We are, around here, near pure pragmatists. If it works, it works, if it don’t then don’t do it. Apparently this isn’t how some others see the world:

Independent Food Aid Network warns of normalising charity as an answer to poverty after Princess of Wales volunteers at Berkshire centre

Yes, they really are saying that charity is a bad thing.

Sabine Goodwin, director of the Independent Food Aid Network, said: “There’s a fine line between soliciting donations with a positive spin and normalising a charitable response to poverty.

As we say, charity’s a bad thing to some people.

“The Princess of Wales’s heart is undoubtedly in the right place but we can’t afford to see royal patronage through rose-tinted glasses. We need to be collectively shouting from the rooftops that baby banks, like warm banks, fuel banks and food banks, shouldn’t be needed.

“If we are to put the baby bank genie back in its bottle, combining calls for systemic change with much needed efforts to fill the gap is critical.”

Graham Whitham, chief executive of Greater Manchester Poverty Action, agreed, saying “it is vital we don’t further normalise charitable responses to poverty”.

We’d just like to point out that the major cause of visits to food banks - as an example - seems to be the inability of the State to hand out free money on time to the right people. Therefore an insistence that the State must be exclusively responsible for what it is patently incapable of does seem to us to be a very strange insistence.

As we’ve also pointed out more than once we are insistent that food banks - to use the same example again - have not expanded because the need is greater than it was 30 and 50 years ago. Rather, because around the turn of the millennium this country imported that American technology of alleviating poverty through food banks. The expansion is not an expansion of need, it’s an expansion of efficient supply.

Charity makes the world a better place. As we’re in favour of better place we’re in favour of charity.

We’d also mutter along the lines of how Soviet this demand of systemic solution is. Sure, Comrade, you’re hungry, cold, dwelling in a shack. But rather than allowing any alleviation of that, first we build socialism, Da?