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Don’t, ever, establish a charity to inherit your money

One of Britain’s biggest charitable trusts is dismissing its entire board as part of a diversity drive after branding itself “white and privileged”.

The Tudor Trust, which has an endowment of £288 million and received £2.35m of government funding in 2018, wants a “more diverse group” and to put “social justice and anti-racism” at the heart of its work.

The group, which awards about £20 million a year through charitable grants, was founded in 1955 with the financial support of Sir Godfrey Mitchell, founder of the construction company George Wimpey. Several of his descendants have held trusteeships, including Matthew Dunwell and his brother Benjamin, both of whom could face the sack.

An email from interim chair Raji Hunjan of the Tudor Trust, seen by The Telegraph, reveals that the charity plans a “wholesale change” of the family-led board. New trustees and a permanent chair “more representative of the demographics and lived experiences of the communities we serve” will be appointed instead. The overhaul is expected to be complete by August 2024.

Because this is what will inevitably happen. Whatever you meant, thought, the money would be spent upon it will just end up as the same group of twats spending it on their wishes. However you write the rules, it’ll still end up this way. Whoever Popham was, you really think s/he meant to fund Spud?

Hell, sign it over to the Treaury rather than this monstrosity.

I’ve got to be paid for my charity, I do!

Payments made to British families welcoming families of Ukrainian refugees are “nowhere near enough”, amid soaring energy bills and inflation, charities and hosts have said.

Volunteers who host Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion receive £350 a month per family as a “thank you”, provided they don’t charge rent.

But hosts have argued that this money from the Government does not go far enough as energy and food bills continue to rise.

What is it about the difference between a thank you and a covering of costs that escapes people?

Perhaps we should look to the example of Clem Attlee:

Paul Willer obituary
German refugee who fled from the Nazis with his mother and brother and was taken in by the Labour leader Clement Attlee

Never told anyone about it, no press releases, wasn’t known to have happened – publicly – until decades later. And most certainly didn’t ask for any money for doing this.

Attlee had never publicised his hosting of a refugee boy and Willer’s time with the family came to light only a few years ago after a memoir by his mother had been deposited at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. The AJR organised an event at the Houses of Parliament where among those he met was Attlee’s granddaughter. He praised the “extraordinary love that was found from the whole family, children and parents”. Attlee, he said, “did not try and glorify himself in any way”.

Clem was certainly wrong about many things but not this one.

But Hitler was charismatic

That of course being a part of the problem:

She then discusses her friendship with Hitler, describing how she met him many times and found him “extraordinary, fascinating and clever … he was the person who was making the news which made him extremely interesting.”

Lady Mosley, by then a 79-year-old widow, talks repeatedly about her admiration for the Führer, referring to his “mesmeric blue eyes” and adding: “He had so much to say, so interesting, so fascinating … I can’t regret the relationship.”

Varied Mitfords were guilty of all sorts of sillinesses but that’s not even wrong.

Ooooh, squeal like a stuck piggie, Johann Hari is back!

I realised then that I needed to understand what was really happening to him and to so many of us. That moment turned out to be the start of a journey that transformed how I think about attention. I travelled all over the world in the next three years, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, interviewing the leading experts in the world about focus. What I learned persuaded me that we are not now facing simply a normal anxiety about attention, of the kind every generation goes through as it ages. We are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live. I learned there are twelve factors that have been proven to reduce people’s ability to pay attention and that many of these factors have been rising in the past few decades – sometimes dramatically.

I wonder whether it’s going to turn out to be capitalism to blame?

Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.

Looks promising, doesn’t it?

Today, about 35% of workers feel they can never switch off their phones because their boss might email them at any time of day or night. In France, ordinary workers decided this was intolerable and pressured their government for change – so now, they have a legal “right to disconnect”. It’s simple. You have a right to defined work hours, and you have a right to not be contacted by your employer outside those hours. Companies that break the rules get huge fines. There are lots of potential collective changes like this that can restore part of our focus. We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model, which is specifically designed to invade our attention in order to keep us scrolling. There are alternative ways these sites could work – ones that would heal our attention instead of hacking it.

Ooooh, yes!

I think that given this uncertainty, we can’t wait for perfect evidence.

We might in fact get there, yes.

We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies.

Yes, bless the little cotton socks on Minnie Mouse. It is tear power from the corporations, abolish capitalism, and the world will be a better place. Who the hell could see that conclusion coming from Hari?

The Serendipity of Charity Bookshops

There’s no way at all I would have read this without being reliant upon a charity bookshop in a non-English speaking country. Selection issues, d’ye see?

Feed. Young Adult novel, bloggers are the irruption of truth into a staid mainstream media, there’s a pandemic – the zombies have arrived.

Well, OK, and rather well done.

The plot point being that the CDC and all know how to deal with the zombies but don’t because there are those who relish their power over society and think that the restrictions will lead to a better world. You know, one continually run by them?

Given that level of prediction it’s a wonder that it is a novel not a TED talk.

A charity that employs 112 people

Well, actually, one that could only, possibly, max out at 112 employees.

