CHARITY CABAL WHICH GETS RICH AT OUR EXPENSE

GIVING to others is a wonderful thing; for one person to offer help to those in need is an act of love and decency. But there is a problem with organisational charity: when it changes from a kindly act of giving from one individual to another to a far more methodical process.

‘Chugging’ – signing up people for payment plans in the street, or apparently unstoppable fund-raising mailings – creates offence and stress.

More recently, there have been serious doubts about how charities operate through their links with government.

The state takes a small proportion of the taxes imposed on a very large number of people and they rarely grumble.

But then you spend a large sum of money on a few people, and they are very grateful – and vote for you. Such is the politics of the spending state – and the source of deficits and debt.

Some Scottish charities linked to the state have climbed onto this gravy train.

They have become supplicants of the public purse, seeking to spend our money on what they consider to be good causes. Unfortunately, in the process they have changed.

Organisations such as Oxfam and WWF were set up to save starving millions in Africa and conserve wildlife.

Today, Oxfam campaigns to end poverty and WWF engages in how human activities affect the environment.

There would be nothing wrong with this if this change of tack was funded entirely by private donation, but it isn’t.

There are around 27,000 charities who are now dependant on the state for more than 75 per cent of their income.

A large number of them are engaged in support activities for those with welfare needs; the vulnerable, the disabled, the very young and the very old.

Again, unfortunately, many charities have succumbed to the pleasure of being favoured with taxpayer funds.

Imagine you are the fundraiser for a charity; is your focus going to be on the hugely hard task of finding, contacting and persuading thousands of small compassionate donors to part with their hard-earned cash?

Or is it not much easier to turn up, suited and booted, at a nice government office and have a one-to-one chat with a civil servant or politician eager to justify their existence by signing a cheque for your promise to work very hard at achieving their policy goals?

The corrosion of personal moral compassion through state largesse is perhaps not conscious but it does happen.

What has been documented is that charities self-select staff with opinions aligned to the spending consensus.

This is where the real rot begins. Where a charity has objectives aligned with the policy ideas of the government of the day, it often begins to lobby for those ideas to support its own bank balance.

ADUAL self-justifying cabal of a tax-collecting government and publicly funded charities emerges, reinforcing each other’s political opinions. The term ‘sock puppet’ has been coined to describe charities engaged in this mutually admiring policy-reinforcing cabal.

Publicly, we see the charity, but inside it is the state providing the wherewithal for the propaganda offered.

Is this wrong? Well, the moral authority of charities is weakened; they are not inclined to criticise government policy.

They provide what has been described as an illusion of public support for new invasive legislation, costly to taxpayers and in reality not having the support of the public.

Some of us believe today’s system of large tax collections followed by large tax-funded support through the agency of the state, which takes a large commission in the process, is wasteful and leads to the unnecessary expansion of dependency, while destroying jobs and growth.

Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Neil, former social justice secretary, have described a proposed rule curbing spending of taxpayers’ money by charities on lobbying activity south of the Border as a ‘gagging clause’.

They say third sector bodies play an important role in providing a voice on public policy.

They surely do, but not when they are being paid from the public purse and have an incentive always to ask for more of our tax money to do more of what their mutual cabal has decided is worthwhile – even if it is misguided. That’s propaganda, not policy-making.