The Munchkins Need Feeding
Charities have become hungry monsters, needing ever more of our money to feed their own, not always charitable ambitions. Many registered charities claim that almost 90p in every pound donated is spent on ‘charitable activities’, but spend at least half their income on management, strategy development, campaigning and fundraising – not what most of us would consider ‘good causes’.
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’.
Oct 2012; Gordon Brown’s secret army could defeat the Tory/LibDem Coalition welfare and education reforms
Long after the 2010 General Election election defeat came the realization that Gordon Brown really was a clever planner. In his last two years in office, he started preparing for a new kind of opposition. Labour might be turfed out of government, but it would carry on the fight through charities, quangos and think tanks. At one time Brown had a team in Downing Street devoted to appointments in public bodies, carefully building what would become a kind of government-in-exile. If the Tories tried anything radical – like welfare reform – then Labour’s new fifth columnists would strike.
The foregoing was evidenced when Iain Duncan Smith trailed a speech about reforming welfare and poverty and a now familiar welcoming committee rose to greet him:
The Child Poverty Action Group declared that there are no jobs to be had, so why punish those on welfare?
Save the Children, said government cuts were a major threat to British children.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children warned that the “most vulnerable” children are “bearing the brunt” of Cameron’s cuts.
Faced with these quotes who would the average listener believe? A politician, or a charity worker.
In 2008, Brown also changed the rules so charities could join political campaigns. In theory, they could support any party but as Brown knew, very few charities would use the new powers to demand smaller taxes. It was a masterstroke. The charities then sharpened their claws by hiring former Labour apparatchiks. Britain’s charities were nurturing a colourful, talented and efficient anti-Tory alliance.
Many of these charities were, “stuffed to the gunwales with Labour placemen” by Prime Minister Gordon Brown before he left office. Some used to work directly for Gordon Brown, while other third sector bosses worked in the last Labour government, or remain members of the party.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/09/04/uk-charity-politics-labour-links_n_5763986.html
Save the Children
In 2010 Justin Forsyth and Brendan Cox were appointed to the board of Save the Children Newly appointed (Chief Executive Forsyth), was the former Director of Strategic Communications for Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Before that he was a Special Advisor on environmental and international developments for former Prime Minister Tony Blair. His ex Labour government colleague, Brendan Cox (appointed Director of Policy) was previously a special advisor in Gordon Brown's cabinet team.
In 2012, Save The Children, was an organisation in trouble, lacking funds it was forced to conduct its first ever public fund-raising campaign in Britain. Tory MPs claimed its charity work was politically motivated.
Forsyth left Save the Children to take up the post of Deputy Executive Director at Unicef.
He was forced to resign from his post following media revelations about his own past workplace behaviour and mishandling of a former subordinate’s sexual misconduct.
It was revealed that when Chief Executive of Save the Children he faced three complaints of inappropriate behaviour towards female staff . The complaints included sending inappropriate texts and commenting on what young female staff were wearing. He was also accused of mishandling allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against his close ally and subordinate at Save the Children, Director of Policy, Brendan Cox, in 2015.
Save the Children said the complaints against Cox were investigated in accordance with its procedures and confirmed that Cox was suspended and a disciplinary process began but he resigned before it was completed.
Cox has since quit the two charities he set up in memory of his late wife Labour MP Jo Cox. More here:
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2018/02/22/former-save-children-staffers-speak-out-abusive-culture-under-justin-forsyth
Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod)
The Labour Government spin-doctor Damian McBride resigned his position after it emerged on a political blog that he and another prominent Labour Party supporter, blogger Derek Draper, had exchanged emails discussing the possibility of disseminating rumours McBride had fabricated about the private lives of some Conservative Party politicians and their spouses.
Cafod appointed McBride as their Head of Media. He worked there until June 2014. He returned to the Labour Party as Head of Political Strategy for the Shadow Foreign Secretary, The Rt. Hon Emily Thornberry MP.
Trussell Trust
The high profile Trust runs a national network of food banks. Chris Mould joined the Trust in 2003 and was later appointed Chairman. He left in January 2018 to concentrate on his work with the Foundation for Social Change and Inclusion which operates in The Balkans as well as in Bulgaria.
