Oxfam must prove it deserves our money

AT the end of a watershed week for overseas aid charities, in which donors’ trust has been shaken to the foundations, Oxfam boss Mark Goldring remains in shameless, blinkered denial.

Preposterously, he suggests that attacks on his charity are driven by those who hate the aid industry. ‘The scale and the intensity of the attacks feels out of proportion to the level of culpability,’ he tells The Guardian. ‘I struggle to understand it.’

Is it really so hard to grasp? Until this week, the public had implicit faith in charities such as his, believing donations would be spent by true humanitarians on relieving suffering among the poorest.

That was before reports emerged of Oxfam executives’ squalid exploitation of women and girls for orgies in Haiti, the jailing of an ex-Unicef consultant for raping a 12-year-old boy and hundreds of claims of child abuse against charities such as Save the Children, most of them covered up.

Yes, this paper acknowledges that countless dedicated field-workers are driven only by compassion. But it is increasingly apparent that parts of the sector have become magnets for sexual predators and paedophiles. Worse, those in charge have turned a blind eye to abuse.

And how telling that Oxfam, in its training manual, refused to ban staff from exploiting prostitutes in disaster areas, suggesting this would infringe workers’ civil liberties!

And still Mr Goldring ‘ struggles to understand’ the public anger?

Isn’t a huge part of the problem that charities draw their directors from a gilded elite of Left-leaning quangocrats – such as former BBC and NHS executives – who flit from one highly paid, publicly subsidised job to the next?

These are people with an overwhelming sense of entitlement, who often seem more concerned with imposing their political agendas than ensuring donors’ money is properly spent.

Meanwhile, ministers have shovelled public cash into the charities’ coffers, asking no questions in their desperation to meet the legal target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on foreign aid.

As the Mail has long argued, the Coalition’s law is a recipe for waste and corruption.

If the charities are to regain public trust, they must prove they deserve our money. An Oxfam boss who struggles to understand the outcry is clearly not the man to do it.