Once again I have to disagree with Ian Parker-Joseph, who, on the subject of the proposed bailing-out of fake charities by the government, says

I think we can assume when the soup kitchens and doss houses spring up as we spiral to bankruptcy, they will be funded by these charities…

Really? I would have thought myself, given the general nature of the fake charities, that rather than running soup kitchens themselves they would instead leave this thankless, hard and messy task to real charities, run by the usual scruffy volunteers and blue-rinsed ladies, while they, the state-funded quangos-with-a-licence-to-beg, concentrate on their, er, ‘core missions’, which will doubtless involve inspecting soup kitchens to ensure that the soup offered contains no more than the government-prescribed levels of salt, saturated fats, or other forbidden foods; that the people queueing for soup provide an ‘acceptable’ representation of the government-specified ‘ethnic balance’, and possess no alcohol or tobacco; and that the feral youth engaged in mugging and murdering the said soup-queuers are treated by the said kitcheneers with a government-mandated degree of ‘dignity and respect’.

You see, the government doesn’t actually need people to be fed or given a blanket for the night, but it must ensure that if they survive at all they meet the minimum European standards for political correctness.

Barmaid: Bitter?
Underclass: No. Just tired.

At Old Holborn, commemoration of an anniversary.

A commenter, Dave A, suggests:

Just had an idea. Devil’s Kitchen does quite rightly does www.fakecharities.org rather than being nihilistic can we/you do www.realcharities.org?

This is a good idea but setting it up is beyond me (I’m really rather better with a set of spanners). However, I have created a link category called ‘Real Charities’, and have started it off with the RNLI, of which I have the honour to be a Governor.

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.

Mark weapon effects.

fakecharities.org has been noticed by Charity Finance:

A new website, fakecharities.org, has been created to highlight those charities which receive state funding and which the site’s creator alleges support the government… A spokesman for Age Concern denied that accepting money from government inhibits its ability to speak out for older people… A spokeswoman for the Internet Watch Foundation, which the website argues is using EU funds to encourage state regulation of the internet, said its EU funding is spent on a hotline for the public to report illegal online content… A spokeswoman for Alcohol Concern said none of its government grant is used on its lobbying activities.

Three palpable hits, with two quite implausible denials (as though it were possible in this day and age to tell one pound in a bank account from another; good heavens) and one pitiful attempt at sophistry. Congratulations to the Devil; more of the same, please. I am considering mounting a local poster campaign about this; a number of people I have spoken to so far have hurried away to make alterations to their standing orders.

Anyone still unaware of the fake charities scandal ought to read fakecharities.org; if they are regular donors to a charity they may be unpleasantly surprised.

I am obliged to Henry North London for the complete and correct lyrics for ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’

It can, I think, be safely assumed that the Ambush Predator has by now submitted to fakecharities.org the deplorable organisation who have seen fit to Bowdlerise one of the best-known British sea-shanties.

I have always thought that this song was a good one. Its chorus could easily have more than one meaning. One wonders whether it could have been this factor which, in the mind of a deeply (and perhaps justifiably) paranoid (female) politician, might have been seen as making it worth picking up the quangophone and issuing some orders.

One hesitates to correct the Daily Mail (caveat lector), but the fact of course remains that there is no such thing as a ‘government-funded charity’; the new and politically correct term is ‘quango-with-a-licence-to-beg’.

Tom Paine has detected another fake charity, and is miffed because he was until recently giving them money.

About as miffed as I was, perhaps, in much the same situation. I unhesitatingly grassed up the fake charity involved to fakecharities.org. Perhaps TP would consider doing the same.

Bishop Hill reports that

Daniel Hannan was on the Today Programme just now discussing EU funding of charities. He didn’t mention fakecharities.org by name, but I think it’s fair to say that our efforts may have had an effect on the news agenda.

I have been consulting fakecharities.org daily since its inception, observing the rate of growth of its database. Today there seems to be an SQL problem:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (2) in /home/f/a/fakecharities/public_html/framework/class.database.php on line 61
Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (2)

Doubtless this will be fixed before long. I hope so, having been trying to draw attention to the site, as it were, IRL.

There were a number of comments on my earlier posting which made me think that perhaps it would be a good idea to be more specific about ‘fake charities’. What I would propose is that the Charities Commissioners (once restored, the ‘Charities Commission’ having been abolished) should distinguish between organisations thus:

1. Voluntary charities: all staff are unpaid volunteers; all revenue is from donations or benefactions; all trustees are elected; contractors may be retained only ‘by the job’.

2. Charities: more than 50% of staff are unpaid volunteers; all revenue is from donations or benefactions; all trustees are elected; contractors may be retained on annual basis.

3. Tax-funded charitable trusts (TFCTs): more than 50% of staff are unpaid volunteers; more than 50% of revenue is from donations or benefactions; more than 50% of trustees are elected; contractors on annual basis.

