How I got on people’s nerves this month

In the UK, we have had a flap over the restructure of our membership body for charitable organisations - the 100 year old National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Apparent cuts to its small charity support, and the hiring of 6 Directors on high salaries set the cat among the pigeons. The open letters, and fur, were flying.

The NCVO backlash reveals a sector faultline that only direct workforce representation can bridge

Never one to avoid wading into a crisis and making sworn enemies in my ongoing attempts to nuke my entire career from orbit, I decided to emerge swearing from my cardboard box under a bridge, bottle of meths in hand. Writing in the best third sector organ nobody can afford to read, Third Sector magazine, my argument was that, first, NCVO has always had this big gulf at the heart of it - small and large, public and private, who is at the table? Different kinds of organisations who think they are not being heard or represented. Their history (on which there is a full book) shows that this faultline has always been there.

How, we might ask, can we bring together so many different causes, interests, ideas, cultures, under one umbrella for the sector - especially at a time when people are always competing, fighting, focused on their own interests. (I’m sorry, but it’s true - the poorer the sector gets, the more cut-throat and fragmented it becomes. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.)

So I suggested we sidestep this. Because honestly, if we want to get beyond narrow sectoral and segmentary interests, we need to turn our attention to the bigger gap in our own industry.

My argment was that we need an individual membership organisation (where people join, not charities) for the whole nonprofit workforce. That would give us more democratic representation for the sector, starting from the workforce up.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. First, a democratic membership organisation of individual workers could better represent the true views of the sector and those in it than solely managerial levels who must be bound by institutional politics. CEOs are gonna CEO, and trustees are gonna trustee. They will put industrial interests first, because it’s their job, if they are drawn from institutional members. But take them out of that space and you may find they take different positions (I know I have). Even if they don’t, look at the balance of numbers: what may work for charitable businesses may not work for workers and clients. That is a discussion and debate worth having, on a more democratic basis.

It could also span the divide between people in funding organisations and the funded - grantmakers and grantees have a lot more in common when you take them out of their immediate professional roles. It could move us away from the anxieties about political alignment that constrain organisations.Create a new body drawn from their membership, and their voices are liberated. As a force for the people of the sector, it would be free to take positions in tune with our values – not with the business interests of larger charities, philanthropists or government.

It may also provide an outlet for all of our deeper concerns about how this industry works, and even a restorative for the morale of the sector. After all, my argument has always been that silencing critique is what damages morale and stokes burnout. Gaslighting is exhausting.

In this, it’s important to note that the two best known membership bodies in the nonprofit world in the UK are NCVO and ACEVO (the Association for Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations). One represents businesses, and one represents CEOs. This is basically a VCS version of the CBI (Confederation of Business Interests, I mean, Industry), and the IoD (the Institute of Directors). Neither of those proivate sector anaogues claims to represent its workforce, either in worldview or industrial matters, so assuming that NCVO and ACEVO can do so in the charity world seems excessively hopeful. Not because they aren’t decent people, doing good work - they are. But because they have to represent the interests of their members, and their members have the interests of the industry and the market and economic forces that drive it at heart. With that comes ideology, whether overt, or, more likely, unconscious.

So, “without something that allows us more directly to represent the voices and values of the vast majority of the charity sector – its workforce and, by extension, the people and communities it supports – these organisations risk becoming, in effect, liaison with governmental ideology, B2B commercial services bodies and federations of the largest corporate charities,” was what I said in Third Sector. (Shit, did I really say it like that? I don’t think I’ll be getting any invitations to NCVO or ACEVO’s after-work drinkies any time soon….

[Edit: somebody suggested today I need to point out I’m not actually actively hated by most of the sector - it’s just schtick. Because, let’s be honest, most important people don’t really give a shit what I say or even know who I am….]

Isn’t it time for a union?

So, following this along, what could such a democratic membership body be?

There was some positivity about the proposal, and of course, a few objections or alternatives suggested, with some good debate on social media. Many of the immediate responses to the article focused the need for more, smaller infrastructure bodies with memberships of organisations. That was where the current energy was, after all.

Others suggested that exactly such bodies already existed - none of the ones proposed seemed the same to me at all. (There were quite a few indignant responses: ‘How dare you! That’s what we do/ what we want to do/ I haven’t really read the post but we might do and I feel threatened by someone potentially competing with us’ - good old LinkedIn).

