The row about the allocation of lottery money is - like the one about the rights and wrongs of Goldie Hawn's botox injections - one that started in the Daily Mail and should have ended there. It all began with the 340,000 grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. The objection to this was kept fairly oblique, but the bare bones of it seemed to be that while the recipients were plenty poor enough for a grant, they were insufficiently white.  To this injury to right-thinking citizens has been added a further 145,000, the insult here being that the recipient group is "linked" to one Gerry German. His offence? No, it isn't his name (you can't blame a man for his name - though if he were called Harry Hun, maybe we could put that to a vote). It's   apparently his history as a "race zealot", evinced by the fact that he was part of the Commission for Racial Equality during the 1980s, when it banned the Robertson golliwog for being an offensive racial caricature (when truthfully, it was ... what? A charming and side-splitting toy, of course).   Now, the organisation in line for the cash is the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, whose stated aims are pretty difficult to object to, put like that. The objection is that German the firebrand is its co-founder, and that seems enough to demonstrate, once more, that this money is being spent on causes with an overt dubious political agenda.   The mooted solution is to give buyers the chance to state their preferred charity on the ticket itself. My gut   reaction is that this can't possibly work.   First, of the 28p from every Lotto pound that goes to charity, only 9p is available to the government for redistribution (the rest goes to other bodies, including the Arts Council and the Sports Council). Of that, only a minuscule proportion, 2% tops, is spent on anything even approaching controversy. Even in the crazy mean-mindedness of the Mail's worldview, they can't seriously believe that people resent making the odd contribution of 0.18 pence to anti-racist organisations.   Second, if you're going to be picky about what lottery-ticket buyers want their money spent on, then it might be worth polling them about how much they would choose to spend on high art (the Arts Council - which doesn't extend to museums and galleries, those are covered by the Heritage fund - gets 4.7p per pound. That's a hell of a lot, given that its areas of concentration - opera, poetry, theatre - are such special interest pursuits).   Third, the charities that would get the money if ticket-holders were consulted would inevitably be the same ones that have least problem raising money in the first place.   The only charities in this country that can drum up money really easily are those supporting cancer research, children and dogs (I guess the Daily Mail might want to be able to specify the colour of the children, though I'm not sure how you'd phrase that; comically, the colour of the dogs would never be an issue).   Cancer is a wonderful disease because it doesn't   discriminate, which is why it's so easy to get celebrities involved with it. Children and dogs are cute. Most other things - from Christian Aid to Amnesty, World Wildlife to Wounded Warriors Welfare - make a statement about faith, politics or social priorities. These aren't statements that everyone necessarily wants to make, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be accommodated within a wider fund that a lot of people are happy to contribute to.   Unglamorous, minority-interest, perhaps ideologically complicated charities are exactly the ones that should benefit from the lottery since, let's face it, they're never going to get Geri Halliwell to launch them a phone-in.   And yet, at the core of the Mail's grimly bigoted objections, there is an unfortunate truth. If a substantial number of Lotto players disagree with where the money goes, yet have no means of influencing the spending, then this isn't a game, it's a tax. What else could you call a sum skimmed off a citizen's spending and redistributed by a government? A gift?   Once you've admitted that it's a tax, you have to clarify what it's a tax on - it's a tax on being poor. Sure, it might also snag some of the stupid rich (Hugh Grant was snapped buying a Lotto ticket only last week), but the real   devotees of the lottery are those to whom the fantasy of the win is attractive enough to off-set its laughable improbability - the more you need the money, the more likely you are to waste it. In other words, it's a total reversal of the principle of taxation, and that can't stand.   So, ticket-holders must be allowed to choose their charities, and if there's a huge cash injection into cancer research, nobody could call that a disaster. Perhaps the government could dip into proper tax to make up the shortfall for the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation groups. Or it could really branch out, and stop deporting people. It might be ethically wrong to ignore the wishes of the lottery punters, but there's no law against a centre-left government adopting a centre-left policy.