An Unholy Mess

Too Big to Fail

Oxfam, which depends upon UK Government largesse, regularly hectors and lectures the world (especially the West) on its moral obligations to humanity.  It regularly takes up Left-wing causes into its megaphone and trumpets them forth, doing its best to make other human beings feel guilty (and so give Oxfam more money).  

Now it appears the organization is an unholy mess.  This, from the Daily Telegraph:

Oxfam refused to ban staff from using prostitutes saying it would "infringe their civil liberties", a training manual has revealed.   The guidance, still available on the charity's website, says that they "strongly discourage" their workers from paying for sex but a total ban would be "impractical".

The same manual reveals that Oxfam has "dismissed staff for exploiting or abusing beneficiaries or members of the local community in virtually every recent humanitarian response".

The document has emerged as the charity faces a growing scandal over its handling of use of prostitutes by its staff in Haiti, where sex work is illegal and some of whom were alleged to be underage.  The charity has since faced revelations of sex for aid and abuse of teenagers in British charity shops. 

Oxfam receives 32 million pounds of taxpayers' money annually.
  Surely the Government might be expected to audit such organizations with thorough rigour.  Apparently not.  We expect that the "old boy network" would have been in force, quashing any nasty stories.  It turns out that there had been whistleblowers within the organization, but their concerns were ignored or quashed, not just by Oxfam itself, but also by the so-called regulatory authorities.

The sexual misconduct scandal at Oxfam deepened on Monday night as the charity's former head of safeguarding revealed teenage volunteers at UK shops had been abused and overseas staff had traded aid for sex.  In some of the most explosive allegations yet against the charity, Helen Evans accused her bosses of ignoring her evidence and her pleas for more resources, forcing her to quit in despair.  Ms Evans said that staff had been accused of rape and that sexual abuse by shop managers in UK stores against young volunteers was covered up. . . .

Any suggestion that the furore was subsiding was quashed by Ms Evans' new revelations which included that volunteers in Britain were not subjected to criminal checks and that her complaints were dismissed by senior Oxfam managers, the Charity Commission and the Home Office.  [Emphasis, ours]

 We fear that because of its ties and tentacles into the State, Oxfam is now too big to fail.  It carries within it too many secrets which would embarrass the Government.  We will see.

One of the more obvious signs that a genuine campaign of house cleaning was underway in UK government circles would be a huge reduction in the country's Foreign Aid Budget, which runs at 13.3bn pounds per annum--despite stringent austerity cuts at home.