But some of the more thoughtful comments were union-related. I Sony have space for some of my thoughts about unions in the article - but it is obviously the most immediate response, and in the comments on Linkedin, people were quick to ask ‘why reinvent the wheel? Why not just join a union?

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Well, yes, unions like Prospect union or Unison or Unite the Union or Community could potentially fulfil part of this need. And I was quick to respond that, on the one hand, that was exactly what I was suggesting. But on the other hand, I don’t think charity workers joining existing unions works terribly well beyond the matter of better working conditions for individual workers (which, admittedly is the case for most unions now), in larger charities. And even there, much as I dislike the exceptionalism pushed by the great and the good of the sector, there are some very specific barriers.

Unions are tricky on the Left

There are also wider problems with unions as whole, which the left has struggled with for many years. Bureaucratised unions have tended to focus more and more on their members alone, rather than creating blocs to struggle for the rights of working class people as a whole. US activists have been criticial of the roles of organisations like the Teamsters, who in fact most recently supported Trump: ‘Unions became narrowly focused on serving their existing members and making backroom deals (‘Politics is something we do’, Jacobin issue 60, 2025, Eric Blanc and Bhaskar Sunkara). (Another note: union members overwhelmingly supported Thatcher in 1979. Now that is a LOT of leopards and faces.)

What we have to remember - which is difficult these days - is that unions were at one point seen as a way to create radical, revolutionary change in all of society, starting at the root of economic production.

As one activist and unionist put it:

“When workers form these organizations whose job is to deliberate and get the best deal out of the system, they become invested in the system if they can get a good deal.

This is what happened to the trade unions in the lead-up to WWI and WWII. This is sometimes referred to as “golden handcuffs”. The more unions allowed themselves to be constrained by the benefits of the fordist era, the less they acted as organizations where the class struggle happened and the more they opporated like an insurance company for workers. In fact, a lot of unions advertise themselves to workers these days like insurance companies—you’d rather have it and not have to use it. They’ve also become modestly lucrative pension funds. Why spend money on a strike that could get your local decertified when you can take the same money and ensure a decent retirement fund for your members?” - Techno Femme, Reddit/ Marxism

There has also always been the problem of unions focusing on work, and employment itself. But what of all the people who work in other ways? Freelancers aren’t allowed to join many unions, but even if they do, they can’t be very well helped by them at least day to day. People who work as unpaid carers, parents, even the ‘unemployed’ for whatever reason, may be technically allowed to join unions, but they are very clearly not designed for them.

And we have to remember that one of the original plans for democratic socialism (and indeed, the undemocratic kind…) was to form many unions and then unite them to force larger scale political change. This was often through the mass withdrawal of labour - coordinated general strikes. (Which have now been outlawed for many years in the UK, btw.) Indeed, this was how Solidarność managed major change in Poland (albeit for complex political ends). But when you don’t have as much in common as you once did, economically or indeed culturally, all of this gets trickier and trickier. And unions are in many ways designed for a simpler economy with vast industries of fairly homogenous workers in factories working for large employers. They are a model formed in industrialisation - but we live in a post-industrial world. The model of many trades, industries and crafts then uniting into a larger union - as indeed the TUC does in the UK is much more limited these days, and harder when there are actually much more complex political and economic factors at work.

‘I just can’t see it,’ said one person in response to my modest proposal: ‘There just isn’t that solidarity’. Well, first of all, the point of unions is to create it, not just act on what exists. That’s like saying ‘we can’t have unity because we’re not united’. But is it an uphill struggle? Maybe so. Others said they were having to actively try not to immediately write it off - not a good sign, but their concerns are realistic. How do you organise this with the sheer lack of time people have? Well, yes - and that is very much the issue for union organising across the board. I don’t have an easy answer to this, because I don’t have time to do it either. (I barely have the time to write the articles.)

The standard in the VCS is to suggest a sugar-daddy funder might want to help. But why would they pay to organise, essentially, against themselves, at least at a corporate level? And there is a strong belief more widely that charity workers are not in any way deserving of even fair conditions, never mind charity or investment.

