I feel I am watching the world as it goes mad (FB 8th September 2015)

Scammers, con artists, rip-off merchants or whatever else you choose to call them are having a field day, fleecing shedloads of cash from compassionate folk via the internet.

Anyone can set up a donation page, post a picture they copied from a news site, write something to inspire guilt-driven giving based around others being less fortunate and then sit back and watch the pounds roll in. It's hardly genius.

If your particular cause isn't photogenic enough you can always pick a photograph of something that will tug at more heart strings and use that instead, use an award winning aerial shot of an overcrowded boat on the sun-drenched Mediterranean, for example, to raise money for some people camping in a field near Calais.

Even the best intentioned of these knee-jerk operations are amateur and downright wasteful of donations, seemingly more concerned to be seen to be making the effort to travel to France themselves than to be efficient with what they get and to feed in locally to the existing and well established supply chain.

Be very careful where you donate. Just because an individual, group or organisation is requesting donations and what they state they intend to do with them is a charitable act does not make them a charity. You could just be buying someone a booze cruise or subsidising their ego with the cash you electronically hand over.
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Until last week most people in the UK had been turning a blind eye to the plight of refugees from war-torn or otherwise less salubrious areas of the world wishing to settle in Europe.

No matter how many times they had heard or read reports of boatloads of migrants drowning or of people being found dead or dying in the backs of lorries they did nothing until they saw a photograph of a drowned child.

Suddenly there were public outpourings of anger, not at the traffickers who provided an unsuitable craft for the crossing or at the father who let his family board it but, quite bizarrely, at the governments of the land they were setting out to visit.
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It is more than fifteen-hundred miles from the Turkish coast where the boy drowned to the migrant camps near Calais in northern France. Fifteen-hundred miles is far enough to make them separate circumstances.
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Assuming one to be a genuine refugee, to achieve refugee status in Europe one has to reach Europe and apply for it. It might take a few weeks to come through but that's only because there's lots to check and every application deserves to be considered properly and individually. Oh, yes, and there's a bit of a rush on.

Alan, the boy whose photograph seems to have shaken people from their rose-tinted torpor, died at sea on his way to Europe. The inhabitants of the camps are already in Europe and have been for some long while. Sitting in a field they are not at risk of drowning. They are in no imminent danger except from themselves.
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Assuming one to be a genuine refugee, the quickest way to a decent life in the UK really is to apply for asylum as soon as entry is made to the EU. If someone failed to apply at the point of entry, their quickest way to a decent life in the UK is to apply right now, wherever in the EU they happen to be.

Had the people camped at Calais applied for asylum even when they arrived there some of them might by now have been in a position to cross the channel by conventional means instead of risking their lives jumping trucks.

Had they applied when they first entered the EU, wherever that was, their applications would have been in days or weeks earlier and the relevant decisions would be made that much sooner, too.

Is it not strange then that so many people choose to stay in a squalid camp with no end to their ordeal in sight rather than signing up for the first step towards what they all say they want, a decent life in the UK, for which they will need the appropriate paperwork?

I suspect their real motive for not signing in is that they know they do not qualify for asylum in the EU under the rules. So I have to ask, how humane are they themselves being by jumping trucks in the hope they can break the rules to enter the UK and to take a job on the sly that might otherwise have been offered to someone who genuinely was a refugee?

It really doesn't make sense on so many levels that so many people in the UK fail to see the difference between someone desperate to reach Europe to claim asylum and get on with their life as we live it here and someone who is happy to turn a piece of northern France into a replica of the slum they snuck thousands of miles to escape from.

If you want to send supplies to Nigerians, Eritreans or whomever living in shanty towns send them to the parts of Nigeria, Eritrea or wherever where shanty towns are as good as it gets. It is ridiculous to perpetuate the existence of a shanty town near Calais, especially one populated entirely by people who insist upon living other than in accordance with the laws, customs and accepted standards of those they purport to wish to assimilate with.

