The great charity scandal

A gentleman named David Craig has written a new book, called The Great Charity Scandal, which he summarises in an article over at the Daily Mail.

The figures are astonishing. There are more than 195,289 registered charities in the UK that raise and spend close to £80 billion a year. Together, they employ more than a million staff – more than our car, aerospace and chemical sectors – and make 13 billion ‘asks’ for money every year, the equivalent of 200 for each of us in the UK.

Indeed.

In England and Wales there are 1,939 active charities focused on children; 581 charities trying to find a cure for cancer; 354 charities for birds; 255 charities for animals, 81 charities for people with alcohol problems and 69 charities fighting leukaemia. 

All have their own executives, administrators, fundraisers, communications experts and offices, but few will admit they are doing exactly the same thing as other charities. Take the case of Ethiopia. Two decades ago there were 70 international charities operating there, today the figure is close to 5,000. 

A 2013 parliamentary inquiry into the charity sector found there were so many charities that the Charity Commission for England and Wales was struggling to ensure that most registered charities were genuine, rather than tax avoidance schemes or political campaigning groups.

Yes: it's a colossal industry.

Many other charities have also been tempted away from their main focus, into campaigning. 

Charities such as Forum for the Future, Friends of the Earth and Green Alliance have been very successful in influencing government policy. Their greatest success was probably in 2008 when the Climate Change Act was passed into law, which by the Government’s own estimate will cost £760 per household every year for four decades. 

But many of these charities are funded predominantly by the taxpayer, rather than public donations. Indeed, a number of commentators have identified that many do little in the way of good works, but are actually campaigning organisations or ‘fake charities’.

Yay! As I have said before, this phrase—indeed, this concept of "fake charities"—is my only meaningful contribution to the political conversation (other than coarsening it!).

About 27,000 British charities are dependent on the Government for three quarters or more of their funding. Without Government cash, many would collapse. Nevertheless they spend much of their time and money lobbying the Government rather than doing what most people would consider ‘charitable work’.

Indeed. And, ultimately, whose fault is this disgusting state of affairs? Yes—it's the fault of Saint Tony and his monocular Scottish idiot sidekick, the Gobblin' King.

Britain’s charities haven’t always been so politically active. Until 2004, any form of political lobbying by a charity could only be ‘incidental or ancillary to its charitable purpose’ and could not be a charity’s ‘dominant’ activity.

But it suited the NuLabour government to ensure that its place-men and women were in  position to lobby the executive to pass new and ever more draconian laws. Because people might rebel against the idea of government interfering in their private lives.

But—ah!—if charities (who, after all, only exist to do good, eh?) insist that such legislation is required, to save the people from themselves, then it must be a public good. And therefore the laws must be right.

And the charities got their reward—cash. And fuck-tons of it...

Oxfam, for example picked up almost £137 million from taxpayers in Britain and abroad during the last year – 37 per cent of its revenue. Save the Children also got close to £137 million from taxpayers and Christian Aid was given about £39 million – 41 per cent of its funds. 

Some charities refer to this money as ‘voluntary income’, though it’s not clear taxpayers would be so generous with donations if they knew how much of their money the charity was already receiving.

It is pretty clear—both from the reaction that Fake Charities got at the time, and in my conversations with people since—that people most certainly would not be so generous. In fact, they would be scandalised.

It's time that it stopped.

Not that desperate, then...

Via Timmy's Other Place, I see that a number of defence charities have turned down some £3 million donations.

Defence charities have snubbed the News of the World by refusing to accept millions of pounds in donations in protest at the alleged hacking of dead soldiers’ families’ phones.
...

Paul McNamara, the paper’s fomer defence correspondent, said he had to make “50 phone calls” to charities before Barnado's, the Forces Children's Trust and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity agreed to take donations.

Timmy, of course, makes the obvious and ancient point that "money doesn't smell"...

Pecunia non olet*, after all.

What the people who used to run the paper did is one thing and that the paper has now closed would seem to be at least in part a compensation for that. Yet that last issue of the paper did raise £3 million for charity and it’s that money that is being refused.

Personally I’d take money from pretty much anywhere, judging neither the source nor the reason for donating, looking purely at the good that could be done with it. Clearly it’s me that’s out of step though.

