Owing to circumstances I shall be unable to post for a day or two. Normal service will be resumed, etc.
I note that the first bleatings about how ‘the charity sector as a whole should be able to access public funds’ has been received at fakecharities.org. Mark weapon effects…
The charity sector should never, ever be offered (or accept) public funds, because it is not charity unless it is freely given. End of file. Of course Mr. Hetherington from the Woodland Trust differs from this view. He is being paid to do so. Poor old Kropotkin must be doing about 78rpm by now.
I’m afraid I disagree with you, slightly (at least as this isn’t LabourList, my comment will appear.)
I would differentiate between charities that are doing something and charities that are lobbying (realising that most actually do both.) If the government decides that “something must be done”, we ought to consider how that can best be completed with value for money and without unnecessary infringement on people the “something” wasn’t deliberately designed to do. It doesn’t really matter what the “something” is – running the trolley shop in a hospital, building the third runway at Heathrow, re-establishing “native woodland”.
Who is more likely to do the something efficiently? The mass bloated bureaucracy of state, with its diversity officers, special political advisors and unfunded pensions? Or a charity? In which case, giving a lump of taxpayers’ cash to a charity to do something isn’t all bad. I give you the example of the much-lamented Assisted Places Scheme, which you can extend to the widely proposed School Vouchers schemes.
Of course, the basic complaint regarding charities that support a government position being given taxpayers’ money to lobby the government to pass oppressive laws regarding that position is well founded. We just need to differentiate between the two. And, I suspect, set up a %age limit on direct gross government funding to retain charitable status.
“Who is more likely to do the something efficiently? The mass bloated bureaucracy of state, with its diversity officers, special political advisors and unfunded pensions? Or a charity?”
Why do you assume that the charity (if large enough) can’t be as bloated, inefficient and wasteful as the state?
And as for ‘diversity officers’, charities are bound by the same nonsense too. And then there’s ‘elf and safety as well….
Why do you assume that the charity (if large enough) can’t be as bloated, inefficient and wasteful as the state?
Anyone can be, the state merely is. Sort of analogous to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?
On balance I am with Mr Underclass on this. If the charity is mainly dependent on state contracts or state grants (whether national, local, Euro- , or from a state agency) then it is correctly part of the public sector.
The public sector is massively bloated and has to be put on a crash diet to save our economy (from collapse and national bankruptcy), our democracy (from permanent progressive government voted for by the payroll vote) and our very freedom.
I’ve posted another piece about this.