The Charity Commission has completed its investigation into the Smith Institute, a registered charity and otherwise known as “the Sith” to followers of Guido Fawkes’ blog. The commission found that the Smith Institute had breached charity laws on political impartiality and ordered the institute to implement a governance review and report back in six months.

Guido, whose complaint to the Charity Commission led to the investigation, says he feels vindicated by its findings.

If you’re new to the subject, this 18 Doughty Street video, presented by Iain Dale, provides a useful introduction.

It is difficult to believe that this could be allowed to happen so soon after the 10p tax row, but the car-tax ‘cloud on the horizon’ is showing every sign of developing into something that will rival the 10p tax storm.

Here again is a policy that was bound to be unpopular and therefore certain to attract acres of space in the media and the blogosphere alike.

Such policies should be handled with care from the outset, and above all, with transparency. Trying to ‘fudge’ matters or spin the impact is folly.

According to Hansard, the Prime Minister said that the “majority of drivers will benefit from the new measures”. Figures released by the Treasury yesterday, however, confirm that this is actually not true. Today’s headlines shout that 9 million will be affected by the tax and only a third of drivers will actually benefit.

I spent some time this weekend going through the pile of mail that had accumulated during my holiday. It contained a couple of items that demonstrate, on a small scale, the extent of information gathered about us and the lack of care taken with it.

The first was a letter from the local council. Bristol City Council is considering setting up residents-only parking schemes across the city and is now looking for areas to take part in pilot schemes.

However, my views on residential parking schemes were not the only information the council was after. No, it also asked me such things as my gender, my ‘religion and belief‘ and my race, all in the name of Equalities Monitoring, whatever that might be and however it might affect a parking scheme!

Clearly, it doesn't affect a parking scheme where permits will be administered on the basis of one car per property.

According to the Council, however, it ‘needs’ to know more about who is living in my household … Rather, no opportunity to update their files is to be missed - there’s always the chance that some unthinking people will provide the information requested, despite its complete irrelevance to the matter at hand.

The second (unrelated) item was a letter apologising for sending previous correspondence to me in an envelope printed not only with my name and address, but also with my national insurance number …
Too much information; held by too many careless people.