Charities

Thursday

Prue Leith

Why is the MoJ making life so hard for prison charities?

For 15 years The Clink charity has run commercial restaurants in prisons, training inmates to cook and teaching them front-of-house service. It is a vital way of giving offenders a second chance. But many of its operations have been forced to close due to the folly of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). At Styal women’s prison in Wilmslow, Cheshire, The Clink restaurant, which has been running for ten years, cannot continue to operate. Despite plenty of interest from inmates, recent changes to the eligibility criteria have drastically reduced the number of women permitted to work there. ‘Sometimes we are trying to run it with five, possibly only three, women,’ explains

Thursday

Michael Simmons

Is Britain funding organisations that wish us harm?

Frivolous state funding isn’t only going to chancers, the plain lucky and the devious, but also to those who would see Britain – and the West – come to harm. Just over a year ago, the National Secular Society (NSS) compiled a dossier for the Charity Commission which called for 44 charities that had ‘fuelled anti-Semitism and division’ and shown support for ‘Hamas and other anti-western actors’ to be investigated. In every case these organisations have kept their charitable status. The charities in the dossier have the stated purpose of ‘the advancement of religion for the public benefit’. In the NSS’s view, this is being used as cover for political

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: What we lose when we lose our factories

Chains of command Sir: Matthew Lynn is correct to emphasise the economic dangers of deindustrialisation (‘Not made in Britain’, 25 January). But there are cultural dangers too. It’s now 40 years since Correlli Barnett and I made a television programme called Assembled in Britain, drawing attention to the alarming retreat of manufacturing. No recent government has respected, still less encouraged, manufacturing industry. The result is today’s mess. What can you say about a civilisation that cannot produce the goods it needs, other than that civilisation loses integrity and pride? In 1944 Matthew King wrote a small classic called The Unwritten Laws of Engineering, pointing out that manufacturing civilisations were daily able

Friday

Stephen Daisley

Why is the SNP gagging charities?

The SNP handles criticism as well as the Incredible Hulk handles irritation. It’s why the party’s own parliamentarians are banned from making critical comments. The Nationalists are an independence-first organisation and rely on two important psychological tools. The first is projecting Nicola Sturgeon as the ‘Chief Mammy’ (her own term; ‘mammy’ being Scottish slang for ‘mother’), a national figure more akin to the Queen than the Prime Minister. The second is framing any institutional or organisational dissent not as standard, democratic debate (in the way that businesses, unions and charities routinely take the UK Government to task) but as something more controversial, political — even unpatriotic. As such, it is entirely

Thursday

Debbie Hayton

The sinister attacks on the LGB Alliance

Lesbian and gay rights are still not secure in the UK. This week the LGB Alliance – a group used to being smeared and misrepresented – came under further attack. With astonishing impudence, the LGBT+ Consortium, Gendered Intelligence, the LGBT Foundation, TransActual, and the Good Law Project ganged up with Mermaids UK in a staggering appeal to strip the LGB Alliance of its charitable status. The legal action is being brought in the name of Mermaids UK, a controversial charity that works with transgender-identified children. If it wasn’t such a serious attack on a legitimate charity, the appeal would be laughable. It’s clear from their submission that Mermaids doesn’t much