Easy money and lax controls made Oxfam a disaster waiting to happen

The charity, poisoned by self-righteousness and virtue signalling, should now be broken up

For years now, I’ve engaged in a one-man boycott of Oxfam. Britain is blessed with thousands of wonderful charities, some large, some tiny, catering for every possible good cause. There were always plenty of more deserving homes for my old clothes or furniture than Oxfam, an organisation that had come to epitomise all that was wrong with the charitable-industrial complex. I was repelled by its corporate arrogance, the snouts-in-trough attitude of its management and ever more shameless politicisation, and felt that it was making a mockery of its army of grassroots supporters.

It now turns out that Oxfam was far more malign an organisation than I could possibly have imagined. The sexual misconduct allegations against the charity are explosive: orgies in developing countries, aid traded for sex, teenage volunteers in British shops abused by predators and a cover-up culture that saw senior management turn a blind eye to abuse. It amounts to a horrendous, disgusting catalogue of failure and one that would be terminal in any ordinary, private-sector organisation. The entire board should have resigned by now.

Compared to such obscene failings, my own differences with Oxfam now seem almost trivial. But my uneasiness stemmed from the fact that I felt that it had ceased to be a real charity, in an emotional if not legal sense, having mutated instead into a quasigovernmental lobbying organisation. It is now clear that this development slowly poisoned its corporate culture.

A large proportion of Oxfam’s revenues are no longer raised in shops or from voluntary philanthropy but from government and bodies such as the European Commission. Oxfam has thus become a sub-contractor to officialdom and this has turned out to be a disastrous shift. Its “liberation” from genuine donors has made it ever more insular, especially since the cash started to pour in from Britain’s absurd 0.7 per cent of GDP aid target. It has adopted the public sector’s bureaucratic nature while maintaining the weak governance and limited scrutiny that is endemic in the charitable sector. Easy money, a growing sense of entitlement and lax controls: it was a recipe for disaster.

Charities are at their best when they set out to solve problems through direct, detailed action with their own money and through their own efforts. They do things, rather than lobby others. They build bridges, look after orphans, or provide scholarships for the poor. They attract social entrepreneurs, not social engineers. The best staff and volunteers want to do good, but aren’t do-gooders. They are humble, working in the shadows, in some cases entirely for free.

My sister, for example, runs a tiny outfit called Rescue Animals of North Africa in her spare time and has rehoused hundreds of dogs. Or take Jon Ashworth, a former colleague of mine: he moved to Sri Lanka to launch Yala Fund, which organises gifts for poor children and helps to repair schools, with virtually zero operating costs. Ashworth drives an old motorbike, not an SUV, unlike executives from giant charities on foreign aid junkets.

That is real charitable work, and of course Oxfam still does lots of that. But its senior management’s real mission now appears to be to ferment radical political change and, as a result, Oxfam employs far too many virtue-signallers. Such folk, in head office or in the field, care primarily about what others think: their career choice is all about cultural positioning in the era of Twitter. They are insufferably self-righteous. They want to bask in the moral glory of working for a Left-wing NGO that rails against capitalism, and that matters far more to them than actually making the world a better place.

Thomas Sowell, the great US economist, predicted this phenomenon. In The Vision of the Anointed, he decried “selfcongratulation as a basis for policy”, and this applies equally to the antics of the foreign aid industry. In extreme cases, otherwise intelligent and honest people can be afflicted by a kind of psychological disorder that sees them turning a blind eye to sexual abuse, as “it’s all for the greater good”.

Such behaviour is hardly unique to charities: we’ve seen it in banks and tech firms, where people who hold themselves in high regard convince themselves that the end justifies the means. A similar perverse logic has infected the Labour Party, where sexism and anti-semitism are glossedover out of fear that they could jeopardise the ultimate, supposedly self-evidently desirable goal of political victory. A cover-up is the only way to preserve what must, by definition, be a morally just enterprise.

Oxfam’s pet hates seem to be billionaires, free markets, globalisation and inequality, and its statistics are regularly debunked by economists. Shockingly, the top item on the Resources for Teachers section of its website yesterday was a “game” for 7-14 year-old school children. Entitled “A Fair share”, it is billed as a “simulation game exploring tax”. It is blatant Leftwing propaganda that implies that a high-tax society must be morally superior to a low-tax one. The purpose is to teach “our shared responsibility for public services”, whether “we all pay our fair share”, and “to reflect on how things might be made fairer”. For some reason, my own take on “fairness” – a flat tax with no loopholes – doesn’t qualify.

Then there is another “game”, this time entitled the “inequality quiz”, which “encourages learners to consider potential solutions to the global inequality crisis”. The only possible justification for any school to use this would be as an illustration of Left-wing thinking, balanced out by the other perspective, which is that what really matters is poverty, not inequality, and that competitive capitalism has shown itself to be the best solution.

So what now? This harassment scandal is so vast, so pervasive that it deserves the ultimate punishment. The Government should pull its funding from Oxfam and commission an independent inquiry into the entire aid sector to root out any other cases of abuse. Oxfam itself should be broken up, its network taken over by other, more deserving charities. As to the future, we must hope that a new generation of purer, simpler and more genuine charities will emerge from the ashes of this terrible tragedy. The victims of the Oxfam sexual abuse scandal certainly deserve no less.