These charities may well be snubbing the News of the World but it is the beneficiaries themselves who will suffer—you know, those brave troops who are supposedly the raisin d'ĂȘtre of these organisations.

I don't know how many wounds could be stitched up for £3 million—or how many prosthetic limbs, or psychological counselling sessions—but I bet it's a lot.

It's so fucking pointless too: if these charities had any common sense they would have taken the money as compensation for the damages done to their clients by the News of the Screws—you know, like the damages payments that those assorted pointless s'lebs got out of the paper—which the charities were keeping in trust in order to try to right the wrongs done by these evil people, blah, blah, etc. (Do be careful not to condemn the government that sent your brave beneficiaries off to die on the basis of total lies at this point, of course.)

The most egregious thing is that, apparently, charity funding is being colossally squeezed and, we are told, any moment now, hundreds of charities will collapse and millions will starve on the streets. At best.

But, apparently, these defence charities can afford to turn down £3 million that could have helped awful lot of people; obviously, they cannot spend their funds fast enough or something...?

And just remember, next time that any of these organisations tell some tragic story in order to solicit a tenner from you, they turned down £3 million from News International—which makes them either stupid or wasteful.

Either way, it means they'll get nothing from me...

How appropriate

According to Hugh Muir at The Guardian, the reason that Santre Sanchez Gayle agreed to shoot a woman he'd never met for £200 was because he lived in poverty.

Riiiight.

To make his case, Muir drafts in some professional bleeding heart... [Emphasis mine.]

The core problem is poverty, says India, chair of the charity Leap, which works to help people out of poverty. "These are two disadvantaged, vulnerable groups, one leveraging the other. But the issue is deprivation. That £200 to him was same as £2m to someone else."

Which is a coincidence, really, because people appear to value their own lives at roughly £2 million.

Gayle, on the other hand, viewed other people's lives as being worth a mere £200.

It seems to me that the "core problem" is that Santre "Riot"* Gayle is an unpleasant little bastard who—in valuing the lives of others so low—reveals that he is a severe danger to society and should never be let out of prison.

So, you know what?

Fuck him.

* You would have thought that his nickname might have given people a clue here...

Let's beat bullying—yay!

A little while ago, a fifteen year old boy was convicted of racial harrassment against a classmate—driving her to attempt suicide.

The 15-year-old boy, who cannot be named, caused a 14-year-old classmate to attempt suicide by repeatedly calling her "wog, coon, nigger, gorilla and golliwog" for six months.

Lincoln magistrates, who convicted the boy of racially aggravated harassment, heard that the girl took a mixture of pills and wrote a goodbye note to her family.
...

However, his conviction - the first for the crime over an incident in a school - prompted questions over whether such bullying should be dealt with through criminal law.

David Green, the director of Civitas, the right-leaning think-tank, said that while the boy's behaviour should be condemned, "the law does not belong in the schoolyard in these cases".

"We are not talking stabbings or serious assault here," Dr Green said. "This should be a matter for the school and the children's parents."

Well, yes and no. First, I would say that it should be dealt with by the school and the parents but what is absolutely and ridiculously obvious is that, in this case, both the school and the parents utterly failed to deal with it.

So, given that, it seems appropriate—since we do hold children responsible for their actions in law (from the age of about 11, I believe)—to bring the child to court.

But it is not really that case that I want to comment on: I wanted, instead, to draw attention to this...

Emma-Jane Cross, the chief executive of the charity Beatbullying, said: "Picking on someone for their race is unacceptable. A young girl was mercilessly bullied to the brink of suicide."

I had this article in my Dock for reference, but hadn't got around to writing about it. I was reminded, however, by today's reports on "sexts".

More than a third of under-18s have been sent offensive or distressing sexual images electronically, a survey by the charity Beatbullying suggests.

A large majority of the 2,094 respondents said a fellow teenager had sent it, compared with 2% who said an adult had sent the message.

The charity said "sexting" constituted bullying and was a growing problem.

Beatbullying asked 2,094 teenagers aged 11-18, and 38% had received such content via new technologies.

