Charidee

More shroud waving from the third sector.

The government’s spending cuts could cost voluntary organisations billions of pounds, the charities’ regulator in England and Wales has warned.

Charity Commission chairwoman Dame S Uzi Leather said cutting funding to charities that were providing key public services would be short sighted.

She told ABC One’s Politics Show that it threatened to undermine the prime minister’s Big Society project.

Well, firstly, if these charities do things that people want, they will fund them voluntarily. If they fail due to lack of funds, then people don’t want them and they will deservedly disappear. If they are providing essential public services, then why are they charities at all? And, frankly, why should any of us concern ourselves with Cameron’s Big Society, let alone fund it?

Dame Suzi Leather: “If you cut the charities, you’re cutting our ability to help each other”

No, I don’t think so. People don’t need taxpayer funded charities to help each other, they can do it perfectly well by themselves. That’s how charity – genuine charity – works.

Any charity that takes money from the taxpayer is not a charity, it is a parasite. The Big Society is so much political opportunism. I’ll have nothing to do with it, so don’t care one jot if chopping away the funding to the third sector undermines it – jolly good thing, too, frankly. Two birds with one stone.

5 Comments

  1. I’ll be bloody ecstatic if the loathsome interfering busybodies at the road safety ‘charity’ Brake loose their government funding.

    What is the purpose of a ‘road safety charity’ anyway? What sort of morons give to an organisation whose facile raison d’etre is ‘Stopping the carnage and the emissions’. FFS.

    (Suzi Leather sounds hot though.)

  2. And if they do a good job, people who support that aim will be happy to give. If the the government needs to provide the service, then it should not hold charitable status.

    As well as Brake, we can add ASH, CASH, Alcohol Concern…

    All are lobby groups funded by government to lobby government to do wt it planned to do anyway.

  3. I imagine Dame Suzy is doing the usual ‘see this cute puppy? If the government cuts our funding, the puppy will die’.

    The problem is, as usual, the state, in this case doling out our money and getting many charities hooked on government cash. Some of these are CINOs (Charities in name only) and merely out-riders of the control-freak state, helping to push forward its control agenda (ASH etc) and I can only hope that they feel the bracing wind of austerity – but I doubt it. Others are certainly worthy institutions doing valuable work.

    What we need are tax cuts. Then we can decide what to do with our money, rather than the greedy, looting state taking it and deciding for us (minus a commission).

  4. I write particularly for Voyager (comment#1).

    You can find a photo of Dame Suzi Leather here, on page 2, with probable date 2007 (though there is some reference on the Charity Commission’s website link that indicates 2009): http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/library/guidance/cc3(a)text.pdf

    The Welsh do slightly better, in having 2 links to the same photo (though with Welsh text) from: http://search.charitycommission.gov.uk/search/?IW_FIELD_WEB_STYLE=SUZI+leather&IW_DATABASE=www.charity-commission.gov.uk

    There are no photos here, for the guidance of the generous or curious amongst those speaking Somali: http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/library/guidance/cc3asomali.pdf ; likewise for the Punjabi speakers: http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/library/guidance/cc3apunjabi.pdf (though I suppose there might be more of them in the UK).

    Also, we can manage without a photo for “Good Governance in Action”: http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/about_us/about_the_commission/ccnews30.aspx#good The register of ‘interests’: http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/about_us/about_the_commission/decint.aspx#5 gives nothing away, though they come across well as to why she thinks she’s interesting (or is that important) rather than what might be a ‘conflict of interest’: clearly none of those.

    If you’d like a caricature rather than a photo, try this (from 2007): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1568137/Quango-queen-takes-on-the-public-schools.html

    Meanwhile, over with Suzi Quattro, under the strangely related title of “Naked Under Leather”, we have: http://www.myspace.com/mysuziquatro/photos/albums/naked-under-leather-images/1192188

    As I said earlier, I write particularly for Voyager: though I did have ‘fun’ with the ‘research’.

    Best regards

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