Taxpayer 'Bonus'. £520,000 we don't need to find.

chewmylegoff

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I don't think memorial is the right word.

However, there must surely be loads of projects that require money, and loads that require this sort of amount.

It would just be nice to think that the government could do something a little more with such a donation to provide something that's required for the community she lived in. I'm not sure the lady in question would have assumed at the time nothing at all would have been done with it. Seems like a total waste of her kindness to her fellow taxpayers.

Whether they have to or not is neither here nor there. It would just be nice to think that for once, they showed some humility and did something that took a little more effort when getting gifts such as this.

Be a sad old world if we only ever did what was "required". If someone goes out of teir way to do me a favour I'll always turn up at their door with a bottle of wine or whatever I think they would like. I'm not required to, it's just nice, IMO, to show appreciation. In this case, it would have been nice to think the government could have done the same with such an amount of money. I'm sure most voters would prefer to see something made of this money.

Given that she went to the trouble of leaving a will and specificlly asked for it to be given to the government to be used as they see fit, I cannot agree. If she wanted the money to be put to use in her local community then she would have said as much. It can't have escaped her notice that there is a rather large deficit therefore if she had a genuine wish to see the money put to some use then she would have changed her will (assuming she still had her wits about her of course).

Government already does too much interfering without trying to second guess the intentions of individual citizens.

grizzly1911

Didn't own her own property either, rented according to radio commentary.

N1AK

BobQ wrote:

This seems very clear to me: it was intended for the Government not the Party that happens to form the Government.

No responsible Government should have agreed to the money being given to political parties based on those words.

Good for you. Not knowing either of you, I'm inclined to trust the intelligence of the solicitor who wrote the will thus having met the woman over your own opinion of clarity.

So the government and every political party needs to hire lawyers to read the will of anyone wishing to donate to them to ensure that the executor is doing their job right?

The wording of the will isn't clear to me (but I'm not experienced in drafting wills). I don't know why she would want to give the money to the political parties in power as she apparently told her solicitor she did; but that's none of my business. It is possible that she was senile, or didn't understand what she agreed to.

All that said. She expressed, admittedly via notes, what she wanted done with the money. We have now ignored her stated wishes. Why? Because we don't think she meant what she said? We're judging a dead old woman to have been too doddery or confused to deserve her wishes to be respected.

The argument that the will is unclear is not overly persuasive. It is the same solicitor who drafted it who also wrote the notes. It's not like the lady wrote down clear (or any at all in fact) instructions that contradict what the solicitor has written on her behalf.

Generali

grizzly1911 wrote: »

Didn't own her own property either, rented according to radio commentary.

Apparently the bequest was for £1,500,000 but she put the lot into silver in the late 70s

N1AK

Graham_Devon wrote: »

It would just be nice to think that the government could do something a little more with such a donation to provide something that's required for the community she lived in. I'm not sure the lady in question would have assumed at the time nothing at all would have been done with it. Seems like a total waste of her kindness to her fellow taxpayers.

The government has to manage billions of pounds of expenditure I don't want it wasting time deciding what to do with £0.0005 billion. It would however have been nice if the two parties had decided to direct the money to a local hospital, university or some such to buy something tangible or start a bursary.

That said, it isn't like she couldn't have done that herself. We have a huge national debt, frankly if the government got handed £1 or £10,000,000,000 the best thing to do with it at the moment probably isn't just ramp up spending.

wotsthat

I wish she'd not bothered - it's now probably cost more than that in meetings and focus groups.

If she wanted a memorial or had a particular good deed in mind then she could have arranged that quite easily. Maybe she knew what would happen when politicians thought they'd won the lottery and this was her bit of mischief from beyond the grave.

I wonder if she enjoyed a practical joke in life as well as death.

Graham_Devon

chewmylegoff wrote: »

Given that she went to the trouble of leaving a will and specificlly asked for it to be given to the government to be used as they see fit, I cannot agree. If she wanted the money to be put to use in her local community then she would have said as much. It can't have escaped her notice that there is a rather large deficit therefore if she had a genuine wish to see the money put to some use then she would have changed her will (assuming she still had her wits about her of course).

Government already does too much interfering without trying to second guess the intentions of individual citizens.

Alright, just stating I thought it would be a nice thing to do.

What they "have to do" because of the instruction isn't the point. She said as they see fit. That leaves the doors open to doing anything with it, including nothing and forgetting about it.

I don't think she ever imagined her money just being sidelined into a black hole for which nothing will ever come from it. I would imagine, when she said "see fit" she meant to do something useful with it at the very least.

quantic

If the Telegraph/Wikipedia is to believed, that will cover 1/6th of the cost to deport Abu Qatada.

Generali

quantic wrote: »

If the Telegraph/Wikipedia is to believed, that will cover 1/6th of the cost to deport Abu Qatada.

Money well spent in that case.

System

It was a silly, ill-advised and ambiguous will, and shows she must have been half-batty.
What on earth does "government of the day" mean? The "government" doesn't have any money to spend and no powers to spend it. As the word suggests, they "govern", on behalf of parliament and the monarch.

But the executors or solicitors were almost criminally at fault too, by thinking it could possibly be lawfully diverted to political parties.