I hadn't heard of BeatBullying before, but here they are trying to influence government policy and being quoted approvingly by the NuLabour Broadcasting Coroporation BBC. Hmmmm...

I think that it might be time to delve into their accounts, don't you?

The overview of Beatbullying's accounts show that they had an income of £586,811 in their latest accounts (July 2007 and submitted at the end of May 2008). Now, let's see how much has come from the pockets of taxpayers*, shall we?

• London Councils (formerly the Association of London Government)—running costs and salaries: £103,700


• DFES (used to be Department for Education and Sport, and is now the Department for Children, Schools and Families)—£90,000


• Greater London Authority—£9,000


• Total: £202,700 (34.54% of total funding)

So, yet another one for fakecharities.org then...

UPDATE: my colleague, The Filthy Smoker, has reminded me of the Daily Mash's take on the "sexts" story...

A CHARITY set up to protect teenagers from bullying cannot tell when it is being lied to, it emerged last night.

Beatbullying said that more than a third of teenagers had been sent a sexually explicit text message which they found distressing, even though they obviously didn't.

Excellent!

* I haven't counted the £68,335 from Comic Relief, since people—for reasons known only to themselves—seem to be easily induced to lob money at Lenny Henry, bloody French and fucking Saunders and other sundry annoying wankers comedians.

I'm sorry? Who banned him?

Via The Man Who Fell Back To Bed, your humble Devil sees this chink of common sense in a fucking stupid world.

A lifeguard dog banned from patrolling a Cornish beach because of health and safety rules is to be reinstated after hundreds of people signed a petition.

Bilbo, a Newfoundland, patrolled Sennen with his lifeguard master and got round a dog ban on the beach by sitting in an all terrain bike (ATB) during patrols.

However, the RNLI said passengers were not allowed on ATBs and banned him.

The petition succeeded in getting him classed as a legitimate working animal which exempts him from the dog ban.
...

The six-year-old dog, which wears a special yellow jacket and paddles out to stricken swimmers while pulling a rescue float with him, had been part of the lifeguard team at Sennen for three years.

Newfoundland dogs are well adapted to swimming because they have a double coat - with the outer layer repelling water - and webbed paws.

And why was all of this expended time, money and effort required?

However, the RNLI said passengers were not allowed on ATBs and banned him.

The RNLI banned him? You fucking what?

I'm sorry, I am generally a fan of the RNLI—it's certainly no fake charity—but since when did a lifeboat charity have any jurisdiction over what people can and cannot do on the beaches of this country? Since when did the RNLI make fucking stupid rules like this—since when have they had the authority, precisely?

Perhaps the Beeb have cocked up the reporting of this, and the RNLI are not responsible for this stupidity. If the story is correct, however, I foresee another cancelled Direct Debit...

The lobbyists fight back

(nb. I ain't DK)

charity, n. leniency, an act of kindness; tolerance of faults and offences; a foundation or institution for assisting the poor, the sick, or the helpless

It seems that various fake charities have taken umbrage at being called fake charities on fakecharities.org. Taking time out from lobbying the government helping the needy, three of them have decided to 'hit back' in a magazine/website called 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.

Alleging doesn't come into it. 35 charities have been listed so far. Between them they spend £55 million of taxpayers' money. It's an absolute ruddy disgrace.

Charities listed include Age Concern, which is described as "applauding government initiatives with £2m of public money",

They do, and the government gave them £1,954,000 last year (23.3% of all income from donations).

4Children, "a glorified quango",

They are, and the government gave them at least £2,378,257 last year.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), "the original fake charity, formed by the government in 1971".

They are, and they get less than 3% of their income from voluntary donations.

Other charities listed include RSPB, Christian Aid and Stonewall.

Whose combined income from the government was in excess of £38 million last year.

A spokesman for Age Concern denied that accepting money from government inhibits its ability to speak out for older people.

"This has been clearly demonstrated in our recent advocacy work criticising the Government's failure to address increasing fuel poverty and the scandalous state of the social care system."

But should we be forced to pay for your 'advocacy work'? That's the question.

Of course you criticise the government. You criticise them until they do something and when they finally do it you criticise them for not going far enough. That is the modus operandi of all lobbyists, which is why, whenever the government does anything, you can bet your last nugget that some twat from a fake charity will turn up on TV saying "we welcome this move but the government needs to go much further."