Why a union might not work for nonprofits

But beneath all of this there are even deeper problems. The charity sector is, on paper, organised labour. We have workers, employers, and the beginnings of collective organisation, at least by institution. But the conditions that make trade unionism work elsewhere simply don't apply here, and understanding that is fundamental to the nature of our sector and where power actually lies. When we’re looking at apocalyptic funding cuts, low pay, precarious employment, burnout, and the horrible awareness of all those people left behind by our existing political economy, the obvious response woould be collective action. But the charity sector's relationship to power makes that harder than it looks - and as I traced that out for myself in writing and reading over the last few weeks, it reveals something uncomfortable about what charities are actually for, and how it also makes them poor candidates for unionisation.

The problem is, a huge amount of the sector is not only small, but also funded by discretionary giving. This shapes everything about our power - or lack of it. When unions representing charities stand against public sector funders, or corporate charities who mostly spend individual giving money, there is more of a chance of success. For example, in Scotland, there are new sectoral bargaining rules coming which apply to commissioned organisations as well as direct employees of the state. Oxfam and St Mungo’s have seen industrial action. Charitable housing organisations too.

But for many of us, these relationships of industrial scale and a relationship to income of ‘services at a price’ simply doesn’t translate. Pulled together from a patchwork quilt of foundation grants with restricted funding, a few local authority crumbs, and maybe a bit of CSR cash, there is little opportunity for industrial action because the income is not related to a direct profit motive. Indeed, restricted funding is probably the greatest barrier to just payment and treatment for staff in our sector - and that, of course, is decided by trusts and foundations, who do tend to represent (and be steered by) the wealthy. (Note: the insistence on Living Wage by the largest funders is to be welcomed - and yet, their pots of funding have not increased to cover that… Charities are simply subsidising that from other sources, usually by taking more time from staff than they can pay for.)

Our bargaining power is limited because we serve at the pleasure of the king - we aren’t even part of an industrial system that needs us to survive and make a profit. We are not like factory workers or even nurses dealing with a huge employer that needs to make ends meet at a reasonable cost. We are ‘voluntary,’ and our income is too. It is easily possible for the people whom we rely on to pay us to simply stop doing so. That is not something that other workforces suffer in the same way.

Why? Our relationship to power is much more tendentious and vulnerable than that of people who are directly ‘profitable’. Someone who owns a factory for profit needs their workers to make that profit. They need to pay as little as possible to make the most profit. But if at a certain point everyone walks out and says they won’t work until they raise wages, that employer will need to come to the table. The law of extraction - we pay you less than you generate for us - is direct, which means that there is a clear reason for employers and shareholders to want to keep their workforce at least minimally happy.

But in the nonprofit world, our extraction is buried at multiple levels of ideological deployment and financial transaction. If the financial transaction were visible it would be less effective socially - the fact that nobody can see we offer real value to those making a profit somewhere is partly how charity works, and how it gives moral authority to the people who fund it.

But the burial of that transaction - in many cases probably even from some level of the consciousness of those who undertake it (fundraisers, donors) - is not just why it works but also why unions struggle to work for us. In the nonprofit world, our production is even more complex, even more bound up in cultural signification, in multiple power relations, and a hidden ‘deal’ between wealth and work, to fit neatly into a model of collective bargaining which reaches an agreement between capitalist extractor and the producers they extract from.

They don’t rely directly on our labour for profit, but for ways to support their profit-making that at some kind of wider cultural and social remove. For example, for their own sense of moral authority. For political access and expediency. For management of reputation and image. And for the management of ideology - and minimal, grudging, support of the ‘deserving’ poor. And indeed, for helping the dominant powers look ‘humane’ when they do terrible things. It’s part of the compact between state and governed - and also increasingly between public and private, and social compact.

There is, of course, also a very basic structural problem: you can’t collectively bargain with 160,000 businesses. Overall, in a sense, the shape of the nonprofit world industry is a great way to atomise us. Thousands of small supposedly value-led organisations being pitted against each other in competition, as we have seen since the marketisation of the sector since the 90s, is a great way to ensure that people don’t come together for a cause - or more broadly, a picture of a more just world - and focus on their own little organisation and getting in the cash. Let’s also remember that this is part of the same ideological and political trajectory of Thatcherism and privatisation (and taken forward at speed by New Labour).

