"Just because I'm Conservative, it doesn't mean I back all Mrs Thatcher's ideas". (All Hail to Thee, Blessed Margaret, Earth Goddess and Mistress of my soul.)
"Just because I'm Labour, it doesn't mean I'm a raging socialist". (We'll keep the Red Flag flying....)
"Just because I'm Liberal Democrat, it doesn't mean I support lunatic policies". (When we're elected, we'll not only legalise paedophilia, we'll make it compulsory.)
Often the information omitted from a politician's speech is far more relevant than that included. You have to translate what the lying SOB should have said. If you think I have a low opinion of the Reverend Blair and his colleagues, you should see the wickedly funny and incredibly foulmouthed political blog Devil's Kitchen (devilskitchen.me.uk). Another blogger recommended him thus:
The Devil's Kitchen is one of the foremost blogs in the UK. He makes "Those Bastards", much loved by Dr Crippen, seem like a Quaker Meeting. The DK is bawdy, foul-mouthed, tasteless, vulgar, offensive and frequently goes beyond all boundaries of taste and decency. So why on earth does Dr Crippen read the DK? Because he reduces me to a state of quivering, helpless laughter.
The DK author recently described our Foreign Secretary David Milliband as "a mendacious sack of shit". This is probably the only nice thing he has ever said about Milliband, or indeed any British politician. It was a refreshing reminder of the savage abuse Jonathan Swift heaped on the high and mighty 300 years ago. This particular vilification was inspired by Milliband's reference to several top British charities supporting the latest European Union treaty, which is about to be press ganged through Parliament. How could any decent person disagree with the opinions of the biggest and most respected NGOs in the country? Well, on closer scrutiny of their accounts, the Devil discovered that all these "charities" are in receipt of truckloads of British Government and/or EU money. No wonder they were all singing from the Milliband hymn sheet.
It was an extra depressing revelation for me personally, as I actively supported one of them (the NSPCC, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) for 20 years and raised thousands of pounds for them. (As many cynics have pointed out, in Britain we have the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals.) The NSPCC was founded by the Reverend Benjamin Waugh in 1889. He was sickened, as many people were, by the thousands of abused, neglected and hungry children in London, the biggest and richest city in the world at that time. (In the first place it was the London SPCC.) Unlike the others, he had the drive and determination to do something about it. His portrait shows a man with the flowing beard and piercing eyes of an Old Testament prophet. It took someone with ferocious "fire in the belly" to save these children and he had it by the furnaceful.
For over a century the NSPCC did a prodigious amount of child protection work on a shoestring income. But, of course, charity bosses have become more and more ambitious, expansionist, "professional" and "commercial". How could you possibly argue with "professionalism" and "efficiency"? The more money raised, the more you can help abused children, famine victims, multiple sclerosis sufferers, or whoever the charity serves. I went to a NSPCC meeting around 1992 where the national fundraising director explained their latest moneymaking ideas. He obviously lived on a different planet to the street collectors like me. Of course, he still wanted the money from the little guys, like the local, tireless and utterly faithful fundraising committees, but his everyday life involved big business sponsorship (e.g. get a supermarket chain to adopt you as their "Charity of the Year") , seeking major media visibility, launching expensive commercials and PR campaigns, promoting initiatives such affinity credit cards......
Judging from the plum senior charity jobs advertised in national newspapers, he was typical of a new breed of charity careerists. Sooner or later, that sort of "charity" executive is drawn inevitably to the bottomless trough of taxpayers' money controlled by the odious likes of Blair and Milliband. But once a charity takes any substantial sum of government money, even for supplying specific expert "services", it is a lost soul. You know that a person needs only 5 or 10% of shares in a business to have a controlling stake. You don't need 51% of the stock.
Similarly, once the state is contributing more than, say, 5% of income, it has the charity by the balls. The charity bosses can't live (or think they can't live) without the state's money and thus cannot help but support any government policy. In effect they are a branch of the state, but a special type of branch where the luckless public are voluntarily paying most of the tax. The "charity" street collectors like me, rattling our boxes in our spare time, become unpaid taxmen. It is a win-win-win situation for the state. They co-opt charity resources and thus effectively increase taxation without Parliamentary approval. They silence a previously independent organisation, held in great public esteem because of its enormous good work, which might have opinions unpalatable to the Government.