The government funds these groups because they help it create a fake compromise while bypassing public opinion. Here's how it works:

1. The government feels like giving you a good kick in the bollocks.


2. You don't want to be kicked in the bollocks. You just want to be left alone.


3. A fake charity turns up wielding some bogus study and demands that you be kicked in the bollocks and pelted with turds.


4. The government conducts a bullshit consultation with some other fake charities and, in the spirit of compromise, concludes that you will be kicked in the bollocks but not pelted with turds.

Result: you get kicked in the bollocks. The government wins.

And if the charity is very good at its job, this will be quickly followed by the fake loophole:

1. The fake charity produces a study showing that being pelted with turds is not as bad as taking one in the Jacob's. They say that the government is being inconsistent by allowing people to kick you in the plums but not pelt you with turds.


2. The government agrees and, having set a precedent, it can't be seen to allow one and not the other.

Result: You get kicked in the bollocks and pelted with turds. Democracy has prevailed.

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.

"Over 75 per cent of our funding comes from the internet industry, as you would expect from a self-regulatory body."

"We don’t fundraise so we’re not a charity in that sense; the decision to apply for charitable status was more about making sure we are accountable."

So they don't fundraise and they don't assist "the poor, the sick, or the helpless". Am I missing something here? Perhaps I'm very old-fashioned but in what way is this 'self-regulatory body' a fucking charity? Is the Press Complaints Commission a charity? Is OFSTED a charity?

DK adds: the Internet Watch Foundation must be absolutely delighted. They registered as a charity in order to be "more accountable" and, sure enough, we are holding them to account. Job done.

A spokeswoman for Alcohol Concern said none of its government grant is used on its lobbying activities.

Really? How does that work then? Last year, Alcohol Concern's government grant was £515,000*. Its total income was just over £900,000, of which £517,515 was spent on staffing costs. Clearly then, some—and maybe all—of our money went on salaries for people who are overt lobbyists.

And lobbyists they most certainly are, as they declared in their year-end report:

"Our main focus during 2007/08 was ensuring, through our lobbying, campaigns and media work that national alcohol policy on tax, treatment and advertising reflected international evidence as the benchmark for policy decisions."

So their main focus is on lobbying and their main benefactor is the government, and yet no government money was spent on lobbying. Guess we'll just have to take your word for that, guys.

"There’s no consideration in terms of being critical of government when thinking about funding."

I bet it never crosses your mind.

"We are primarily a lobbying charity…"

Indeed you are. You are a pressure group, and therein lies the whole problem. Why are we being forced to fund a pressure group? Why are we not forced to fund, for instance, the Pro-Life Alliance or the Salt Association? The answer lies, surely, in the fact that the organisations listed on fakecharities.org are, to a man, dedicated to expanding the power of the state, increasing regulation and, in most cases, jacking up taxes.

*DK adds: £115,000 of Alcohol Concern's grant was in restricted funds, i.e. was allocated to a particular project. £400,000 was in unrestricted funds, i.e. can be spent on whatever the fuck they like. In practice, of course, the grants all allow Alcohol Concern to operate and, since the fuckers are "primarily a lobbying charity", then this money is, presumably, primarily spent on... well... lobbying.

"…we don’t really do public awareness, and if the fact that we get a grant mattered to the work we do we wouldn’t be able to do it."

I put it to you, you disingenuous set of bastards, that the grant matters to you a great deal, seeing as how it represents 57% of your income. Or would you prefer to live off the £4,991 that you generated from individual donations last year? Face facts: without the government shovelling money at you, you'd be fucked.

It's funny how the charities that the government funds are always the ones that want to change the law, is it not? You never hear a peep from charities like the RNLI or the Donkey Sanctuary. You don't hear the Cats Protection League demanding a ban on dogs. You don't get the RNLI demanding a tax on dinghies. It's always the fake charities—the ones that no one gives money to—who think they can change the law of the land.