Just because someone used to live somewhere dangerous does not entitle them to ignore the laws of Europe, the very same laws we are expected to follow, and it certainly shouldn't entitle them to mollycoddling while they do.

If British idiots stopped making life unnaturally comfortable for people choosing to camp in a field in France the people in the field might just make an effort to accord with the rules, to play fair and to either sign in or fuck off. I thought we were supposed to stand-up for fairness here, not to support those who cheat.

If people in the camps in Calais don't qualify for asylum in Europe they should take the oft referred to "drive and determination" they displayed in coming thousands of miles to shit in a French field back to their own home countries and make life better for their families, friends and neighbours that way.
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There are hundreds of thousands of genuine refugees currently in or heading for Europe. It is a massive headache for everyone concerned, an unprecedented situation but, if you prioritise the saving of life, the most immediate need is to stop people putting themselves at risk.

The real urgency is stop people being overcrowded onto boats in Libya, Turkey and elsewhere and to stop people gathering near Calais in the hope they might jump a truck to England. Yes there will be queues building up while we work out how to deal with everyone but no one will be dying at sea, suffocating in or dangling off lorries.
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It is not compassion fatigue or an initial lack of it it is common sense. Anyone who calms down enough to look at things clearly will see that to perpetuate the camps as they are at Calais brings no solution any nearer. If you can't see why that is and you still want to perpetuate the camps at Calais you should do it in a cost effective fashion.

If you want to make a cash donation choose a proper charity that has some experience and expertise in the field. If you want to be a more direct part of helping you can always volunteer to assist with an established charity's work. They will know how best to deploy your skills or resources and will work with complementary charities in developing long term and sustainable support strategies.

Or, if you live in Brighton, you could wander outside and probably find someone homeless to help within minutes of your front door. You wouldn't need to waste money on a van or a ferry ticket or anything if you did that. You could be cash efficient and green, too.

Of course, if you were helping homeless people in Brighton you wouldn't be able to use an award winning picture of an overloaded boat on the Mediterranean to encourage donations to fund a weekend away like you can if you help homeless people in Calais.

Safe Giving - Avoid scams and other rip-offs carried out under the guise of a charitable cause.

If you give money directly to a registered charity they can claim back the tax you paid on the money when you earned it, increasing the value of your donation to their cause.

If you donate to any small charitable fund though a crowdfunding site a proportion of your outlay will be diverted from the cause to the operators of the site. It is unlikely this will be the most efficient method of funding disaster or crisis relief efforts where established charities are already operating with similar aims. Larger operations benefit from economies of scale, reducing costs and maximising the effectiveness of your cash support.
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The regulations being flouted by a surprising number of pop-up independent charitable fundraising campaigns currently surfing the wave of compassion triggered by the recent publication of a photograph are there to protect the donations made to the fund and to ensure they are used properly and only for the purpose for which they were made.

For small charitable public fundraising campaigns the requirements are far from onerous. For successful campaigns that raise in excess of £5000 a year there is a requirement to register as a charity, which is also not onerous and is quite reasonable an expectation to make of any group or individual entrusted with that amount.
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If it is not clear *before* you make your charitable donation exactly whom you are giving your money to, by which I mean such that you could easily identify and locate them if they were to misuse or lose it, consider why they would feel the need to keep this detail secret when the law requires transparency.

Also check it is clear *before* you make your charitable donation to a particular cause what will happen to unspent monies when a campaign is closed. Your money should not, for example, be at risk of loss in the event of the organiser losing interest in the cause or being incapacitated through illness or death and should not be spent on anything you would not wish to contribute to.
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The above advice applies to any charitable giving and is provided free of charge and for the benefit of all. Whether I personally support any cause or not is irrelevant as to whether I wish those who do support that cause to have confidence their cash donation to it is efficiently achieving what they intended it to.

This is about safe giving. It is not about politics.