Letter From the UK (About Pseudo Charities)

Fake Tories Cheer on the Long March of the Left

By James Delingpole
The Telegraph
February 8, 2014 

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical". Thomas Jefferson, 1779.

One of the curses of modern life is the plethora of "charitable" lobbying groups demanding that the government take more regulatory action in areas where most of us believe the state has no business interfering.

Almost every day you read in the papers that some apparently grassroots movement, supposedly speaking for all of us, thinks more should be done to stop us drinking, smoking, eating sugar or salt, make us less sexist, force us to spend more on foreign aid or environmental issues. But if that wasn't annoying enough, here's the worst thing of all: we're paying for these unrepresentative, mostly left-leaning lobby groups with our taxes.  [NZ also is awash with the same egregious travesty, Ed.]



This is the message of Chris Snowdon's report for the Institute of Economic Affairs, The Sock Doctrine – the third in his trilogy of broadsides against the lavishly state-funded "fake charities" industry. By 2007, he noted, a quarter of the UK's 170,000 charities were receiving money from the state and approximately 27,000 received at least 75 per cent of their income from the state. If you share these charities' predominantly liberal-Left-leaning aims you probably won't mind so much. But if you don't, you might be inclined to believe, as Fraser Nelson argued in these pages last year, that "Britain's charities are nurturing a colourful, talented and efficient anti-Tory alliance."

The only part of that sentence I'd dispute is "anti-Tory". A better phrase might have been "anti-Right" or "anti-small-government" for the evidence suggest that the current bunch of Tories are playing the fake-charities game as assiduously as any Labour administration in order to advance their Big Government agenda.

Who, for example, is funding the lobbying for the government's HS2 white elephant? Why, the Department for Transport and the publicly owned HS2 Ltd, of course! In other words, you.

And what about the IF Campaign of 2012 which lobbied for the continuation of Cameron's massively unpopular, ring-fenced 0.7 per cent of GDP spending on foreign aid? This was mounted by charities – Oxfam, Save The Children, ActionAid, Cafod and Christian Aid – which receive millions of pounds from the Department for International Development. Again, in other words, here is an egregious case of the Government using your money to pay outside groups to give the illusion of widespread public support for its own agenda.

Ah, but what about all those Right-wing charities which benefit equally from taxpayer largesse? Well the problem is that they're almost non-existent. The reason for this was identified in 1985 by US researchers James T Bennett and Thomas J DiLorenzo:  "Virtually without exception, the recipients of government grants and contracts advocate greater governmental control over and intervention in the private sector, greater limitations on rights of private property, more planning by government, income redistribution, and political rather than private decision making. Most of the tax dollars used for political advocacy are obtained by groups that are on the left of the political spectrum."

Snowdon's report is very timely, coming as it does on the day that the Commons public accounts committee criticised the Charities Commission for being insufficiently "radical" in policing the excesses of the charities sector.

It also puts into perspective the confected Leftist outrage – whipped up, of course, by the usual suspects at the BBC and the Guardian – regarding Education Secretary Michael Gove and his unexceptionable decision not to renew Baroness Morgan's contract as chairwoman of Ofsted.

Yes, something badly needs to be done to remove political bias in the so-called Third Sector. But that bias swings one way only.