Category: National politics

Today the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank has published a paper that looks at the potentially distorting relationship between charities and the state. Written by Christopher Snowdon it is titled: Sock Puppets: How the Government Lobbies Itself and Why.

Many charities are not what they purport to be. To steal a phrase from the world of social media they are sock puppets. According to the IEA about 27,000 charities are now dependent on the government for more than three quarters of their income and the so-called voluntary sector now gets more money from the state than it gets in donations. The report makes four recommendations of which number 3 says:

A new category of non-profit organisation should be created for organisations which receive substantial funds from statutory sources.

I wrote to Nick Hurd MP the current minister for charities in December 2009 whilst he was the opposition spokesman to raise a similar point.

Could I suggest a rule of thirds? The Charity Commission should insist on the use of some designation such as “Government sponsored body” for any organisation that accepts more than one third of its income from government sources of all kinds but still wishes to be treated as a charity. Once a body exceeds two thirds of its income from government sources it should cease to be a charity and should formally become an agency of the relevant department. It could then be monitored by the NAO and use a .gov.uk web address, etc. Then we would all know what we are dealing with.

To re-iterate:

• You could call yourself a charity as long as less than one third of your income came from the state.
• Above one third you could still be regulated as a charity but you would not be allowed to use the word charity when describing yourself and would have to use a designation such as “Government sponsored body”.
• Above two thirds just call yourself what you are – a part of the government.

Back in 2009 Hurd said my ideas were “interesting” but clearly he has not got very far with bringing transparency into this area of public life.

I had a lovely drive through Sussex this morning, returning from a couple of nights at my Dad’s place on the South Coast. The combination of well-watered greenery and the whites of elder, ground elder and ox-eye daisies was quite stunning. I enjoyed listening to the Jubilee thanksgiving service on Radio 4 with Nicholas Witchell. He showed some of his BBC TV colleagues how to say little and let the subject matter speak for itself. As I drove through verdant, lovely Sussex I couldn’t help being grateful to live in our beautiful, safe, civilised, happy and prosperous country.

My enjoyment of the service was only slightly marred by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s frankly silly, Marxist world view. He talked of “the traps of ludicrous financial greed, of environmental recklessness, of collective fear of strangers and collective contempt for the unsuccessful and marginal”. Do his family and friends have contempt for the unsuccessful and marginal? Mine don’t. I can only conclude that this line is this some kind of veiled criticism of the government’s social policies? If so it was quite out of place. Whatever you think of our government it is not driven by contempt. Williams was just using his pulpit to get a free hit on the government. I didn’t hear Rowan Williams decrying a previous government that spent £4 for every £3 that it collected and made mendacious promises that it knew it could never keep. I didn’t hear him criticising Bill Clinton for forcing the US financial system to lend to people who couldn’t afford to borrow.

Williams talked of financial greed presiding in his ludicrously expensive fancy dress over the highest in the land. What a complete fool? If he believed a word he said he would turn his back on his future role as of Master of Magdalene College, his career in high office in the church and his theological career at Oxford and Cambridge and do something personal, and probably dirty, to help the unsuccessful and the marginal. No hope of that. What a complete fool?

The point of the parable of the widow’s mite was that the mite was all she had but she gave it willingly. I have to say that I heartily agree with Dan Hodges.

It is very nice that the wealthy can decide to give their taxes to their pet cause rather than to the basics our society agrees should be priorities such as defending ourselves, keeping people healthy, etc. It isn’t charity though. Charity is giving what you have. It should feel painful. It should mean you have to go without something. By curtailing abuse of charitable giving taxes will be lower overall and ordinary people will have more money so that they can make their own choices about what they spend.

The use by the BBC News website of this piece of video as their lead story right now proves one of two things. Either its staff are naive and easy to manipulate or they know that this was a stunt by revolutionary socialist activists and are quite happy to collude with them. If revolutionary socialist June Hautot had been a little more subtle and not barracked Lansley quite so relentlessly it wouldn’t have been quite so obvious that this was a set up. More from Guido Fawkes here.

Watching the video Lansley comes across well, coolly trying to make his case in front of cameras whilst trying to deal with a deranged woman. The more the case is made directly the more unreasonable the detractors will appear. No-one is privatising the NHS. Does June Hautot suggest that we nationalise factories, power stations, mines and steelworks so that NHS surgeons’ scalpels can be produced entirely in the public sector? The health sector in the UK is now 10% of GDP. One tenth of ALL economic activity. There is always going to be a mix of providers and we really need to get the most efficient mix and not be doctrinaire about who provides what.

If Cameron has decided to go ahead with the NHS reforms then the Tories need to get out from the foxholes and start communicating.

One of the main stories yesterday was the news that police numbers have fallen by 6,000 or 4% over the course of the last year. Altogether police numbers may fall by up to 16,000 up to 2015 as a result of police budget cuts. See BBC story here. The Telegraph story mentioned that crime had fallen by 4% in the same period too.

A simple measure that would offset the full 16,000 loss in police up to 2015 would be to close police canteens and ask officers to buy their meals out like most of the rest of us do. This means that the deterrent effect of police being physically present would be extended even whilst officers eat. They would also save travel time between their duty stations and their canteens. This is common practice in the US.