We don't play favourites at fakecharities.org. We agree with some of the charities' aims and disagree with others but their agenda is irrelevant. Some were born fake (e.g. ASH), others had fakeness thrust upon them when they started accepting millions from the government (e.g. Age Concern). Some are respectable charities that do good (e.g. RSPB, The Woodland Trust), others are mean-spirited bottom-feeders specifically created by the state to serve the state (e.g. ASH, Alcohol Concern). What they all have in common is our money, taken without our consent, and as my gracious host has said:

... any charity in receipt of any level of government funding is a fake.

It's bad enough that we have to pay the fat salaries of the avaricious shower of shitehawks who make up the House of Commons without having to support whining pressure groups as well. At least the politicos have to stand for election every four or five years.

Far from being, as the Internet Watch Foundation put it, "accountable" these fake charities are unelected, untouchable and, by and large, unspeakable.

So the third sector parasites can bitch and moan about being called fake charities. We can't come to an agreement on this because we fundamentally disagree on what charity means. They think they have a divine right to snatch our money and squander it on themselves and their own obsessions. We think that real charities rely on money that is freely given and use it to help those less fortunate.

So if they don't like being called fake charities, here's a suggestion. First, have a read of this very sensible proposal, then take a leaf out of the RNLI's book and throw the government's money back in its face.

Age Concern—give us that £2 million back and we'll take you seriously next time you say that being in the pay of the government doesn't compromise your relationship with the government. Maybe once you're truly independent, you might find the balls to admit that Harriet Harman's so-called Equality Bill—which you are currently supporting—is the most vile piece of legislation to be put before Parliament in living memory (y'know, seeing as how it will legalise racial discrimination.)

Internet Watch Foundation—either give us back the £467,000 you've taken from the EU in the last 2 years or give yourself a more appropriate name. The EU Department of Internet Regulation has a certain ring to it.

Alcohol Concern—you're not going to get far on five grand a year, are you? Let's have that £515,000 back and you get on the streets rattling tins. Let's see how many public donations you get when you haven't got the government there to swipe it from us under pain of arrest. I'm sure when you explain that you want to ban happy hour and raise tax on beer, the donations will come flooding in.

And to all readers of The Kitchen, please keep submitting the fake charities, and please give as many details as you can. There is still a long way to go.

Funny peculiar

(nb. I am not DK)

I see Alcohol Concern have been talking their shite again, bitching about Wetherspoons selling pints for 99p and kissing Liam Donaldson's fat ginger arse.

It's bad enough that we pay for this fake charity through our taxes without seemingly genuine charities syphoning off more money to the cunts, but that is exactly what Comic Relief have been doing. 

And what a waste of money it is. This piss-poor website, for example, cost Comic Relief five grand. 

In 2004, Comic Relief funded Alcohol Concern and London Drug and Alcohol Network to produce an online toolkit that would help local alcohol leads develop and implement cross cutting local alcohol strategies.

Since Red Nose Day is looming ahead of us like a hideous but unavoidable dose of flu, I thought I might fire off a quick e-mail. 

Sir/Madam,

As a long-time supporter of Comic Relief I was troubled to discover that you donated £60,000 to Alcohol Concern in 2007. This is a state-funded pressure group that is rarely out of the news due to its relentless lobbying for such fun policies as higher taxes and the abolition of happy hour.

I very much resent having to pay for these puritans through my taxes and to think that I might be giving them so much as a brass farthing via Comic Relief is frankly too much too bear.

I hope you can reassure me that you have no plans to finance these people again in 2009 otherwise I will be forced to start donating to your bitter rivals at Children In Need.

Yours, 

Filthy

PS. It would also be nice if you could refrain from releasing an unfunny novelty record but I suspect that is too much to ask.

I'm not being facetious in describing myself as a long-time supporter. I do genuinely think that Comic Relief do good work but what the fuck are they doing associating with arseholes like Alcohol Concern?

Ironically, Comic Relief only started funding UK charities because a certain section of the Great British pleblic suspected that money given to Africa ends up getting spent on AK-47s and palaces. Well fuck that. If the alternative is giving it to Alcohol bastard Concern, then let's throw them the cash and ask no questions.

Pesticide Action Network: another fake charity, and some proposed action

You may have seen that, a few days ago, Euro MPs voted to put strict controls on pesticides.

