Some time ago I labelled Oxfam ‘the anti-capitalist lobby group which is also a part-time aid charity’: my column has repeatedly highlighted the fact that donors have unknowingly funded a hard-left think-tank (recent publisher of a list of ‘the eight people who own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’) as well as a Third World relief operation that has now been tainted by allegations of sex abuse. I also objected to the plague of its 650 charity shops, cannibalising the trade of established small businesses in struggling high streets.
So I have scant sympathy for Oxfam’s embattled boss Mark Goldring. But I would not want the current witch hunt for disrespecters of women (and worse) to lead, as some wealth managers have predicted, to a fall-off in philanthropic giving. Britons donate almost £10 billion a year to good causes, and the fragile fabric of a society in which public funding is increasingly scarce depends upon us continuing to do so.
But if the result of the Oxfam scandal is to divert cash from big, smug, mismanaged multinational charities to smaller local projects that are easier to scrutinise and whose social impacts are more easily measured, then so much the better.
This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business, which appears in this week’s Spectator
Comments