4. Quangos with a licence to beg: organisations not qualifying in any other category.

All of this, of course, rather presupposes the reform of the Charities Commission. It would be possible to devise several further categories by permuting the parameters, as it were, but this is probably undesirable from the point of view of minimising and simplifying regulation.

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.

Blogging is light at the moment because I am particularly unwell, though not as unwell as some people.

I am very much obliged to The Devil (who appears to have set it up) and David Davis (who brought it to my attention) for reference to this.

For some time I have been blethering on about charities. I work for a real one, in which nobody is paid, all revenue comes from donations, and suggestions that we ‘change what we do so we can get money from the council’ are very firmly rebuffed. I deplore the revolting habit of government (in all of its forms) of setting up ‘charities’ funded from taxpayers money, the purpose of which is deceitful and dishonest ‘mock-vox-pop’ propaganda, having the secondary effects of depriving real charities of funds, and of tarring them with the same brush.

Now there is fakecharities.org. There is only one fake charity listed there this morning, because the site has only just been set up (and, according to my RSS thingie, which is called Vienna and apparently uses the Safari engine, perhaps still needs a bit of graphics adjustment). However, you can nominate the fake charity of your choice for inclusion in the database (how they’re going to love being on one of those; nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?).

As the assassin chap says in Total Recall:

It’s about goddam time!

Because I am trying to get through on the phone to various white-coated individuals (not yet, I trust, the ones with the yellow van) and am in some discomfort I will probably not spend today digging the dirt on my most hated fake charities and submitting them to fakecharities.org, but I would urge both readers to consider doing so themselves.

Thanks once again to the D-men (Devil, David Davis) for this fine piece of work and for its further publicising. Any attempts by the state to ban it will doubtless be amusing. I suspect that MPs will instead soon see that the accounts of certain important charities need to be an official secret. Like their own expenses.

The Ambush Predator on charities:

Time to give the Charity Commission real teeth, and make it harder to set up in the ‘charity business’…?

I work for a local charity. It is a real one. None of the volunteers or trustees is paid. Everything comes from the subscriptions of supporters or the benefaction of local business people. Though we employ no paid staff, some very large ‘true’ charities, such as the RNLI (of which I happen to be a Governor) are obliged to.

There are two other sorts of entity calling themselves ‘charities’. On the one hand there are the large, well-known international aid organisations of one kind or another, which are often widely supported by the public, but which are sometimes used by the government to implement its aid plans.

On the other there are organisations which have no public support whatsoever and are funded wholly from taxpayers’ money in order to provide the government with a cynical and mendacious propaganda tool (“‘Charities’ are urging the government to Do More about [insert government objective]…”).

Having had to deal with the Charities Commission (recently reformed; the Charities Commissioners have been abolished, and replaced with the present bureauquango under a remarkably similar name) I hold out little hope of restoring it to useful function.

It hassles and occasionally persecutes real charities like ours, its primary method being inefficiency. It is routine for us to fill in a huge and complicated annual return form and to send it in to them by the due date, only to receive a menacing reminder; to send a photocopy, and to receive another reminder; finally, when the next annual form is almost due, to get through to them on the phone and to be told that the first form was indeed received the day after we sent it, but had not been processed for eight months owing to ‘computer problems’.

On the other hand it appears to do all that it can to facilitate the creation and maintenance of quangos masquerading as ‘charities’, the sole purpose of which is to maintain the illusion of broad public support for a cause which is fact nothing more than yet another government ‘target’. It seems to me that the majority of so-called ‘health charities’ fall into this category.

In a decent country there would be three different names for these organisations.

Type 1 (the kind I work for; no pay; no official subsidy of any kind; all revenue from public support) should continue to be called a ‘charity’, being the only body worthy of the original name. The RNLI, unsupported by any public funds, cordially hated by the government and routinely denied the credit for its own rescue work by the state propaganda service (which usually ascribes rescues to the firmly-ashore police if there is not an HM Coastguard or HMRC Revenue Boat station within plausible distance), would, despite having some paid staff, be the largest organistion to qualify as such.

Type 2 could perhaps be called a ‘charitable non-government organisation’. Suppliers of equipment to aid organisations (like Messrs. BCB) seem to call all such bodies ‘NGOs’ anyway.

Type 3 should be called a ‘quango’ and abolished.

The ‘Charities Commission’ should also be abolished, and the former office of the Charities Commissioners restored.

The use of public trust in the British tradition of individual charity (a most Libertarian phenomenon) to foist off tax-funded state propaganda engines as examples of such is one of the more shabby, demeaning and, in the long term, damaging machinations of the present government. Unfortunately it seems that they now intend to hurl yet more wads of public money at anyone, howsoever unsuitable, who says that they will attend to one of the government’s stated objectives while pretending that in so doing they are being supported by freely-given donations.

This is a deplorable situation and requires radical reform. Unfortunately the Tory party seem intent on using mock-charities as propaganda devices in exactly the same way, particularly in respect of ‘public health’. I wonder whether the LPUK might consider adding some suitable measure to its manifesto.