The European Parliament has voted to tighten rules on pesticide use and ban at least 22 chemicals deemed harmful to human health.

The UK government, the Conservatives and the National Farmers' Union all oppose the new rules, saying they could hit yields and increase food prices.

The rules have not yet been approved by the 27 member states' governments.

The draft law would ban substances that can cause cancer or that can harm human reproduction or hormones.

UK farmers say the law would "seriously threaten" UK food production. It could wipe out the carrot industry and seriously affect many other crops, the National Farmers' Union has warned.

Certain pesticides are particularly useful in Britain to combat diseases associated with wet weather, such as potato blight.

So far, so utterly unsurprising. However, to extol the virtues of this wonderful new measure, the BBC decided to interview a "charity" called Pestercide [sic] Action Network.

And, as his Ecclesiastical Eminence points out, the Pesticide Action Network are funded... by the EU!

Here are their accounts for 2006 [PDF], when they received £240,715 [page 19] from the Commission of the European Communities (a.k.a. the EU Commission).

And here are their accounts for 2007 [PDF] (the latest available), when the Commission of the European Union handed Pesticide Action Network another £240,419 [page 20] of our hard-earned cash.

What a massive fucking surprise that was, eh?

A MODEST PROPOSAL

These fake fucking charities are springing up left, right and centre: see a pro-state charity quoted in the MSM and the odds are that the "charity" is, in fact, little more than a QUANGO. This fake charity will derive a large part of their funds—our money—from the government whose measures it is supporting.

I am thoroughly sick of this: there are so many of them. And, whilst various bloggers have highlighted different ones at different times, I think that it would be a splendid idea to establish a central website—an up-to-date, searchable directory of these fake charities—which people can visit to determine easily and quickly which charities are funded with our cash, and by how much.

I have registered the domain fakecharities.org and will set up and style a content management system framework over the next week or so. [Almost done: see update.]

This endeavour will be considerably easier if a number of people participate, so if anyone would like to help me to establish and maintain fakecharities.org—which will, I believe, be a valuable resource—could they please drop me an email (published in the RSS & Contact Details section of the sidebar) with the title "fakecharities.org help".

UPDATE: five hours later, fakecharities.org is taking shape. I haven't debugged for Internet Exploder yet, but it should look (and operate) fine in modern browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, etc.

UPDATE 2: RSS feeds now properly validated and run through Feedburner.

A New Year's Resolution

Even when most on his uppers, your humble Devil has been wont to donate money to favoured charities—those he has carefully selected as doing good works and receiving no government money.

However, I am fed to the back teeth with "charities" that are effectively government agencies—QUANGOS, if you will—which earn their thirty pieces of silver by parroting government policy and lobbying for proposed government legislation.

As such, I have today cancelled all of my standing orders and direct debits, and sent the following letter to the charities concerned.

Dear Sir,

I have been sending a small amount of money to your charity for some time now. However, I feel unable to continue with my support, and I would like to explain why.

Over the last few years, I have taken to looking up the accounts of nearly every charity that features in the news as supporting government policy: in every case, they have either received vast sums of money from the government or their accounts are so opaque—featuring subsidiary companies and other non-accountable organisations—that I am unable to tell where their funding comes from.

It has always been my policy to avoid giving money to any charity that receives money from the state, on the grounds that:


1. I am already giving (involuntarily), and


2. any body which takes money from the government is beholden to the government and therefore bound to advance aims with which I do not agree.

These days, it is becoming more and more difficult to tell which charities are in receipt of government funds, and I have therefore ceased to give any money to any charity the funding of which I cannot accurately trace.

However, over the last decade, the government has racked up ever more its use of the Third Sector for advancing its own aims and I find this utterly unacceptable.

These effective QUANGOs are using charitable status both to dodge tax and, more importantly, to con the public into believing that they are impartially advancing good works when they are, in fact, bound to advance and support government policy.

Furthermore, charitable giving is supposed to be voluntary: when the government steals money from me by force and then hands it to "charities", there is no voluntary element there at all.

What is to be done?

I believe that it is only when genuine charities start to kick up a fuss about this perversion of charitable status that anything might get changed.