These opinions carry considerable weight if the charity is perceived as honest, competent and independent in its specialist area. An obvious example in the case of the NSPCC was some years ago when it pointed out the blindingly obvious - that children are safest from physical and sexual abuse in a traditional intact family. Plainly this is not welcome advice in numerous "progressive" circles. Also, as I pointed out in an earlier post, existing Government policy undermines family stability by facilitating adultery and single parenthood and thus probably increases the sum of childhood misery. But charities can go on being perceived as "independent" for a long time after they have been captured by the State. How many people ever examine their accounts, think of who is paying the piper and apply a suitable interpretation (Non Government Organisation means Government Organisation) to their PR utterances? I never looked at the NSPCC accounts in the 20+ years I collected for them.
The implications of the state (and, even worse, the EU) controlling "NGO"s are endlessly sinister. The whole point of a charity is that it is supported by voluntary contributions. This has the disadvantage of restricted income and involves continuous competitive effort to fundraise. But it encourages creation of a widespread support base where the loss of an individual donor is less important. It ensures continuous contact with the general public and their opinions. It offers the dignity of independence where the charity is free to provide services where it thinks the most urgent need or appropriate recipients exist.
Also it is visibly distinct from local or national government. This was very significant in the case of the NSPCC. Parents knew that the local NSPCC "cruelty" officer was not a policeman or civil servant or social worker. In many cases parents at the end of their tether approached the NSPCC to seek help when they had hurt their children, or felt about to hurt them. They trusted the long established reputation of the charity - that they would be sympathetically helped and the family kept together, with the risk of the children being taken into care much reduced. Concerned family members or neighbours who suspected child abuse would approach the NSPCC in preference to the police or social services.
All the opposite factors apply as the charity subtly slides into state control. Why should citizens give their hard earned (and hard taxed) money to an organisation which is also receiving piles of the tax money extorted from them? The whole motivation to give and the nobility and generosity of charitable giving is undermined. The energy of the charity gets diverted in ways alien to their original objectives. The fact that the NSPCC had any opinion on the European Union is bizarre: what special knowledge or interest have they in international relations? The charity has to pay attention to an area if its paymasters hint that resources are needed there, regardless of their own expert opinions. Why should the public trust the employees of a charity which is merely a disguised branch of the state and is thus obliged to observe every highly suspect regulation and guideline?
The public confidence in the NSPCC has also been severely damaged by a series of disasters, notably the horrible death of Victoria Climbie. This little girl was failed by every agency which might have helped her, including the NSPCC, the London Social Services and a hospital doctor in the National Health Service. About the only person with the intelligence and compassion to help her was a cab driver, who saw her catastrophic condition shortly before she died and drove her straight to hospital. The ever increasing income did little to improve the competence or basic common sense of NSPCC staff. This is hardly surprising as over half the grossly expanded NSPCC income is now going into publicity campaigns rather than child protection services.
Every organisation makes mistakes, but the way they respond and admit fault is crucial. The PR speak of the current NSPCC director defending the charity after Victoria's death was in unbelievable contrast to the attitude of the NSPCC National Director in the late 1980s after a comparable disaster. He was a doctor, who, like the retired doctor in my earlier post, sadly lacked all training in bullshit, evasion, garbage, Political Correctness, Public Relations and Communications Strategy. Heidi Koseda, a 5 year old girl, was locked in a room and left to starve to death. Before she died, she was reduced to eating strips of wallpaper torn from the wall. A NSPCC officer came to her home, but failed to see her and put the file away after falsely reporting he had seen her. The Director at that time could speak only in plain honest English which needed no translation and his grief and distress at the failure of the charity was palpable.
The public response to this tragedy, just before the charity's 100th anniversary in 1989, was remarkable. People were putting extra money in collecting boxes, saying that the NSPCC had received a pile of appalling publicity, but they knew it was an isolated lapse in a huge history of public service. The NSPCC was still serving abused children who would suffer all the more if the public lost faith and stopped giving money.