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What people often don’t tend to recognise is that one of the key reasons for Thatcher’s privatisation agenda was to neuter unions. With private companies, there is far less reason to worry about industrial action than with public sector workers (because your workers don’t have to vote for you). Unions could no longer hold politicians to ransom if they were successfully atomised across providers. (Clearly this has not worked so well in transport…) But that same process of privatisation and atomisation is part of what happened to social and health services as they have been farmed out to the voluntary sector. We are part of the same movement of privatisation that neoliberal statecraft and economic dogma has pursued for its own reasons of atomising a workforce, through competition and marketisation.

So what can connect us?

You might then wonder what connects us, and how we could develop solidarity and a louder, more powerful voice?

Well, I find it interesting that over the course of the last 30 or so years, as nonprofits have taken on much of the work of the public sector, it has also taken on the dogma of New Public Management. And that, in the end, what the Acronyms and think tanks teach us is that all that can connect us is managerialism in the name of whatever branding there is at any one time: Impact. Efficiency. Social change. Positive Outcomes. Data, theory of change, all of that management sector stuff that we have imported from the public sector, which in turn imported it from the private sector. These usually have little conneection to the work that the vast majority of frontline staff do, and are generally bureaucratic, managerial, financial and data-driven. In a sense, sector solidarity, our shared values, and workforce representation has been replaced by managerial techniques, led by sectoral industrial bodies who must present themselves sometimes as uniting us through a technocratic philosophy rather than a culture of practice and principles.

My sense is that a new individual membership body would need to focus on values, principles, and a vision of a better, more equal world.

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You see, people say we won’t agree on anything because we are not aligned and so different. But hold on - really? That sounds like a bit of a confection designed to keep us competing. How many of us believe people should get welfare benefits if they are sick? That we should support people with disabilities. That we should tax the ultra rich. That we should be supportive of minority communities, and avowedly anti-racist. That we should not plunder the natural resources of the planet and destroy its ecology. That we should be kind and welcoming to migrants. We should hold resources in communities and not sell them off to the highest bidder. That we should take a holistic view of the quality of people’s lives and not reduce them to outcomes and interventions. That arts and culture are important to the quality of people’s lives.

In that comes the potential for us to act as a moral voice - perhaps, in a secular way, as something like the Church of England does. It would allow us to speak out about the issues we face and what connects them all - economic extraction, atomisation, cruelty and exclusion - and argue for the things we believe in. A profoundly humanistic, holistic voice of care, love and community in a world which has thrown such things aside as surplus to requirements - or rather, of no use to Capital.

That would also need to include a fuller understanding of ourselves as people involved in this. Our own workforce needs are not beyond the purview of such a voice, because we are people too (well, most of us), and, especially at the lower levels, and in concert with our colleagues in areas like care work or unpaid care, we are a group largely left out of demands to a more egalitarian society.

What I want to ask is: what kind of power do we have, or could we have? Withdrawal of labour is difficult in the traditional union model for most of us. But there must be other kinds of power, and charity workers and nonprofits demonstrate this every day. We organise change, as well as provide care, for a living. How can we use that power, that latent capacity, to make broader social change?

And as my friend Hannah Kowszun from pointed out to me, it has worked for sex workers. We may not be sexy but we know how to hustle.

The Sex Workers Union in the UK is a branch of the Bakers, Food, and Allied Workers Union. No jokes - I’ve been trying to find a dedicated branch of that type for nonprofit workers and I can’t. Can anyone help me? Shout if it exists!

Are we revolting?

I would go one step further: I’m very taken with David Graeber’s idea of ‘the Caring Classes’. Graeber, involved with the Occupy movement, noted that the majority of those involved in movements for social justice and change were from the ‘caring’ or ‘helping’ professions. That is, a

“class of caregivers—that is, in the broadest possible definition, as anyone who saw their work primarily as helping, caring for, or furthering the development or flourishing of other human beings (or, arguably, living beings)—what I called the caring classes, or the class empathiques (Nafe Krandi-Mayor) or courgeoisie (Holly Wood).” (David Graeber, ‘The Revolt of the Caring Classes, 2019)

Health workers. Teachers, Nonprofit workers. Universities. (He also noted that many of them were middle class professionals - there is much to say on that, but no time here.) In this, he suggests, the ‘caring classes’ may be a locus of social change, rather than a traditional unionised industrial labour force. The idea is complex and evocative - and attractive, I think, in societies where love, care, and community are forces actively controlled and minimised by our most powerful social and economic forces.