As such, I have made it my New Year's resolution to cease all charitable giving until this situation is resolved—and also to inform my friends and family, as well as the charities involved, why I have made said decision.

I hope that you carry on your good work but that, nonetheless, my message resonates with you.

Regards,

DK

So, that is my New Year's resolution: I shall cease giving to charity but shall, at every opportunity, give said charities due notice as to why I am taking this measure.

I am aware that there is a slight irony in my insisting that charities lobby the government in order to stop lobbying groups being charities, but that's just tough: if they want my cash, then this covert (and not so covert) perversion of the concept of "charity" needs to stop.

Fake charities

(nb. I am not the Devil's Kitchen)

So they've gone and done it. Even the sight of cigarettes cannot be tolerated in Brown's Britain. Tobacco displays have been banned.

The Tories, the Lib Dems and even fucking Peter Mandelson can see that this is a piece-of-shit policy which will shaft small businesses for no conceivable benefit. But what the hell, eh? It's not like there's a recession on.

James Lowman of The Association of Convenience Stores is one of many pissed-off people:

"We have explained that implementing a tobacco-display ban will cost our industry over £250 million and concessions on a longer lead-in period will not allay our grave concerns."

"This announcement makes a mockery of government claims to be the friend of small and local businesses."

After eleven years, they still don't get it, do they? James, they don't give two shits about "small and local businesses". They butt-fucked the publicans and they're going to butt-fuck your members, just like they did the rest of us. Deep, hard and with sand in the vaseline.

What was striking, however, was the comment from Health Secretary Alan Johnson:

He [Johnson] told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the "overwhelming evidence and support" in the government's consultation on smoking was for such a ban.

Having read the consultation document, I would say 'overwhelming' is a fair word to use. I haven't seen such a consensus this overwhelming since Saddam Hussein's last election.

"Almost 98 per cent of respondents...were in favour of plain packaging"

"There was over 99 per cent agreement by respondents to this question that there should be further restrictions."

"Approximately 90 per cent expressed a preference for option three (prohibit the sale of tobacco products from vending machines altogether)"

It's fair to say that you won't replicate these results if you ask the average man in the pub, let alone the average man outside the pub. The extraordinary support for the Department of Health (DOH)'s recommendations can only be explained by looking at the "stakeholders" who got involved. Of the 96,000 responses, only a handful came from private individuals. The rest came from block-voting by state-funded pressure groups and charities. And, as my gracious host has recently pointed out:

...whenever a so-called charity supports a government initiative, you can almost always find that they rely on substantial state funding.

Sure enough, SmokeFree NorthWest - with 49,507 votes - is entirely funded by the DoH. Direct Movement by the Youth Smokefree Team - with 10,757 votes - is entirely funded by SmokeFree Liverpool who are entirely funded by the DoH). SmokeFree NorthEast - with 8,128 votes - is entirely funded by...yes, the DoH.

Weighing in with a further 1,562 votes were SmokeFree Action. These were the cunts who masterminded the smoking ban. As they say on their website:

We came together initially to lobby for smokefree workplaces...

Now they've achieved that, do you reckon they're happy to leave it there - as they swore blind they would - or do you think the mythical slippery-slope worked its magic again?

...and are now committed to reducing the harm caused by tobacco more generally.

Of course you are, you dishonest set of bastards.

SmokeFree Action is headed up by the biggest fake charity of all: Action of Smoking and Health (ASH). ASH, like all the rest of the "stakeholders", were created by the government but try their best to pretend to be a grass-roots organisation. Since they are registered with the charities commission it makes it that bit easier to inspect their accounts:

Year ended 31st March 2007

Department of Health: £210,400

Wales Assembly Government: £110,000

Supporting charities: £185,228

Donations & legacies received: £11,143

Incidentally, take another look at that last figure. That is the full amount that was voluntarily given to this 'charity' in a whole year. To give you a frame of reference, the Cat's Protection League received over £30 million in private donations in the same year. The fucking Donkey Sanctuary was given over £20 million.

ASH - one of the most powerful charities in the UK - made eleven grand. If they were left to fend for themselves they wouldn't have the money to rent an office. They would be hard pushed to send out a solitary press release, let alone change the law of the fucking land every five minutes.