In London police get free travel on Tubes and buses. Again, by requiring them to travel in uniform in return for this huge benefit you get policing for free.

Both changes are worth 10-15%.

In London the police have delivered 1 million additional patrols a year by the simple expedient of asking officers to patrol alone.

The police are probably our most hidebound and unmodernised public service. LibDem GLA member, Dee Doocey’s campaign on perks for senior officers in the Met illustrates again how much further there is to go. There is another way.

Ed Balls this morning uses the Guardian to admit that the “too far, too fast” rhetoric of Labour’s first 20 months of opposition is now redundant. He puts his hands up and tells us that he accepts the need for cuts.

My starting point is, I am afraid, we are going to have keep all these cuts. There is a big squeeze happening on budgets across the piece. The squeeze on defence spending, for instance, is £15bn by 2015. We are going to have to start from that being the baseline. At this stage, we can make no commitments to reverse any of that, on spending or on tax. So I am being absolutely clear about that.

We have heard various pronouncements over the last few days as Labour tries to dig itself out of its fantasy economics hole. Ed Balls has now accepted the whole package on behalf of his party. 20 months late but welcome anyway.

The return of the Euro crisis and the French debt downgrade will eclipse Balls’ submission so he gets to get his message out on “a good day to bury bad news”. The French downgrade simply underlines the necessity of having a credible budget. Osborne was right.

Sometime after the Braveheart movie came out in 1995 I heard a silly Scotsman voxpopped on TV or radio. His reaction to the film was “Now I know why I hate the English”. Apparently he didn’t know why he had hated the English before he saw the movie. His hatred was obviously just some inchoate, congenital thing that had come down through seven centuries with his DNA and nothing to do with the modern state that we both live in. I am sure that the feeling was mutual at the end of the 13th Century. Mel Gibson’s one-sided film failed to mention that William Wallace was reputed to have worn a belt of human skin flayed from the body of the hated English tax collector Hugh de Cressingham. Nice.

I don’t really hate Alex Salmond. But, having seen this letter from Salmond to the disgraced banker Fred Goodwin in the run up to the calamitous takeover of parts of the Dutch bank ABN Amro by Royal Bank of Scotland, I do think that he made a total fool of himself sucking up to Goodwin. (Thanks to Faisal Islam at Channel 4 for finding this particular smoking gun.) This takeover marked the high point of UK banking stupidity in the early years of this century. Signing his letter “Yours for Scotland, Alex” was particularly emetic. With this one letter Salmond has accepted moral liability for the bad debts of Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland on behalf of the people of Scotland. No amount of blaming the banking crisis on English regulators will wash. The largest part of the UK banking crisis was terrible commercial lending decisions made in Edinburgh – almost identical in fact the ludicrous ones made in Dublin. Yours for Scotland.

Salmond is a clever enough bloke, but this letter taken together with his totally debunked Arc of Prosperity schtick (can’t believe the SNP haven’t taken that off their website) proves he does not have as sure a touch as some imagine. On the evidence he is a man given to wishful thinking. I hope that he doesn’t succeed in breaking up my country.

I was interested in Labour MP Chris Bryant’s blog piece in the Independent today. Challenged by an 11 year old to explain the difference between the Tories and Labour he came up with the following at short notice:

Labour wanted everyone to have a decent chance in life, no matter what their background, while the Tories thought everyone should stand on their own two feet.

His comments betray his party’s belief that it has a monopoly of compassion and fellow feeling. There is no Tory who couldn’t sign up to wanting “everyone to have a decent chance in life, no matter what their background”. This equality of opportunity argument is mainstream conservatism. Anything else is a waste of human resources and fails good Tory principles of practicality. It is also a mainstream Tory position to say that people should stand on their own two feet but this would always be qualified by the phrase “where they can”. A social safety net is fully embraced by Tories.

Bryant’s problem is that the mainstream majority in this country thinks that Labour stands for “everyone to have a decent life, regardless of how much effort they put in”. It is a mainstream view that too many people make too small a contribution to our society. This might mean not bothering at school, it might mean skiving at work, it might mean cheating the benefits system, it might mean being anti-social, it might mean letting drink or drugs rule your life, it might mean not saving for your own future, it might mean not raising your kids right. It is a mainstream view that actions should have consequences. The Tories’ tough love is in keeping with the mood of the times. Labour’s something for nothing culture is not.

Bryant is an interesting case. He went to an elite public school (Cheltenham College where many scenes for the film If were shot) followed by Oxford. He was a member of the Conservative Party, and an elected office-holder in the Oxford University Conservative Association. During the eighties he got ordained, worked out that he was gay and joined the Labour party. Bryant was born two weeks before me so I understand the times he lived through. I don’t suppose that many parts of the Conservative party were particularly gay friendly in the eighties (if only in antithesis to the often overwrought politicisation of this issue at the time – remember “political lesbians”?). You might have thought that with history on both sides of the political divide Bryant would have come up with something a bit more insightful. Although Tory love is tough it is real enough all the same. Bryant should know.