Read the small print before you donate

21 March 2007

That is the point about charity bonanzas. They give us an opportunity to feel a warm glow from having done something to help humanity — without actually worrying, or indeed caring, too much what it was that our money went towards. What about those University of Manchester students who on Red Nose Day were invited, via the student union website, to ‘Dig out your fancy dress and put on your red noses for this Fallowfield bar crawl. You know you want to....You can hold your head up high safe in the knowledge that you’re doing your bit for charity.’ As they slumped to the floor of some seedy Mancunian dive, I just wonder if any of them had a flicker of understanding that, aside from the boost they helped give the brewing trade, the money that they teased from the pockets of their well-meaning sponsors had helped towards the £115,000 awarded to a little-known charity called Rainer to hire a specialist alcohol worker to, er, ‘support young people to reduce the amount of alcohol they consume’?

I doubt it. All that mattered was that some money was going ‘to charity’ — on the back of which they were excused behaviour which any other time might have been considered boorish. And what about those Swindon students who raised a ‘massive’ £525 by sitting in a bath and eating dog food while they had baked beans, flour and cornflakes poured over them: do they share the views of Twin, a charity which has just trousered £803,000 from Comic Relief to campaign against what it regards as the world’s ‘unfair trade rules, such as prices and quantities being determined by powerful institutions and trade bodies’? Of course, it never even crossed their minds.

Two weeks ago, in these pages, Rod Liddle memorably attacked what he called the ‘fascistic smugfest’ of Red Nose Day, deploring the way in which we obediently shower money on charity just because we’re told to by people on the telly. Rod’s piece made me wonder where this £40 million actually goes. The answer, besides the charities mentioned above, seems to be a remarkable number of organisations advocating women’s rights. There was the Women’s Aid Foundation, which was given £112,447 for its campaign against domestic violence. Bassetlaw Women’s Aid separately received £66,174 for the battered women of Bassetlaw. The Family Welfare Association received £114,501 for its ‘domestic abuse service’ in Leicester — which, contrary to its name, doesn’t offer a service beating up members of your family on your behalf, but helps the beaten-up. There was £43,000 for Women’s Integrated Services, Harrow; £65,726 for the Migrant Women’s Network; and even £77,236 for Paws for Kids, which ‘takes in animals when abused families enter refuges’ — in other words, it keeps battered women’s bunnies in fresh carrots.