Katie Lam is the Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the MP for Weald of Kent.
When people give money to charity, they reasonably expect that it will be spent on the things that the charity is there to do.
So, if people give money to a donkey sanctuary, they should reasonably be able to expect that their money will be spent on rescuing and caring for neglected donkeys. If people believed that their money was being spent instead on, say, organising an environmental protest, they might never have given the money in the first place.
And yet in far too many cases, charities in our country are taking people’s money, on the implicit promise that it will be spent on a cause that they care about and then spending it on divisive and ideological projects.
Just this week, it emerged that Shelter, a taxpayer-funded homelessness charity, had tried to co-opt the personal testimony of a formerly homeless veteran to push pro-migrant propaganda.
That veteran wanted to talk about his military service, his subsequent homelessness, and his experience of PTSD. Shelter told him that this was “exactly the sort of story they were looking for”.
And yet Shelter employees tried to get him to change his statement, to “address” the fact that “people conflate veterans being homeless with migrants ‘getting homes’”.
In other words, they tried to turn the heartfelt testimony of a veteran into a piece of political propaganda, about a subject he had never mentioned, in service of their ideological commitment to supporting immigration.
This alone would be bad enough. It’s a complete insult to that veteran, and to those who’ve donated money to Shelter on the premise that they exist to help people off the streets.
But it’s particularly galling to see this kind of ideological capture of a homelessness charity. Mass migration has clearly made housing more expensive, not to mention the fact that many of those living in social housing have come here from abroad.
Unfortunately, this is far from the only case of charities taking money from people, in good faith, and then spending it on divisive and ideological projects which have little to do with their stated purpose.
We’ve seen exactly the same playbook, for example, from the Church of England’s Commissioners, in service of their disastrous and historically absurd plans to hand out reparations. Under their ‘Project Spire’ plans, they’re trying to divert £100 million of donations, given in order to support the upkeep of parish churches, to a reparations fund for black-owned businesses.
As it happens, the whole idea is based on false history. The Church claims that this fund will address their role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In fact, there’s no evidence that the Church profited from the trade, and many Church of England clergymen were amongst the most vocal advocates of abolishing the trade altogether.
But even if the historical case stood up to scrutiny, it’s still completely dishonest – not to mention illegal under charities law – to take people’s money for the upkeep of parish churches, only to spend it on an ideological and divisive project like this.
Then, there are the thousands of charities which receive taxpayer money to pursue similar ideological crusades. As Chris Philp has highlighted so well, this is especially poisonous when it comes to the border. The Home Office alone pays out millions of pounds a year to charities which undermine its efforts to secure our borders, including by launching expensive legal actions against the very department which has funded them.
Whether it’s individuals having their donations spent on projects that they would never have consented to, or taxpayer money being funneled to nakedly political organisations which undemocratically undermine the government, something has clearly gone badly wrong in the charitable sector. Shelter’s attempt to twist the testimony of a veteran is a particularly galling example, but this problem is now endemic.
At the very least, charities should be transparent about what they’re doing, and about what causes they’re pushing. Wherever we can, the Conservatives will hold them accountable.