Could a union of sorts that brings together all of those of us in the nonprofit world contribute meaningfully to what Graeber calls a ‘revolt of the caring classes’? Not alone, but in partnership with other groupings, as part of a wider set of movements for social change? There will be faultlines - I can see them already - but there always are, and they are standard left faultlines. And the levels and degrees of all these things are debatable. Welcome to democracy. Everything is a negotiation.

If your answer to all this is ‘Erm… blimey, I dunno’, then you’re doing the right thinking. Or about to. I don’t propose this as a solution to the world’s problems. Graeber suggest it has revolutionary potential, and I’m not sure I’d go that far.

But I do think that a uniting force - through democratic membership and individuals united by purpose, born of a certain view of the world driven by their work relationships and subaltern relationship to power, might not be trivial. If nothing else, it could provide a better way to organise a sectoral voice with shared values, rather than shared techniques of measurement and management. That, I’m afraid, is all the unity we have in our sector relationships at present.

Drop me a line and tell me what you think.

Interventionitis Let Southport Down

With the devastating report from the Southport inquiry this week, I’m posting a link to my article in Barely Civil Society about this last year, when the first evidence started to be heard.

My views haven’t changed, much as new details have emerged - and, I fear, neither have the prevailing ideas about what I call ‘Interventionitis’ - pulling issues from the headlines and throwing money at them to fix their surface manifestations rather than any deeper thinking about people and societies. I first wrote about this in 2020, coming out of a role where youth violence was a significant focus - and none of us really believed it was the right one.

The chair of the inquiry said it best: there was an “inappropriate merry-go-round” of state bodies passing the buck and their “frankly depressing” refusal to accept responsibility, saying: “This culture has to end.”

And this is not just cultural but structural. Removing the glue of person-centred support leads to exactly this.

Until we start to recognise the need for deeper, holistic approaches to care and community, and funding those, we will keeping wasting a fortune on things that are easy to count and so far from the humanistic values and approaches our social and community care need.

Meanwhile the knife crime units, the vast money spent on researching each ‘intervention’ one by one ad-infinitum, and of course, billions on one-off quick fixes like National Citizen Service, which draw money away from communities and services that - let’s be clear - I don’t suggest would have prevented this case. But they could have created better environments for our kids to flourish and not treated them solely as clusters of social problems needing a pathway and a referral.

Interventionitis: Why Headlines Don’t Make for Good Social policy.

The funny personal bit

This week my most popular post on Linkedin, by a factor of three, was one about Hot Cross Buns, where I proclaimed that I had eaten so many, my nipples were now raisins, my blood was infused with the heady aroma of mixed spice, and my face was imprinted with a cross like an Essex roundabout. Everybody loves to watch someone rave on a professional network about quasi-religious confectionery. This buit on my previous posts about Jammie Dodgers, a personal obsession, more so since I no longer get to eat them much.

But then something evenmore amazing happened, and my mate Luds let me know about this in Aldi.

I literally ran out of the house in between meetings and got one. Yes, it was amazing.

But this is all part of a personal quest to ensure that when I turn up to meetings, people have read my posts and prepared a selection of declasse British patisserie for my personal delectation. It already works with workshops, although sometimes they provide fruit which is like, WHAT?

Meanwhile, after being cruelly spurned for funding for Barely Civil Society by a charitable funder - one of the few I’ve never pissed off yet - I have been continuing to work nonstop and try and get various articles written and meetings and conspiracies happening alongside a pretty full workload. It is knackering, but it could be worse.

I would like to make some comments on the current world political sitch, but as for all satirists, it really is just at the stage where you can’t be satirical when the reality is beyond satire. I just can’t compete with the Fat Orange F**k Show.

And thus ends our work here today.

Oh wait…

One Instagram post very worth watching

See you in three or so weeks.

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Welcome to this week's Barely Civil Society, where we talk about society, politics and non-profits. After a longer piece kicked off by the NYT article on the Giving Pledge, we move on to the usual quick fire news and nonsense from UK philanthropy and charity. But we’re starting in the US - where the power and the money is.

