Why charity chiefs are no better than the bankers
I VERY much welcome Sir Stuart Etherington’s report on charity fundraising (Mail), but the scandal it addresses is a symptom of a wider malaise.
Increasingly, national charity leaders are career administrators who happen t o wash up in prestigious charity jobs. He or she might have no relevant qualification and might l ack experience of working in children’s services.
But the public expects someone heading a big children’s charity to be a national expert, able to speak with authority on children’s health, care or education.
It seems most excesses are in large, national organisations with government f unding. These charities i ncreasingly appoint Whitehall insiders to chief executive positions — but the truth is that there is no better way to start a career in charity than by humbly washing the feet of the poor.
As trustees search f or chief executives with experience of working with national politicians, the pool of acceptable candidates narrows, salaries rocket and public criticism grows.
Too much talent is excluded when ministers, senior civil servants and charity leaders all come from the same social, educational and employment silo.
With no clear values to guide them, like bankers when one top executive exploits a loophole, others follow for fear of being left behind. As a result, the Fundraising Standards Board reports 1,000 complaints a week.
As a former chief executive at Help The Aged, I lament how the word charity is daily being besmirched.
WALLY HARBERT, Frome, Somerset. Spare a thought for the lesser victims of the rise of Britain’s charity culture, those who used to buy and sell second-hand records, books or electrical goods and others who did small repairs but who have now lost their livelihood.
I know of a furniture shop that survived two world wars and umpteen recessions that went out of business when a charity shop opened next door. These people paid rent and rates, VAT and Paye. What has replaced them?
I have no objection to what I call the ‘dead donkey’ charity shop, run by dedicated people who raise money for good causes.
The problem i s the national organisations who have sniffed out a ‘nice little earner’ as Arthur Daley would say, and take advantage of British people’s charitable nature. They get hold of a cheap, often rent- free, shop belonging to a council or a landlord who can avoid the empty property business rate. They get up to 90 per cent rate relief, pay no VAT and two-thirds of the staff are on benefits.
They can claim tax relief on donated goods: all in all, these shops are heavily subsidised. And who benefits? The bi ggest beneficiary is the chief executive, who receives an eye-watering sum of money. Government and people alike pay a heavy price for our charity myth.
G. HOLWILL, Exeter, Devon
Reichs and wrongs
When people are afraid of Germany’s potential power, they call it the rise of a ‘Fourth Reich’, and that’s scary and ridiculous.
It’s scary because it reminds us of Hitler’s awful nazi regime, but thoroughly ridiculous because no one seriously believes Germany will generate something like that again.
Talk of a Fourth Reich is less absurd when we look at those that went before it. The Second Reich was the Empire of Bismarck. The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, an entity with many fairly sovereign states held together by a feudal system with an Emperor at the top. It wasn’t a purely German thing, though Germans were dominant in it.
It i ncluded parts of modern France, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the netherlands, Swit- zerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia.
In the largest war in which it was involved, the Thirty Years’ War, the Holy Roman Empire was more of a vi ctim t han a t hreat to its neighbours: its multi-state nature together with religious conflicts compromised its unity.
If Britain leaves the EU, the rest of it will be a continental European multi- state and multi- national entity, larger than the Holy Roman Empire, but with Germany, its largest member, at its centre.
Germany is smaller than the other EU members taken together but has just succeeded in causing external migration flows into several EU countries against their will.
If Britain leaves the EU, France continues to be uninterested in Central Europe and Germany starts to take military leadership in any f uture Eastern European crises, the EU still won’t be called a Fourth Reich, but it will be something like a modern version of the Holy Roman Empire.
Engagement by Britain and France in Central and Eastern Europe is crucial for how Europe will be governed in the future. Dr PATRICK A. PUHANI, Professor of
Economics, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany; Foundation scholar, Queens’ College, Cambridge.
Human suffering
ALL the goodwill in the world will not solve the EU refugee crisis.
politicians and do- gooders alike seem to miss the point. Take, f or example, the 800,000 who will stay in Germany. In the old days at Hampden park that would have been a full house, multiplied eight times.
With i ts open borders, the European Community must have had an inkling that the constant trickle of refugees over t he years would turn into a flow of human suffering.
How great the Western dream and how sad that it may turn into a nightmare for many.
ARCHIE MACKINNON, Glasgow.
Call this progress?
So the Snp, which is so antiausterity and anti-Westminster elite, has Mps who are now immersed in t he t ax- f unded excesses which are available in the capital of the UK.
Is this what the Snp describes as progressive politics, or is it just another example of the hypocrisy and ‘do as I say, not do as I do’ mentality?
We see more and more examples of mismanagement, with the catalogue of police Scotland errors growing under the watch of Justice Secretary Michael Matheson, who so far does not appear any more capable than his predecessor, while the First Minister (and former Health Secretary) seems in denial over hospital bed-blocking. Is this the party that would competently govern an independent Scotland?
E. NICHOLLS, Dunfermline, Fife.
Search for fairness
Kezia Dugdale has been corralled into accepting pro-break-up-the-UK Labour supporters in her ranks. This gets to the nub of the Labour party’s recent problems in Scotland.
Going back to pre- devolution days, Labour in Scotland always had this tendency to try to be all things to all people.
Rather than take an unambiguous pro-UK stand it tried to have it both ways and it has paid a severe price.
Far better to let the pro-break-up elements go – they will always be there and there is no placating this mindset, as can be seen daily with the Snp.
Far better that those claiming they are seeking social justice and fairness seek it throughout the UK and care as much as about humanity and the poor and needy in London and newcastle as they do about those i n Edinburgh or Aberdeen.
History should have taught us that nationalism and socialism is a dangerous mix.
Alexander McKAY, Edinburgh.