Charity

I was interested the other day by a piece in the Guardian by Polly Toynbee about how the lobbying bill, presently in transit through Parliament, will do nothing to restrain or even make visible the activities of professional lobbyists, but everything to restrain charities from commenting on affairs in their spheres of interest.

First stop was OED to find out what charity might once have meant. I learn that the original Latin had at least two meanings, one being about things being expensive and another being about affection or love - with both these ancient meanings subsisting in the modern French cher. But gradually, Christians shifted the meaning to Christian love and from thence to the modern English sense of the word, and an article of faith both for Christians and, to an even greater extent, for Muslims.

From there we move to charities and their place in the Anglo-Saxon world - I don't think they have a place in the Roman Law world of, for example, France. My idea of a charity is that it does obviously good works - I pop money into a tin and they look after the orphans and widows - but an idea which does not work so well in the modern world. Should Eton School count as a charity? What about a worthy cause which derives a lot of its income by providing services to or on behalf of the public sector, quite possibly in competition with the private sector? What about a charity which pays its Chief Executive Officer the rate for the job, say £300,000 a year? Or which pays its Senior Vice President (Marketing) a similar sum?

But today's issue is whether charities should be allowed to campaign. My understanding is that in general terms they are not and that otherwise charitable outfits such as http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/ are not charities for this very reason; they exist to campaign, albeit for ends which one might have thought were charitable. In general terms this seems reasonable: I want the money I drop in the tin to be spent on orphans (or whatever), not on some more or less party political campaign. Charity should be a matter of compassion and consensus, not controversy.

So next I turn to the lobbying bill, and get off to a good start with a Parliament web site which does a good job of telling me how the bill is getting on on its passage through Parliament. It also tells me that the aims of the bill are first (Part I) to regulate and make more visible the activities of professional lobbyists and second (Part II) to control the amount of money that pressure groups and others can throw at elections; both worthy sounding aims. And then in a couple of clicks I am looking at the text of the bill itself and here the trouble starts. Not only is Part II written in a language fit only for lawyers, it is also expressed as a series of amendments to some other bill, with the result that it is completely incomprehensible, at least to me. Why could we not have a parallel text version with the left hand pages for the bill itself and the right hand pages with a gloss so that we the people can have some idea what is going on without having to put our trust in our daily rag? What price participating democracy?

That aside, my daily rag suggests that the bill in its present form will have the result of gagging exactly those organisations who know what is happening at the sharp end of the spending cuts from saying anything much at all in the run up to the next election. Now while I do not want my favourite charity to get into the ring with all the policians, we do seem to have a problem here. Civil servants who might know what is happening on the ground are not allowed to participate in elections. I don't think that local government officials are allowed to either. So if we stop the charities too, who on earth is qualified to speak up for the lost souls who have been trashed by the bedroom tax?

But I don't have an answer, any more than the Guardian did. I just don't trust the present administration to work on behalf of us all. Much more likely to think that looking after its already rich friends amounts to pretty much the same thing.

PS: I had thought that the excellent Macmillan (http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Home.aspx) derived a good chunk of its income by providing services to the Health Service, but a quick perusal of their annual report suggests that I was wrong. The nearest they come is 'Macmillan develops cancer services in partnership with other organisations, particularly the NHS. Macmillan has a team of development managers who work with partner organisations in their locality to develop the requirements for the service, negotiate the funding for the service (the standard arrangement is that Macmillan funds the service for an agreed period and then the partner organisation picks up the ongoing funding), recruit the professional to deliver the service and monitor the ongoing delivery of the service'. Maybe I anticipate. Maybe the Camphill Communities would be nearer the mark, but I have yet to run down any accounts from them.