‘Ring-fencing’ charity guarantees bad behaviour
The problem with organisations like Oxfam can be expressed in one phrase – “ring-fenced”. The term is used to describe any area of government spending permanently exempted from cuts. As Prime Minister, David Cameron “ringfenced” overseas aid, thus increasing payments to Oxfam, among others.
If you offer any area of government such protection, you give it a moral status superior to the rest. This has a terrible effect on those thus protected. They feel virtuous. This weakens not only their cost control, but their self-criticism. They have in effect been told that they can do no wrong. Human nature being what it is, they therefore do more wrong than they otherwise would have done.
The case of Oxfam is a small version of that of the Catholic Church in Ireland after independence. The Church’s moral prestige won it special state privileges. These special privileges eventually led it its corruption. This corruption led to its downfall, mired in accusations about the physical and sexual abuse of children.
The argument about whether governmental overseas aid is a good thing is a complicated one. Aid’s perverse effects can be dreadful. On the other hand, we in the West have skills and resources which we should use to help the weak.
The question of “ring-fencing”, however, is much clearer. It is simply wrong, both practically and morally. It subsidises and guarantees bad behaviour. The new International Development Secretary, Penny Mordaunt, should insist that her department be subject to normal cross-government spending restrictions. If she refuses, the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, should demand that her department (DFID) be reincorporated in the Foreign Office where, many years ago, it started a more honest and modest life.
A friend relates a small example of how overseas aid can backfire, even when no sexual exploitation is involved. He sold a business which had on its staff an able IT expert from the Congo. The man asked my friend for help in returning there to start an IT company, training local businesses to use British-quality software. My friend paid for his return ticket so he could get there, get going and then come back and report.
After a couple of months, the man returned and said that his work in Kinshasa was impossible because the NGOS had occupied all the suitable offices, hired all the suitable staff and priced the locals out of commercial activity.
Today the able man from the Congo is running an IT business in Tottenham. I recently appeared on a BBC World television documentary called Elizabeth Our Queen. Last week, I received an email from an organisation called the Creative Diversity Network. It wants me to take part in its “Diamond” survey for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and others to answer what it calls the “vital” question: “Do the people who work on UK productions reflect the diversity of the UK?”
To answer this, the survey will send me a questionnaire. I know that “diversity” is a codeword for everyone who is not male, white and English, so I am horribly undiverse. My answers to the questionnaire will therefore make it less likely that anyone will pay me to go on television ever again. So I probably won’t fill it in. But I hope to be able to inform and entertain readers by telling them what the questions are.
A correspondence on the page above has resumed debate about whether people should dress formally for work. It is alleged that women are allowed to dress more casually than men and that this is hard on men.
Surely the opposite is the case. Having a greater choice about what you can wear at work can be quite a burden and expense.
Should you try to look attractive or inconspicuous, powerful or unthreatening? Hard to know. For many men, the uniform of a jacket and tie removes such tricky choices. Women cannot avoid them.
The desire for workplace freedom to wear what you like is based on a misunderstanding of what clothes are for. Beyond the basic need for function and warmth, they are for other people, not for the wearer. They indicate respect for others, decency, good order – or the reverse. For such reasons, it matters what people in public-facing jobs wear. For men, it doesn’t have to be a tie – and increasingly, it isn’t – but the virtue of jacket and tie is that it is a polite formula.
Years ago, I wanted Sir James Dyson to write a part-work for this newspaper on the history of inventions. I took him for lunch at the Savoy Grill which, in those days, insisted on ties. This turned out to be a bad mistake. When he arrived, he told me that he hated wearing ties. Clad in one provided for such emergencies by the Grill, he looked like a man about to be hanged. I was touched that, despite this ordeal, he agreed to write the series, which was brilliantly successful.
But the story does not undermine my point. Sir James is a man who triumphantly made his own way in the world, as great entrepreneurs do. Most of the rest of us need other people’s rules and expectations to give structure to our lives. Like Sir James, I dislike wearing ties, because they constrict the neck. Unlike him, I feel it is my place to do so.
READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion