Charities are swapping altruism for activism

Guy Dampier I 25 January 2025 I Morning Double Shot I Spectator Australia

Charity no longer begins at home. It starts with a thunderous denunciation of western sins, promotes an excoriation of this country’s past and then advocates the dismantling of white privilege – all paid for by you. Welcome to the charity industrial complex, the money-guzzling, taxpayer-subsidised assault on common sense that has turned the impulse to generous altruism into a licence for radical activism.

Just this week, Oxfam released a report damning poor governance in India. The guilty parties are not those in power today, but our imperial forebears: the report claims the British empire drained $64.82?trillion from India. Never mind that this figure is based on long-standing dubious statistics which have been debunked by historians such as Tirthankar Roy and the late Zareer Masani – Oxfam says it’s time for ‘urgent action’.

Although many charities do good work, others are more interested in pushing left-wing ideas

The solution, naturally, is reparations from western nations. The report proposes starting with a commitment to an annual $5?trillion payment (which also covers ‘climate debt’). But the report doubts that any figure can ever be enough: ‘There are questions about whether true reparations can be delivered in a system based on white supremacy.’ So it helpfully suggests nothing less than a full commitment from the ‘Global North’ to dismantle its ‘dominance of the global economy in all forms’. Exactly how these countries are meant to stump up the annual fee if they’ve also pledged themselves to penury doesn’t appear to have crossed the mind of the authors.

As absurd as is it, this type of political activism masquerading as charity has sadly become typical of Oxfam. Its CEO is Halima Begum, who sought to become a Labour parliamentary candidate under Jeremy Corbyn and told the Guardian this month that she sees her mission as one of ‘solidarity, not charity’. Begum was part of the Charity Reform Group, which in 2023 called on charities to ‘speak into the agenda of its day’ and not just their ‘core issue’. To be political campaigning organisations, in other words.

Oxfam is by no means the only charity following an activist model. There are more than 170,000 charities in Britain, with a combined income of ￡96 billion. Last year it spent ￡94 billion. (The Ministry of Defence cost ￡53.9?billion in the same period, by contrast.) Many of these charities are small – around two thirds have an income of ￡100,000 or less – but about 9,000 have an income of more than ￡1?million. Although many of them do good work, others are more interested in using the moral authority of charity to push left-wing ideas.

Sometimes the government even helps them. The group Conservative Way Forward looked at the charities opposing the previous Conservative government’s efforts to stop the illegal small boat crossings, and found that between 2017 and 2021 they’d received ￡203?million in taxpayer funding. Take Asylum Aid, which in its annual report is very proud of its role in blocking the plan to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda.

In that same annual report, it reveals that, of its ￡1.7?million income in the last year, only ￡100,547 came from individual donations. The rest was sourced from either the taxpayer or grants by large donors such as the National Lottery Community Fund, the Open Society Foundation, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. In other words, if Asylum Aid had to rely on donations by the public, this charity would barely exist.

If you spend time on the Charity Commission’s helpful website, you’ll quickly spot the same names popping up when it comes to funding these activist charities. Prominent among them are foundations established by well-known Quaker philanthropists, such as Joseph Rowntree and Barrow Cadbury. Many of the grant-givers can also be found on 360 Giving’s GrantNav tool, which lets you search through the grants made by 315 major funders.

Rowntree was the pioneer of using charity for political means. In his 1904 Founder’s Memorandum he pointed out that while there were plenty of charities that responded to social ills, few were trying to find ways to end them. He didn’t just want his money to be spent on almshouses or hospitals, but on?influencing public opinion too. Of the three trusts he founded, one provided housing for the poor, to continue in perpetuity, and the other two were planned to close after 35 years. Yet they are still around to this day, with a near-permanent source of income in the endowments he made for them.

In the 1960s, as the left changed, so too did the trusts. Pratap Chitnis, a prominent organiser in the Liberal party, became secretary and then chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust. Between 1969 and 1988, he brought about a revolution in the way it worked. It set up an office at 9 Poland Street hosting a ‘counter-civil service’ for pressure groups, among them Friends of the Earth and the Tory Reform Group. One of the more radical moves was funding ‘liberation movements in Africa’, a euphemistic way of describing groups such as Frelimo, Marxist-Leninist guerillas who took over Mozambique and ran it into the ground. The Tory party’s response was to boycott Rowntree’s After Eight mints.

Although the charity industrial complex was originally associated with the Liberals, it is now linked more closely with Labour. In 1997 the Runnymede Trust got Jack Straw, then home secretary, to launch its report on Islamophobia, popularising the term. Its 2000 report on Britain becoming a multi-ethnic nation led to the creation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Equality Act, the source of much modern–day ‘wokeness’ in Whitehall.

If charities openly behave like left-wing pressure groups, then they can’t be surprised if they attract a certain type of activist. This week a Save the Children employee called Yasmin Ghaffar uploaded a video to her TikTok before she went to New York, asking for recommendations on bagel shops that didn’t support ‘that hellhole place and Zionism’ because she didn’t want her money to go to ‘genocidal maniacs’.

A reform of charity laws is needed. Nobody wants to damage organisations that do real good, or prevent people from donating to causes they think worthy. A legal distinction should be drawn between those doing charitable works and those seeking to influence politics – and there should be no taxpayer funding for the latter. That could shift many charities back to a focus on helping others. And if charity workers still want to change government policy, then they can join a political party.

Author: Guy Dampier