But there is more to the Trussell Trust and Mould than meets the eye. Full story here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/well-trousered-philanthropists-tory-party-chums-and-food-parcels-for-poor/
Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (Aveco)
Head of the charity bosses’ trade body, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, Sir Stephen Bubb was a Labour Party member of Lambeth Borough Council for Clapham Town ward from 1982. He was chairman when the Labour group protested against rate capping by refusing to set a rate and was among 32 Lambeth councillors who were surcharged for causing the council a financial loss by wilful misconduct. The action disqualified him from being a councillor for five years from the end of March 1986.
He came under scrutiny in August 2013 after it was reported that his 60th birthday bash in the House of Commons had been partly financed by his own charity, ACEVO. And this despite the charity paying him a salary in excess of £100,000, he still felt it was acceptable for the charity to cover some of the costs, stating “seemed just right to celebrate my 60th with a tea party in the House of Lords on Monday!”
National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC)
Peter Watt Director of the NSPCC, was previously Labour’s General Secretary. He resigned following the revelation that a property developer had made donations to the Party through third parties. David Abrahams, gave almost £600,000 to the Party over four years. Watt admitted to officers of Labour’s National Executive Committee that he had known about the arrangement. Under the law, those making donations on behalf of others must give details of who is providing the money.
Read: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7113255.stm
Royal Society of the Arts ( RSA)
Between 1998 and 2003, Matthew Taylor was the Director of the left of centre think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, In 2003 Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair appointed him head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and gave him the task of drawing up the Labour Party’s manifesto for the May 2005 General Election.
Following the re-election of the Labour government he became Chief Adviser on Strategy to the Prime Minister and was involved in several initiatives engaging the public with the political process. He also had a key role in developing the Labour Party’s “Big Conversation” discussion forums.
In 2006 he was appointed Chief Executive of the charity, the RSA, an enlightenment, apolitical organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to social challenges.
National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA)
Geoff Mulgan was a special adviser to Gordon Brown from 1990 to 1992 when he was shadow Trade and Industry secretary. Mulgan described himself as ‘the Clinton campaign’s link to Labour, which involved lots of telephone calls with the Americans’. Mulgan was part of a 1995 ‘secret committee’ led by Peter Mandelson ‘to examine policy changes, that were central to the modernisation of the Labour Party. The group, set up just before Blair flew to meet Rupert Murdoch in 1995, was officially described as outside experts ‘helping to write sections of speeches and background papers’ for the Labour leader. But some senior MPs noticed that the committee was actually an exclusive policy-making forum
Mulgan discharged a number of key roles in the Labour Government between 1997 and 2004 including director of the Government’s Strategy Unit and head of policy in the Prime Minister Tony Blairs’s office.
NESTA was conceived in part thanks to the vision of Oscar-winning director David Puttnam, who recognised the UK’s failure to capitalise on its globally recognised talent for innovation and invention. The country was, in short, bad at turning inventions into marketable applications.
In an effort to reverse this, the UK’s first ever publicly supported national endowment was created with £250 million of National Lottery funding (later supplemented, in 2006, with a further £75 million of Lottery funding drawn down over five years). The idea was that a secure income source would enable greater risks to be taken with UK-based innovations, which could be backed over the long term without being at the behest of government funding cycles and shifts in the political wind.
In 2010, Mulgan was appointed Chief Executive of Nesta the body responsible for distributing the Labour Government’s £250 million endowment for science and technology.
Under his leadership it became an independent charity in April 2012 and its focus shifted towards innovation for public benefit as it concentrated its policies on tackling social problems in the public and voluntary sectors.
He was awarded a knighthood in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours in recognition of his work to advance social innovation.
International Rescue
International Rescue is based in New York and is financially supported by the UK, US and other governments and billionaire, & political manipulator, George Soros.
David Milliband, from 2010 the President and Chief Executive of “International Rescue” based in New York, cost the charity £1million in his first year (taking into account his £300,000 salary, relocation fees and other costs, together with the costs of importing his sidekicks, Ravi Gurumurthy and Ollie Money, (his former political strategist and PR man).
Miliband has never come cheap: in one year as the MP for South Shields in South Tyneside, he grossed £288,000 in outside earnings on top of his parliamentary salary of £65,000.
2018: International Rescue fronted by David Miliband hushed up 37 sex abuse, fraud and bribery allegations. The Department for International Development cut off funding “based on claims of “fraud, bribery and sexual misconduct” among groups awarded funds. A total of £5.4million of taxpayer cash was eventually released. Investigations are ongoing.
