A CORRUPT ELECTION WITH THE VOICES OF POVERTY MUFFLED BY THE CHARITY COMMISSION -
LETTER FROM TAP PUBLISHED BY THE GUARDIAN 23 APRIL 2015.
Never again must we go through an election for the mother of parliaments while the protests of charities that work with and for the poorest citizens are muffled by a ruling from the Charity Commission. Oxfam’s “perfect storm” tweet in June 2014, related to a report by it and two other charities on the impact of austerity, was an entirely reasonable analogy given all the facts and circumstances of the impact of cuts, caps and council tax on the health and wellbeing of the people they serve since the last election.
The commission decided that the tweet “could be misconstrued by some as party political campaigning”. That cuts to the heart of the human right of free speech in a democracy. There is a smell of corruption in the notion that receipt of funding from taxpayers by charities directly from government, or from donations that recover donors’ taxes, pays for a gag on truthful and effective protests against poverty.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I keep on hearing the Tory MPs bang on about the recovery and prosperity they have delivered and how having a government with some basic humanity in it will apparently put this in jeopardy but with in work poverty at record levels, foodbank use higher than ever, you have to think that the prosperity they talk about isn’t for the average Joe.
Seems to me that what Richard says about Jersey in a recent post, namely
“Jersey is not a functioning democracy. It is a captured state where state revenues are used to pursue private interests”
is perilously close to being true of the United Kingdom as a whole.
Richard
(Please delete if I’m being stupid and have missed the point.)
I don’t understand why the Institute for Fiscal Studies isn’t gagged in the same way by the Charities Commission. I thought it received a large percentage of its income from the Economic and Social Research Council, which in turn receives funding from the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. If I’m right, surely that makes it a taxpayer funded charity, at least in part?
They are not campaignign
Incidentally, neither am I, in fairness
The Gagging Law does not apply to me – partly because of monetary limits though
“could be misconstrued by some as party political campaigning”. This places an unreasonable and impossible constraint on charities. It is beyond the power of anyone to determine how some other person might misconstrue a statement possibly by intent. The use of statute to override the conventions and traditions of common law is offensive and demeans those who brought it about. How long until this hypocritical statute is widened to apply to a statement such as the one I am making now?
Disagreement is not a barrier to harmony but an invitation to resolve a problem.
Ed Miliband did promise 38 degrees that he would repeal the gagging law.
http://blog.38degrees.org.uk/2014/04/03/great-news-labour-commits-to-repeal-gagging-law/
He organised a meeting in Westminster to discuss with 38 degrees.
It shows he will respond to democratic pressure and will listen.
the compliant was made by Connor Burns Conservative for Bournemouth West. I doubt if many who support this blog and live there will be voting for him.
Contrast this with the freedom of the tory press to spew out lies every day on their front pages to try to influence the vote.
Indeed.
Or indeed the ability of all those organisations such as CBI, big businesses, IMF etc to make statements about the British election and economy. As ever one rule for the elite and another rule for the rest of us.
The whole political system appears rotten, we need a written constitution.