Any other business: Do the maths: no one in their right mind uses charitable giving to minimise tax

You wouldn’t thank me for filling this column with arithmetic, but the way in which the government has sought to defend George Osborne’s proposed tax-relief cap for charity donations, and the way most broadcasters have tried to challenge it, has displayed woeful if not wilful ignorance of the tax maths involved. It’s as though ministers have been instructed by Downing Street on no account to consult the easy-to-follow section of the HMRC website headed ‘Giving to Charity: Individuals’ lest it deter them from parroting the line about the iniquity of the super-rich minimising their tax rates by exploiting reliefs. Likewise, it’s as though the leftists who populate BBC newsrooms, inherently hostile to charity and philanthropy, have never personally encountered a Gift Aid form — the most common route for tax-efficient giving — with its certification that ‘I will pay an amount of Income Tax and/or Capital Gains Tax in this tax year that is at least equal to the amount of tax the charity will reclaim on this gift.’

As George Bull of the accountants Baker Tilly says, ‘It is a myth that a person can reduce their income tax liability to nothing by gifting to charity.’ For a 40 or 50 per cent taxpayer to reduce his effective rate even close to the 20 per cent basic rate through charity relief, he would have to give away an enormous slice of his income. No one in his right mind would do that purely for the tax effect. As Tony Blair observed in a breezy Newsnight interview, ‘Yuh give it away, y’haven’t got it any more, yuh’ve lost it.’

What’s more, in my own experience of fundraising for a variety of causes, I cannot think of a single instance when I sensed that a donor had any significant motive other than wanting to help, and feeling able to do so.