David Davis, remarking on fake charities, mentions the definitely non-fake RNLI (of which I have the honour to be a Governor).
On the BBC’s ‘You and Yours’ programme immediately before the one o’clock news on Radio 4 I was disgusted to hear someone with a ludicrously overmodulated voice, more appropriate to childrens’ TV than any other genre, having a snide but carefully-cleared-by-our-lawyers go at an RNLI spokesman (whose name might have been Brandt; my hearing isn’t what it was), who defended the RNLI’s persistent refusal to accept state funding in the hearts-of-oak manner that I would expect.
The next stage will be to try to portray the RNLI as ‘amateurs’, who are ‘irresponsible’ in ‘claiming’ to be a safety of life service when they are, in fact, ‘completely unregulated’.
The charity for which I work has also recently come under (brief, and very vigorously repelled) attack from a tendency who appear to have been encouraged by a local authority’s funding body to attempt to alter the charity’s purpose and practice in order to facilitate its takeover.
The fake charities are obviously doing such a good job in bamboozling the public into accepting yet more petty tyrannies that the surviving real charities cannot be allowed to continue to provide examples of what the word ‘charity’ really means.