Alarge part of Ianne Fields Stewart’s advocacy is centered on universalizing experiences that are often thought of as a luxury, thus making them accessible to members of marginalized communities. That’s one of the reasons Stewart — a queer, trans, non-binary activist — founded The Okra Project, a New York-based nonprofit that employes Black trans chefs to visit the homes of Black trans people who are experiencing food insecurity to cook them meals.

That’s really pretty specific. Chefs are 139,000 of the population. Blacks are 13.4%. Trans are 0.6% – arguable but that’s what Google says. There are therefore 112 people max who could work for these guys. Nationwide.

That’s really pretty specific.

There’s sharing information and then there’s sharing information

Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn were part of a group of at least 15 senior Labour figures who shared information with Eastern bloc agents, it is claimed.

Jan Sarkocy, a former Czechoslovak spy, described the MPs as “great sources” to himself or his colleagues in the KGB.

The new claims come after he said on Friday that the Labour leader had shared information with the Communist Czechoslovak regime.

My own opinion – based upon no evidence other than just this is what I think they would have done – is that they were over the line. That line between “Here’s a newspaper article” and into “I desire that the system be smashed, here’s some good info.”

But it does depend upon where you draw the line. A generous drawing of it, a too generous one, would have me myself as an agent of the Americans, Brits, Russians and N Koreans all at the same time. That there were some really taking Moscow Gold is known fact. That all were not so. Most I would think would fall under the Tony Benn exception. Regarded by the Soviets as too dippy to be reliable.

As I’ve pointed out before, Sharia marriage is not recognised in UK law

Getting married should be one of the happiest times in a woman’s life, but for some Muslim brides the fairytale can suddenly come to a shocking end.
Rukhsana Noor and Habiba Jaan both found themselves homeless and hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt after they learning that their Sharia marriages were not recognised under UK law.
Both women’s stories are told in a new Channel 4 documentary, The Truth About Muslim Marriage, which exposes the plight of women who discover they have no legal rights after their ‘marriage’ falls apart.
Habiba, a mother of four, found out that she was never legally married to her husband because they’d never registered the marriage. When she begged him for a civil ceremony she discovered that he was actually legally married to someone else.

And thus, obviously, nor is polygamy.

This isn’t, either, some mark of the oppression of Muslims or anything. It is the civil marriage which is the legal part, not the religious one. The standard CoE wedding, when the five (? priest, couple, two witnesses) go off stage for 5 minutes is when the marriage, in the law, actually takes place. The rest is whatever we want to call it but it ain’t the legal part of it all.

I’m actually quite keen on the Portuguese system. Any ceremony you like, anywhere, why the hell not. But if you want the legal protections and rights of a legal marriage then you have to, without exception, rock up to the civil registrar and go through the same process as absolutely everyone else. The advantage being that everyone really does therefore know what’s a legal marriage.

I’m even happy with the idea of no legal recognition of marriage at all on absurdly libertarian grounds but agree that’s just not ever going to happen.

This is all a bit difficult, this Swing Low, Sweet Chariot stuff really

It is a famous refrain and melody. For many in the United States, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” enjoys a hallowed status as one of the cherished of 19th-century African-American spirituals, its forlorn lyrics invoking the darkness of slavery and the sustained oppression of a race.

But here, across the Atlantic, the song has developed a parallel existence, unchanged in form but utterly different in function, as a boisterous drinking song turned sports anthem.

Hhhmmm:

“Such cross-cultural appropriations of U.S. slave songs betray a total lack of understanding of the historical context in which those songs were created by the American slave,” she said.

Well, yes:

In the 1950s, at the same time that slave-era spirituals were having a reawakening as part of the American civil rights movement, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was becoming a popular drinking song in the rugby clubs and pubs of Britain, where the lyrics were often accompanied by a series of bawdy gestures.

And yes:

But Williams laughed when asked if those pieces reflected a larger debate occurring in the rugby community. “The typical crowd that goes to watch the English national rugby team is not likely to be an audience that’s going to think hard about these types of questions or spend much time worrying about political correctness,” he said.

But here’s the thing you see. Aren’t we English entirely and solely responsible for the horrors of chattel slavery in the first place? So what culture are we appropriating if it isn’t our own?

They will be sharing it all with the workers, won’t they?

Spain’s Socialist party may have lost two general elections in the space of six months, ousted their leader and found themselves eclipsed by the anti-austerity Podemos party, but the past 12 months have not been without at least one small victory.

On Thursday, the Spanish Socialist party (PSOE) announced that staff at its Madrid headquarters had won a share of the country’s €2.3bn (£1.96bn) Christmas lottery, El Gordo (the Fat One).

If not why not?

This is not a charity

It’s been seven months since the Daily Mail, through its venomous columnist Katie Hopkins, launched an attack on Creative Access (CA) – a British diversity charity that helps place people from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds secure paid internships in the creative industries, such as publishing, broadcasting, journalism and public relations.

Sadly, it seems that Hopkins and her followers have won. This week it was announced that the charity has lost £2m in funding from the government and is facing imminent closure.

That is government spending.

