar experience- local charity, impeccable image and the whole thing is basically a massive grift, it's shocking.

They made a joke on The Now Show on Radio 4 about her having made sure that all financial donors were signed up for 'Grift Aid' - childish, I know, but I did giggle!

I think people who set up small charities often underestimate how much is costs in time and effort to run the charity.

Yes, just like folk who want to open a cafe or a little shop - it sounds such a simple, straightforward premise, but it's absolutely not So many upfront costs and so much work before you can get anywhere near the actual job of selling coffee and scones or whatever.

In one respect, it's much easier for the massive charities, because they benefit from the economies of scale and centralisation; but because they're so big and have what may seem like unlimited millions sloshing around, they too can easily lose their focus (or just outright take advantage) and forget/ignore the simple idea of raising as much as you can, restricting your admin outgoings to only what you need to spend on legal/basic essentials and the most efficient/successful way of running it all, and then purposefully using the rest for the stated aims of the charity.

A possible benefit of the rise of AI is that it could render "celebrity culture" obsolete. The older I get, the more disgusted I become over the greed and hypocrisy, shown by these attention seeking narcissists. The era of celebrity worship needs to come to an end.

An aside but don't we feel the Captian Tom affair epitomized what felt an era of people taking advantage of a pandemic? The PPE scandals downing street parties, trips to Bernard Castle, eloping health secrataries.

It just seems like the little people were being screwed.......

How awful. sad

Yes and it bred a total cynicism which will never go. it finds it's way to hate and prejudice. Refugees in hotels are a handy target.

I just find it really sad it also really annoyed me when he went abroad on holiday with his family all paid for and he was bragging about eating steak on holiday when we couldnt see our families or travel for 2 years it was very unfair for that family to do something like that and to take money from the public. Not just a few thousand either but 7 8 figure sums tens of thousands. I've never donated to any chairty since I've lost trust in people like them all he did was walk around his garden he didnt do anything else it was con to start with

You’ve resurrected a zombie thread to complain about a 100 year old man having his last holiday that was paid for by British Airways and Visit Barbados? You must be so bored.

Just to really stoke your ire ‘7 or 8 figure sums’ isn’t tens of thousands - that’s 5 figures. It’s millions.

Anyway I agree the whole thing with Captain Tom was disappointing and maybe even upsetting but ‘we couldn’t travel or see our family for two years’ is ridiculous hyperbole.

Looking back on this, to me it was all part of the flag waving bull around Brexit ( all around the same time) let’s big up an old school military guy with his medals etc , at a very confusing time, gullible public etc, the timing was ripe for an opportunistic bunch to cash in -whether or not he understood his families underlying ‘milk it ‘ motives , I’m not 100% sure. Problem is I still think large swathes of the public are still gullible or they would be far more wary of Farage etc, who I also think plays enormously on the rose tinted glasses crowd