Pledge? What pledge?

The New York Times [paywall] recently published a remarkable piece on the collapse of the Giving Pledge - the commitment set up by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates for billionaires to give away most of their wealth before death. Not only are people failing to sign, they are unsigning. This week, I’m looking at the article’s import, and looking deeper into the structures of thinking it reveals.

Despite Buffett’s claims to the contrary, the shifting sands are real, and they offer an insight into how people of a certain class are thinking. What I want to argue is that the collapse of the Giving Pledge is a window into the moral logic of the oligarchic class at the precise moment that logic is most nakedly exposed. It shows a developing structure of thought, and of power, in our society and economy. It has changed a good deal in 15 years, and more so since the second coming of their enabler-in-chief, Trump who in many ways espouses the same values – albeit without the same pretence of intellectual justification.

“The Pledge,” Theodore Shleifer reported, “became a way for the uber-wealthy to announce they’d arrived.” After all, what could be richer than someone who could afford to give all their money away?

A succession of billionaires signed. As the Times has it:

“People like Mr. Gates epitomized a humanitarian culture that espoused both big capitalism and big philanthropy. Being seen as a good billionaire who gave back was important. Republicans and Democrats alike embraced the Gates Foundation’s priorities - U.S. education, global health and gender equality. Now, it’s stylish, in a Silicon Valley contrarian sort of way, to bash the Giving Pledge.”

Where did it come from? Lest you think it merely the cynicism of socialist philanthropy critics like myself to suggest there was an element of self-interest in this, even Scott Bessent (Trump’s hardly left-wing Treasury Secretary) put the Giving Pledge down to “panic among the billionaire class” during the financial crisis.

As the Giving Pledge has evaporated, we need to ask what has led to this. It shows us how much the structure of thinking in the US, and by extension the world of the ultra-wealthy, has changed in that time. My sense is that, fifteen years later, billionaires are more confident than they have ever felt. Just as Trump has recognised that his global hegemony is total, and that the rule of law holds only as much as anyone upholds it, so the billionaires have realised that they can simply release themselves from social responsibility. Philanthropy is only necessary when they feel under threat. And they don’t. I imagine them suddenly noticing that the door of their gilded cage was open all along.

Might is right: a repudiation of empathy - and the ‘woke’

And while some have decided not to sign, and others have ‘unsigned’, Peter Thiel has gone further still - actively persuading people to unsign the Pledge, wanting that money redirected to his for-profit businesses. This is, let us not forget, Mr Sovereign Individual/ kindness is the antichrist himself.1

As the Times reported: “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Mr. Thiel said. His own charitable philosophy is centered around for-profit businesses; his foundation principally funds those who drop out of college to create start-ups.”

His concern is that money will be used to support left-wing causes chosen by Bill Gates.

Meanwhile, Marc Andreessen, the tech right’s leading ‘intellectual’, has spoken against “introspection,” much as Elon Musk has railed against empathy. This is a macho, bullying, quasi-fascistic approach where ‘might is right’, and, as Thucydides put it, recently quoted by Mark Carney in discussions of international politics and economics, ‘the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.’

For many on the US right, power without mercy has become a badge of honour - it is Trumpism, fascism and hypercapitalism all at once.

And for tech billionaires, it simply does not compute to support anything that goes against their belief in the total domination of the weak by the strong. “Woke” is empathy. How could acting for the good of others be accepted by those who have made a philosophy out of denying the value of empathy?

And beneath the arguments piling up against the idea of helping the ‘weak’, can we not see an implication of something almost eugenic? The suggestion that helping the weak does not actually “help” after all?

Thiel is a devotee of the cultish accelerationist movement, with the Sovereign Individual - written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father - as its lodestar. Made even more aggressive by his bizarre beliefs in mystical soi-disant Christian eschatology and the role of the Antichrist, the idea is simple and chilling: that a coming crisis will allow the wealthy, strong, and powerful to take full control of the planet, with the remainder of humanity serving as cheap labour. In that framework, solving crises and helping others may delay the reckoning. That is not good for them, or for the other oligarchs who expect to survive and rise from the ashes.