And it really is just government spending too. They got, assuming I’m reading their accounts right, £4,500 in private donations. £300k or so in donations of services (presumably rent etc) and the other million was half of a two year government grant.

This is not, in any meaningful sense, a charity. It’s government spending.

What fun on charity shops!

The number of charity shops on the high street should be curbed because they cost the Government more in tax breaks than they make in profits, a new report says.

Hmm, mebbe so. But from the report this is interesting:

The US charity, Goodwill Industries6, which runs 3,000 charity shops, manages to convert
83% of overall income into profit for charitable activities. The majority of Goodwill
Industries’ income derives from its charity shops

True, so far as it goes. But Goodwill counts the cost of running its shops as part of its charitable activities. Because that’s where they do the training for people to move onto other jobs.

Ho hum, Johann Hari doesn’t change, does he?

The leopard is not changing his shorts:

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was — at the same time as the Rat Park experiment — a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.

Stanton Peele was pointing this out 25 years ago. I read him pointing this out 20 years ago. Wonder if Hari mentions him in his new book? Be fun if he didn’t, wouldn’t it? And no, I’m not buying it to find out.

Hmm, according to search inside, he doesn’t. Now isn’t that lovely? Hmm, and hmm again.

I wonder what a detailed comparison would show us all. Of course, it could just be that search inside isn’t very accurate…..

Johann Hari resurfaces

And he’s getting some things right for goodness sake! More on this later elsewhere.

One thing though:

The author used to be the Independent’s star columnist, a prolific polemicist and darling of the left, until his career imploded in disgrace when it emerged in 2011 that many of his articles contained quotes apparently said to him but in fact lifted from his interviewees’ books, or from previous interviews by other journalists. Worse, he was exposed as a “sockpuppet”, or someone who anonymously furthers his own interests online.

I’m pretty sure that “Keith” here at Forbes is in fact Hari. And there’s one or two more on pieces of mine around I think.

On the writing of Sharia compliant wills

Oh, there’s going to be fury about this:

Islamic law is to be effectively enshrined in the British legal system for the first time under guidelines for solicitors on drawing up “Sharia compliant” wills.

Under ground-breaking guidance, produced by The Law Society, High Street solicitors will be able to write Islamic wills that deny women an equal share of inheritances and exclude unbelievers altogether.

The documents, which would be recognised by Britain’s courts, will also prevent children born out of wedlock – and even those who have been adopted – from being counted as legitimate heirs.

Anyone married in a church, or in a civil ceremony, could be excluded from succession under Sharia principles, which recognise only Muslim weddings for inheritance purposes.

Nicholas Fluck, president of The Law Society, said the guidance would promote “good practice” in applying Islamic principles in the British legal system.

And that fury will be wildly misplaced. For we are not like the Frogs and others who insist that the State should detail how your very own property is disposed of. We actually have a free and liberal system, which says that you can do what the hell you like with your cash. Leave it all to the cats home, hell leave it to the cat if you wish. So a will that disposes of property on the grounds of religious faith, gender, legitimacy, style of marriage or anything else your religious beliefs might require is already entirely legal under English law.

All this is is a set of guidance notes to make sure that the usual Islamic religious desires are incorporated into wills in a manner that is indeed consistent with English law.

It is not, at all, a change in that underlying law itself. It’s “if this is what you want to do then here’s how you go about doing that”.

Sure, we can all have lovely arguments about whether such a will is being misogynist and all the rest (but then so is primogeniture) but it’s sod all to do with bringing Sharia into English law.

Ritchie is complaining about charities being political

The consequences are obvious, but to take a simple example, the deeply right wing Institute for Economic Affairs is a charity because it, apparently, does not offer political opinion and yet to question the role of the market is, apparently, political. The dichotomy is obvious, unless of course, you’re a neoliberal. Then it’s natural.

This from a man who gets £35k a year from a charity to be political?

On charity versus welfare

I am attacked:

Tim Worstall asks:

And what the fuck’s wrong with voluntary collective action rather than State enforced collective action?

Answer: charity presupposes a condition in which some people have stuff which they can do without, and some people lack stuff that they really need. This inequality (which, like all inequalities, is morally objectionable on the face of it) is only sustained by the actions of the capitalist state in enforcing property rights through its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In a more just world, there would be no need for charity because you would not have a situation in which some people have, whilst others need.

That’s interesting. All inequality is immoral? That I have an IQ above my shoe size while Polly T might well not is immoral?

Aside from this obvious point, I honestly don’t see any moral difference between a spontaneous, voluntary urge to do good on the part of certain individuals, and a reflective, truly collective urge to do good as manifest in a legal requirement to provide support to those in need through the existing system of taxation and welfare.

And that’s even more interesting, isn’t it? There’s no moral difference between the actions of an individual unforced and the forced actions of the same individual? Forced by the monopoly on violence of the State?

And do note that we actually have good evidence that the taxation and welfare system is not in fact voluntary nor freely entered into. For there’s that what, £120 billion, tax gap we keep being told about. Pure and clear evidence that some to many people do not in fact agree with that State system. For by their actions they, at risk to their liberty, deliberately avoid it.