@möbius strip
A sphere might be easier! Although perhaps it would not suit the purist.

@not 10%.
Yes. Particularly silly given the ubiquity of the spreadsheet convention that 10% is simply another way of formatting the number 0.1

I wonder if a mobius strip could be bent into a shape such that it could never land on its edge, and thus would be a fair 1-sided die.

Also, why ‘not 10%’? Has there been a decree in the British educational system that probabilities must never be expressed as percentages?

For expressing fractional numbers, especially numbers between 0 and 1, I think that using percentages is sometimes clearer and more intuitive than using a decimal point.

I tend to think of national expenditure in terms of its value per citizen, or per taxpayer. On that basis, £300 million is about £5 per citizen, and perhaps £10 per taxpayer in very rough terms. It’s about the price of latte and Danish for two at a cafe, a paperback book, a small round of beers, or a train trip to somewhere quite close.

As for the need to curry favour with voters and persuade them of the merits of government policies, there is less to this than meets the eye. After all, if voters become disenchanted with the party of government, what is the worst that can happen? Presently the other party gets a turn – which will happen anyway, as voters are largely motivated by sheer boredom and the contempt that familiarity breeds.

No. Keeping the voters happy is an important job for politicians. However, altruistic your motives, you cannot do achieve much as a politician unless you are in power. Unfortunately, there is sometimes a conflict between good policy and policy that the voters perceive as good.

I am a firm believer that ultimately people are rational. So eventually you can persuade them that a good policy is good. But it can take a surprisingly long time to get things across. Often years, sometimes decades or longer.

So if you happen to be in a position where the public do not accept the best policy, you have to compromise between what they want and want is sensible.

I am not saying that politicians are always so noble or so well-informed or rational. Sometimes politicians’ motives are despicable and their competence laughable.

But I do not think that the charities debate has been notable for clear thinking.

In principle, sufficiently brilliant exposition can get things across much quicker. So one can always blame the politicians for insufficiently inspired explanations.

Certainly, Osborne did not distinguish himself here. Many people claim he made out that it actually profits philanthropists financially to donate money to charities. I have heard/read many indignant rebuttals of that proposition.

@£300 million is an upper limit to what the Treasury will gain

Hmmm. 1/3 of a billion is quite a lot in government expenditure terms. Major Whitehall battles have been fought for less.

Of course, there are obviously stupid examples of expenditure far larger than that – eg Trident. But politicians tend to measure things in terms of political cost. Trident might look completely stupid to me, but cutting it would mean huge internal fights in the Tory party which Cameron not unreasonably shies away from.

But I still do not really follow your logic. Why should the government allow the rich to redirect some of the tax they pay from government to charities the rich favour?

How far would you take that principle? Should everyone be allowed to donate money to charity as a simple alternative to paying tax? In other words, if you get a tax bill for £X, then instead of paying it you are allowed to donate £X to Oxfam or any other charity. [Or if the tax was deducted at source, then you could write to Oxfam authorising them to reclaim all the tax you had paid from HMRC.]

The fact that governments spend some tax receipts foolishly or wastefully is not really a reason for allowing people to require the government to make matching contributions to charities of their choice.

By refraining from both the attacks on Libya and the proposed tax measures, the UK government could have saved thousands of lives and made many more people’s lives substantially better. Regrettably, that is not what governments do.

So, essentially, the government is wasting its valuable time trying to pass a law that will do no one any good, but is aimed only at deceiving some taxpayers. And they can’t even get that right.

I don’t really follow your logic about the justification of the change, either. You say that £300 million is an “overblown” estimate of what charities will lose (although how can you tell?) But by the same token, £300 million is an upper limit to what the Treasury will gain; because, after all, no one is disputing that the new law will simply transfer money from the charities to the Treasury. But while £300 million means a great deal to the charities, it is pocket change to the Treasury. It is rather less than one twentieth of one percent of total government spending (£722 billion); two-thirds of one percent of the interest on the public debt; and one-sixtieth of the government’s own estimate of the cost of its interference in the internal affairs of Libya last year.

Any purported campaign to reduce red tape will, in practice, be found to increase it still further.