In case you're wondering, the "supporting charities" were the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research. These are real charities, no doubt, and we've all given to them in our time. Still, when I donated to Cancer Research I foolishly assumed that the money might go towards actual cancer research. Now I know it gets hived off to pay for the fat salaries of a bunch of hateful, lemon-sucking harridans I don't think I'll fucking bother in future.

This is what happens: The fake charities set up websites where vistors can support the cause by entering an e-mail address and pressing click. No one really knows what they're voting for, but it has got something to do with thinking of the children and it only takes a second. Then the fake charities send postage-paid postcards out to every address they can get their hands on, urging the clueless recipients to sign them and send them back. Again, it isn't clear what the postcard is supporting but if you don't send it back it means you want lovely little children to get cancer.

Dick Puddlecote explained exactly how the Department of Health's "public consultations" work back in September (in the comments to this post):

1) The DoH think up some looney proposal and have to pretend to ask the public in order to exhibit some semblance of democracy.

2) The public aren't actually told about it unless they are avid watchers of smokefree sites so therefore will have formed an opinion one way only anyway.

3) The smokefree sites are told of course seeing as they are paid for by the Labour Government

4) Labour pass the measures and can say in front of the cameras that X% of stakeholders are fully in agreement with them about this. No fiddling at all. Not in the slightest. Perfectly above board.

With eye-watering disingenuity, the DoH specifically asked for input from shopkeepers regarding the mooted tobacco display ban:

We are particularly interested in hearing from small retailers and in receiving information on the potential cost impact of further restrictions on display

But when it arrived, it found that:

"Among the 10,570 small retailers responding, virtually all are against the proposal."

"Ninety-five percent of specialist tobacconists and all non-specialist shops surveyed suggested that a display ban would lead to them being unable to carry on trading."

So obviously the DoH ignored these dirty capitalist interests and pressed on with what could easily be the most stupid piece of legislation of the year. If you're on the gravy train, you get a voice. If you're not, forget it. Not so much a public consultation as a public sector consulation.

And in case you're under any illusion that the government might lay off smokers for a while after this, you should remember that Labour wouldn't be turning to fruitcake anti-smoking policies if they hadn't committed themselves to cutting the smoking rate to 21% by 2010 (it's 22% at the moment).

In that context, the scariest (and unreported, natch) thing about the DoH's bullshit consultation is that it asked 'stakeholders' what the smoking rate should be in a few years time. Here's what they said:

Action on Smoking and Health: 15% by 2015 and 5% by 2030

British Medical Association: 11% by 2015 "with the aim of making the UK tobacco free by 2035"

Royal College of Physicians: 11% by 2015 and "the eradication of smoking between 2020 and 2030"

Oh Lordy. These cunts haven't even got into second gear yet.

If you throw away a bottle...

I happened to notice that, playing in the MessageSpace ad space under some of my posts, this WWF-sponsored advert for Connect2Earth.


The message is clear: throw away a bottle and you will get hit by a truck.

Actually, I found the advert quite amusing, if slightly unlikely: who would be allowed to practise archery in their own home these days, eh?

But let us remind ourselves of what the consequences should be: what should happen is that you break the law and then someone accuses you, the police come around, charge you and then you answer to your peers in a fair trial.

These days, you throw a bottle into the street (admittedly, a fucking annoying and despicable act) and your retribution involves being hit by a twenty-ton truck.

Still, I welcome this ad. After all, the idea of karma is a religious one and it helps to enforce the idea that these Green nutters are little better than religious fundamentalists, consistently pursuing the wrong policies—can you say "biofuels"?—and using fear to attempt to gain support.

Just like the politicians who allocate millions of pounds of our money to these organisations then...


P.S. As standard, I like to check charity accounts to see just how much the British taxpayer has been forced to contribute to these so-called charities. So here's the accounts for WWF-UK, and below are the relevant sections.

Only £5.7 million from the EU and other government agencies. A bargain, wouldn't you agree?

Obviously, it would be more of a bargain if it wasn't your money being stolen from you and being used to support WWF-UK, whether you approved of their aims or not. You know, if "charity" actually meant "charity"...