That’s not very charitable, Mr Lammy

He MAY have made a fair point about white celebrities such as Stacey Dooley posing with what David Lammy calls ‘victim’ black babies. Yet when it comes to the wider implications of charitable donations from this country to Africa, he is way off beam.

Being charitable to those who are less well off than we are is something inculcated in British schoolchildren from an early age.

From infant school onwards, we collected milk bottle tops and did good deeds for the starving children in African countries where famine, poverty and lack of medical resources were endemic. We were taught that we were the lucky ones — and we were.

Then we grew up and saw terrible films and images of even more starving babies in Africa and once more we gave generously. Over and over again.

Comic Relief has its faults, but it has raised more than a billion pounds, most of it donated by ordinary British people of every colour, people with only goodness in their hearts. Where the excitable member for Tottenham sees white privilege in any of this is hard to fathom. The biggest problem is not our unstinting generosity, but the widespread corruption and lack of will by some African governments to improve the lot of their citizens.

We all know that millions of pounds ends up in the wrong places. If Mr Lammy would care to address that issue, instead of admonishing those who are only trying to help, we might have a little more respect for him.