Tony Blair expanded his empire to include oil-rich South Sudan. His charity, now has offices in presidential departments across five African countries. His reach in Africa stretches into Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Liberia, Guinea and now the world’s newest country.
David Brown, who worked for five years in the Prime Minister’s strategy unit under Blair heads up AGI’s South Sudan operation.
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing questions over his role as adviser to Malawi President Joyce Banda following a corruption scandal dubbed as ‘cashgate’ which forced Britain and other Western donors to withhold budgetary aid. Blair and his charity the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) has been working closely with President Banda since August last year. Conservative MPs and campaigners in Malawi are now demanding to know whether Blair and his team were aware of the corruption allegations. It said they want to know whether Blair was warned about corruption, and if so what he did about it. If his team was ignorant, then it raises potentially embarrassing questions about what AGI’s “governance” programme meant to achieve.
Other reading:
Tony Blair faces questions over Malawi cash scandal
Oxfam
Oxfam was reported to the Charity Commission by the Tory Party in 2014, for publishing a faux film poster, headed “Lifting the lid on austerity, Britain reveals a perfect storm and it’s forcing more and more people into poverty.” Showing a broiling sea under clouds titled: The Perfect Storm. Added were the words ‘starring zero hours contracts, high prices, benefit cuts, unemployment, childcare costs’. And a post on Twitter which invited readers to hear how Oxfam “investigated the reasons why so many people were turning to food banks in Britain 2014.”
Worthy of consideration is that the late Jo Cox, who was head of policy at Oxfam, was previously an advisor to Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah and also worked for Baroness Kinnock, whose husband Neil was leader of the Labour party between 1983 and 1992.
It is also worth noting that David Pitt-Watson, Oxfam’s honorary treasurer, was also a special advisor (SPAD) for over 20 years and was Assistant General Secretary of the Labour Party from 1997 to 1999.
This is how the Oxfam scandal unfolded.
Oxfam was accused of covering up an investigation into the hiring of sex workers for orgies by staff working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, which killed thousands. After the investigation the charity allowed three men, including the country director, Roland van Hauwermeiren, to resign, and sacked four for gross misconduct, according to an internal 2011 report. The UK government International Development Secretary threatened to cut off all funding to Oxfam unless the charity handed over all information on its workers’ use of sex workers in Haiti. Meanwhile, Oxfam was hit with allegations that employees used sex workers in Chad in 2006, when Van Hauwermeiren was running operations there. The Charity Commission launched a statutory inquiry into Oxfam amid concerns it might not have “fully and frankly disclosed” all details about the Haiti allegations. Oxfam’s deputy chief executive, Penny Lawrence, resigned saying she was “desperately sorry”, as Haiti demanded the prosecutions of aid workers identified as using sex workers. More here:
Apr 2021: More than 50 Congolese women have alleged that they have been sexually abused or exploited by aid workers from some of the world’s top humanitarian organisations, including Oxfam. The investigation, which took almost a year to complete, will send shockwaves through the humanitarian sector.
The allegations come two years after charities pledged to clean up their act when it was revealed that Oxfam had covered up an investigation into the hiring of prostitutes, some allegedly under age, by staff working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Other organisations, including Save the Children and Plan International, were also embroiled in the scandal and reported cases of sexual harassment by staff members. Full report here:
Comment: The UK Charity sector is largely given over to Left-wing Labour Party political polemicist appointee’s with little, if any experience in Charity work.
Massive amounts of financial donations are inappropriately used and tens of thousands of poor and under privileged people are abused and women and young girls blackmailed into providing sexual services for highly paid charity employees. And yet it goes on and on and no one seems to give a toss!!!!
The latest scandal. Only reported. today
Apr 2021: More than 50 Congolese women have alleged that they have been sexually abused or exploited by aid workers from some of the world’s top humanitarian organisations, including Oxfam. The investigation, which took almost a year to complete, will send shockwaves through the humanitarian sector.
The allegations come two years after charities pledged to clean up their act when it was revealed that Oxfam had covered up an investigation into the hiring of prostitutes, some allegedly under age, by staff working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Other organisations, including Save the Children and Plan International, were also embroiled in the scandal and reported cases of sexual harassment by staff members.
caltonjock 
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