Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well in the City of London, according to a report from a British centre-right think-tank, Policy Exchange. That view is not wholly wrong. A glance across the Atlantic gives a sense of what a true culture of philanthropy can produce: American levels of charitable giving are more than twice as high as those in the UK, relative to gross domestic product. And the celebrated British philanthropists are not modern figures such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, but Victorian relics.

In other ways, the comparison with the US is unfair. The US level of giving - put at 1.85 per cent of GDP by a research group at Johns Hopkins University, and at 1.67 per cent of GDP by the Charities Aid Foundation - is truly exceptional. The British are among the best of the rest, on a par with the Canadians and the Irish and, according to the CAF, five times more generous than the French. Dickens should have set A Christmas Carol in Paris.