Tsunami debate - against a £10,000 donation

I think the council was well advised not to pursue this action.

I and my family have already donated £60 to this fund and I do not want to have donations made on my behalf.

I regularly donate to charities, including St Michael's Hospice, Marie Curie, the National Trust, The Royal British Legion, and Naomi House, plus most boxes that are "rattled" by volunteers - all-in-all, several hundred pounds.

If councillors feel they can afford £10,000 (what about future causes?), they have no need to charge people to use their car parks on a Sunday.

Perhaps they would like to "rattle" some boxes around the borough - something my wife and I did for many years, collecting for the Poppy Appeal each year.

It must be lovely to make donations with other people's money.

-Name and address supplied.

Sir.-I wholeheartedly agree with the decision and I will not be holding my head in shame.

If the council has that much money to spare, it should go to the residents of Basingstoke and Deane and not some Third World country.

It could go towards lowering our council tax bills which most of Britain disagrees with.

Also, I think charity should begin at home and Britain should sort out the state of its own country before giving aid to others.

Has the council given any money to the people in Boscastle and Carlisle? Probably not.

-Vicki Coventry, Lychpit, Basingstoke.

Sir.-Far from believing I should hang my head in shame, I think the few who objected to this money being spent from council coffers should be applauded.

Yes, the tsunami has caused much grief and left people with little or nothing on which to survive, but is the same not true of AIDS in Africa? Are the council members going to send money to help those people?

No doubt your postbag will be full of letters from other charitable organisations that could do with the same amount of money to relieve equal suffering at home and abroad.

Therefore, would the councillors' time not be better spent dealing with local issues and finances rather than those to do with national Government?

Perhaps they could use money from their own pockets for organisations of their choice and credit the borough's residents with enough wisdom to decide how we wish to donate - which we surely can, as is proven by the many reports of fundraising.

-Name and address withheld.

Sir.-I read in horror the story about the council wanting to donate £10,000 to the tsunami appeal.

I then read in disgust your comment about people not agreeing with the donation.

You all seem to have missed the point. Had somebody gone round to each resident and asked them for the 20p, I'm sure we would have all given willingly, but the council thought that it could spend our money as it wished.

What the members seemed to have forgotten was that this would have been a generous donation from us, and not the council, as was stated.

By deciding to make the donation, the council would have taken away our right to choose.

The awful thing about this is I'm sure that the greater majority of residents have already given to the appeal. I know my family did, the very first time we saw the appeal on the TV.

Many residents in the borough struggle to pay their taxes - OAPs, single parents, those with no jobs or on lower incomes, to name a few - so surely if the council felt it needed to make a donation, maybe members should have paid it out of their own pockets, with any shortfall made up by yourself.

Or maybe the council could have used its entertainment budget. We've already put the money into that and it would be nice to know it had gone to good use.

Hasn't The Gazette reported how incredibly generous borough residents have been? So don't try sending us on a guilt trip - we've done our bit to help.

Charity begins at home - not in the offices of Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council.

Congratulations to the five residents who stood up to the council. The handful is getting bigger by the minute.

-Mrs J E Higgitt, Waltham Road, Overton.

Sir.-I was as shocked as everyone else by the events of Boxing Day but I feel the people who objected to the council making a donation have a point.

Central Government has given aid and, by the accounts in The Gazette, almost everyone in the area, as elsewhere in the country, has either given money or helped to organise a fundraising event.

This is a wonderful response but I feel it has to be an individual one and perhaps it is not the council's place to spend our council tax for us on things other than those it is empowered to do.

If it began giving money to charity as a general policy, who would choose which charity?

One of the dangers of our response to such a shocking event as the Asian tsunami is that equally needy people, such as the refugees in Darfur in Sudan (whose story has totally dropped out of the news since Boxing Day), are forgotten.

-Mary Thomas, Cliddesden.

Sir.-You state that the intended donation of £10,000 by the council was a generous gesture - would you please justify this comment?

It was not about individual contributions by the members of the council. They are, in effect, trustees, which carries responsibilities and obligations.

The money comes from the community at large and I would suggest that most of us are quite capable of deciding which charities we wish to support, when and to what extent.

Cllr Gurden may have received only five complaints but I can assure him there were others in the wings who would have come out if the council had gone ahead.

Hoping to get around the law is hardly setting a good example.

-Name supplied, Kingsmill Road, Basingstoke.

Sir.-I agree with the residents.

For one thing, the money doesn't belong to the council. It's the public's money, given (under duress) through various taxes to be used for the benefit of the residents of Basingstoke and the surrounding areas.

When we're repeatedly told that there's not enough money to fund care for the elderly or the disabled in this borough, how is it the council has suddenly unearthed £10,000?

Secondly, to give to an appeal is a personal choice and, although I'm sure there are few people around here who haven't donated in some form or other, they have had the choice to do so and not been told that the money would be given on their behalf.

We have given willingly to the tsunami appeal but would not presume the authority to give someone else's money.

-Mrs J Mott-Gotobed, Chineham.

Sir.-This is not the council's money. It belongs to the taxpayers and is totally wrong in principle for a council to demand money from the taxpayer and then give it to charity on his behalf.

The people of Britain have shown there is no shortage of generosity in the face of this tragedy, and the people of Basingstoke are no exception.

If the council wished to make a donation in the name of Basingstoke, it should have opened an appeal fund for that purpose.

The fact that the council was able to provide this money merely indicates it didn't need to collect it in the first place.

Trying to use the taxpayers' money in this fashion is not only wrong but it is inefficient, since the council has to employ staff to collect and manage this money.

If they had not taken it from the taxpayer in the first place, no doubt people could afford to be even more generous.

Since the council has now identified £10,000 of savings, can we hope that this money will be transferred to next year's budget and used to reduce the intolerable burden being placed on the people of Basingstoke?

How much more money could they save if they put their minds to it instead of empire building in the name of civic pride?

Mr Gladstone said it best over 150 years ago when he said that the best place for money was in the pockets of the people, where it would do most good.

-R E Cross, Steventon.

Sir.-"I could use that money to put a new statue up in the borough - but it would have been a pretty small statue at that", to quote Cllr Brian Gurden.

I feel this quote shows that he has no idea what the real issues are in Basingstoke.

I can think of many worthwhile areas where this money could be spent, so let's not trivialise it.

I am not an objector. However, the point I believe the people are trying to make is that we have all donated from our own pockets as much as we can, as we have all been touched by this tragedy.

It is a personal decision to donate our own cash, not that of the council.

-Name and address withheld