The language of money looks something like English, but the quantities described in the media usually lack any connection with everyday reality. What does £12.4 billion ($25 billion) really mean in plain English? Put one way, it is one of the estimates for the National Health Service computer project I mentioned in a recent posting. Admittedly this figure is probably as fictional and flexible as the shoe production figures in George Orwell's "1984". But you have to start somewhere, even if the figure won't end at 12.4 billion.
Spoken quickly, it sounds like a larger version of your weekly grocery bill. Translated into physical reality, it is more than half of the houses in Reading, a town of 250,000 people. Put another way it is three large family cars for every single man, woman and child in Reading. There is physically not enough space in town to park these cars. In plain English, these 800,000 cars parked nose to tail would stretch from Detroit to Los Angeles. It is an insane, unreal, eye watering, mind bending, obscene and unbelievable sum of money for a service ancilliary to the alleged core functions of the NHS (i.e. caring for the sick, injured and disabled).
There is no reasonable confidence that this monstrous Information Technology (IT) scheme will ever work remotely satisfactorily or deliver any benefits commensurate with the investment. Yet once launched, there seems to be no political will to cancel it or settle for a more modest system and spend the loot on some real NHS disaster areas. There is no shortage of the latter, despite what you hear from the ludicrous Michael Moore in "Sicko". Care of the elderly, cleaning/infection control and decent prostheses for amputees all spring to mind as needing radical improvement. These are all problems where fancy IT support is irrelevant. But, as numerous cynics pointed out, organisations exist for their own benefit, not for the good of the luckless clients. The one thing in "Sicko" which was right on target was the depiction of the NHS doctor's lifestyle, with his new Audi and luxury home. Doctors have done best out of the recent massive increases in NHS spending.
The lack of basic numeracy among much of the population is a stumbling block in translating any Government expenditure into plain English and getting people sufficiently outraged. This £12.4 billion is a fraction of the money squandered by the British Government alone (£100 billion per year according to one estimate). But the ten or twelve figure sums poured down the toilet lack any clear physical meaning. And don't even get me started on the EU corruption and waste...... If more journalists expressed some government folly by saying, for example, that this NHS project alone will cost new Ford Mondeos stretching from London to Moscow, would it make any difference?
Does any of this have relevance to a Christian? Well, so many UK and US charities are of Christian origins and continue to draw massive Christian support. The "professional" fundraisers really know this when they are targeting possible sources of help, whether cash donations or volunteers. Churches are always near the top of their hit list. The choice of Christmas cards offered by secular charities for fundraising purposes is revealing; they always include a good choice of beautiful religious cards along with those depicting only snow, robins and holly. It is sickening to see Christian goodwill being hijacked by an alien state or superstate and pressed into anti-Christian service. But at least there are still independent charities to which you can switch your money.
Politics is far worse because there is no alternative Parliament or credible existing alternative parties. The few which exist in Britain are tiny, powerless and stuffed with nutcases and sociopaths. Setting up a new Christian party would be horribly expensive. Yet some alternative is desperately needed; the shameless mendacity and venality of politicians in the main parties invites only the worst and most cynical interpretations. Tony Blair proclaimed 10 years ago that he was a "pretty straight guy" and has now moved to a 4 million dollar sinecure with JP Morgan. The only sane conclusion you can draw is that every senior British politician is automatically corrupt. The 4 million dollars is obviously intended as up front corruption of every top British (and other senior Western) politician for the rest of eternity; keep your nose clean, don't offend us and your semi-eternal reward will be great on earth... Like the corruption of charities above, it is an all-time bargain. Great control for very little money.
As bad money drives out good, so any remotely intelligent and honorable Christian will shun political life. Even if you are heroically idealistic and austere, you cannot help but suspect that your colleagues are eyeing a massive future payoff. And they will be far more ruthless and less principled than you in any fighting for senior positions. Genuine Christian politicians of the past, such as Konrad Adenauer, will seem as unreal and unimaginable as a Hobbit. It is already impossible to imagine any Western politician behaving as courageously and honourably as he did, in resisting the flying of Nazi flags over his home city of Cologne.
