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Keeping an eye
on charities
Stuart
Hartill learns that free speech isn’t
always to be found where you’d expect it.
I had a positively
surreal experience recently.
In effect, I was barred
from the local branch (Isle of Man) AGM of
Amnesty International for exercising the
right to free speech. Christian staff at the
AGM venue don’t like my saying that overseas
aid needs more scrutiny and, in particular,
evangelical charities are not a good use of
public money.
It happened because our
Amnesty group meets in the One World Centre
(OWC), which started as a joint initiative
by local campaign groups (Oxfam, Amnesty,
Friends of the Earth etc.). The OWC was
originally based in a conference centre run
by evangelical friends of the current staff.
It moved on when, having traded enough on
our “good works” to get government bookings,
they raised the rent dramatically.
It is now housed,
rent-free, on a floor of the Manx Co-op’s
administrative building. It also gets
Education Department funding to send people
into schools to talk about developing-world
and environmental issues, and is closely
involved in the Manx government’s
overseas-aid policy.
All round, it appears an
ideal “rainbow coalition” answer to
small-town campaign groups’ needs – a place
to hold group meetings and collaborate on
campaigns that aren’t run by church or
state.
Except it isn’t.
Vital
information
For example, no gays or
other local minorities are involved. And the
involved groups are dominated by Christians
who can’t see how a crossover between their
church and “secular” community work shuts
out non-churchgoers.
They mainly socialise
with other Christians and habitually pass on
vital information at church events, thus
excluding everyone else. They also assume
that membership of one group implies support
of all, which rules out critical discussion
of individual organisations or policies
(e.g. Tearfund or CAFOD).
Another problem is the
obsession with “positive thinking”. The OWC
have a bit of a party line on this, probably
derived from a vacuous New Age publication,
Positive News, which you often find
in “alternative culture” hangouts such as
health-food or fair-trade shops.
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Positive
News –
“a vacuous New Age publication” |
The idea is only to
report the successes of plucky native people
against big bad Westernism, strongly
seasoned with mystic “wisdom”. You never,
ever, mention that the poor sods are, say,
unjustly imprisoned, or living in
communities plagued with unemployment or
alcoholism. That would suggest that they
live in the material world like the rest of
us, and may even choose to.
Rubberstamping
This has had a knock-on
effect on our Amnesty campaigning, as we
become dependent, for example, on OWC
resources to run off case notes to
distribute at public events. Their staff
like only lightweight, uncontroversial cases
– no politicos or trade unionists, no
lawbreakers, no LGBTs, nobody who defends
themselves against state violence, nobody
who has been tortured, nobody facing
execution. That would be “negative” and
“might put the public off”.
The other irony is that,
when another secular committee member
stepped down, I briefly joined the OWC
management committee myself to try to
broaden the representative views. But I
quickly felt I was there to rubberstamp
predecided policies, not ask questions or
put other views. After being unable to
interrupt the “feel-good” chatter and ask
even basic questions at one Saturday
“blue-sky thinking” all-dayer and another
mid-January evening, I just gave up.
But I do raise those
questions, among many others, on my blog,
Clinging to a Rock – questions about
dubious evangelical activity in Africa, or
concerns of East European friends and
relatives about the breakdown of civil
society and the public sector caused by
interfering Western faith-based charities.
I also know from working
in offshore finance that the Manx charity
register, unlike the highly professional
Manx companies registry, just registers
documents. It doesn’t scrutinise or police.
For example, a church linked in
international reports to a people-smuggling
conviction in the Manx courts several years
ago remains registered.
Guilt money
It seems absolutely
reasonable to me to ask who vets
overseas-aid applications and how. Who
ensures our government makes informed
decisions, rather than secretive deals with
lobbyists?
It is also reasonable to
suggest people check out “charities”
properly instead of just dropping guilt
money (which could even subsidise a
bloodbath) into the tin.
Sadly, the OWC seem to
take this as an insult, rather than an
honest attempt to set people thinking about
world issues. So when, as publicist for the
Amnesty group, I circulated notice of the
AGM, the OWC staff refused to open the
building if I attended. Our treasurer
(another OWC committee member) was told to
collect the key beforehand and put it
through the letterbox afterwards.
I learnt all this via a
phone call from the chairman two days before
the AGM. By implication, the price of future
cooperation with the OWC was that I should
make a 70-mile round trip merely to be told
to apologise and censor myself over a matter
that doesn’t even involve Amnesty, which
isn’t a charity and never takes funds from
any government.
As a busy parent who sees
little enough of his family, anyway, I
didn’t waste a precious Saturday on such
nonsense. I had a very pleasant day with my
wife and daughter instead. As for the
future, most individuals involved will
either potter on quietly as an official
local group (as we have for years where
interest groups don’t interfere) or plod on
as individual members of the UK Amnesty
section (which most of us are, anyway).
But, as an Amnesty member
who, on principle, always campaigns against
censorship of evangelical dingbats whom I
would cross the road to avoid in person, I
just love the irony.
Stuart
Hartill lives on the Isle of Man. A
founder member of
Isle of Man Freethinkers, he is also a
human-rights activist and writes a blog,
Clinging to a Rock, which pokes fun
and tries to raise awkward questions far too
often for some local tastes.
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