As the NYT article shows, for many of those figures, the belief is that “woke” leftism has taken over nonprofits. Well, of course it has. Wanting to share resources and help people does tend to be more of a left-wing impulse. Wanting to do it for people who might not look or act like you is, of course, “woke.”

(This reminds me of someone who complained that Substack was full of left-wingers, only to be told that this was inevitable - since, by nature, it tends to favour the literate.)

Those who see Nietzche in here are probably right – he’s always been popular with autocrats, oligarchs and crypto-fascists. But my sense is it has a much lesser intellectual pedigree – probably closer to Ragnar Redbeard and the ur-text of social Darwinisim, Might is Right.

Leo Tolstoy described, with horror, this idea:

‘Right is not the offspring of doctrine, but of power. All laws, commandments, or doctrines as to not doing to another what you do not wish done to you, have no inherent authority whatever, but receive it only from the club, the gallows, and the sword. A man truly free is under no obligation to obey any injunction, human or divine. Obedience is the sign of the degenerate. Disobedience is the stamp of the hero. Men should not be bound by moral rules invented by their foes. The whole world is a slippery battlefield. Ideal justice demands that the vanquished should be exploited, emasculated, and scorned. The free and brave may seize the world. And, therefore, there should be eternal war for life, for land, for love, for women, for power, and for gold. (Something similar was said a few years ago by the celebrated and refined academician, Vogüé.) The earth and its treasures is “booty for the bold.”’

Philanthropy as a now-unnecessary moral legitimacy

The key function of philanthropy, as I have discussed previously, is to launder reputations - or at least to provide a patina of moral legitimacy. As Andreessen puts it, it “reclassifies you from a sort of suspect business mogul to a virtuous philanthropist.” Let us be clear: when those of us who are critics of philanthropy have been saying this is how it functions, we have not been going on hunch alone. These people are very open about it. The fact that they feel more than ever able to say so is itself evidence of their sense of absolute power.

Philanthropists have come to realise that their giving is, as Schleifer describes it, “little more than public relations.” The deal was this: people would be grateful for your wealth, and question less where it came from and how you acquired it. But the deal broke down. People started asking why anyone had enough money to give half of it away. Whether this was the best way of doing things. Even worse, they started asking whether philanthropy was the best route to greater equity - and recognising, plainly, that it was not. (As I’ve noted here before, fundraisers and charity are dangerous - they show where the faultlines are. There is always a danger that people will start to ask difficult questions if they follow the logic - and the money.) Where billionaires were once targeted with lavish praise, that is (in some rarified spheres) no longer the case. And at that point the deal collapses: it is only of value to give if others lavish you with praise and acknowledge your moral as well as financial superiority. And a polite silence.

Philanthropy buys something. These people do not give things away for nothing. It is, as someone once said, the art of the deal.

Philanthropy as intellectual power

As I mentioned last time, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently lamented the end of philanthropy in this class, true to his emerging role as the bleeding heart (comparatively) of AI oligarchy. He is the brother-in-law of one of the leading lights of effective altruism. Effective altruism, as I have argued elsewhere, is an outgrowth of the idea that the tech billionaire is not merely wealthy but an intellectual giant - a further intellectualisation of the Carnegie-era notion that the person who extracted the wealth knows best how to spend it for the benefit of those they extracted it from. Participating in philanthropy, in this framing, demonstrates that you are an intellectual as well as a financial genius. But even this is no longer sufficiently attractive. And believe me, when I am suggesting EA is at least a more morally defensible better position than the current one, you know something is wrong.

Even EA cannot hold their attention now. They got bored when they realised that dropping pocket change to solve problems they had created could not fix the world they themselves had ravaged.

When their intellectual gigantism was punctured, philanthropy lost its interest for them. Because one of the things they most wanted to prove was that the problem of inequality was not a moral one but a failure of intellect - that by solving the intellectual problem, they could fix everything, and demonstrate in the process that their greed was not the issue. They wanted to show that a mechanical, capitalist-instrumentalist approach could “solve problems.” There is surely an element of boredom in the collapse of the Pledge - and a growing, deeply unwelcome realisation that philanthropy cannot solve the problems. That is a dangerous thought they do not wish to countenance. Because if it cannot - what are the alternatives?

Philanthropy as capitalism, and capitalism as philanthropy

And so they are all doubling down on capitalism as the solution. What has really changed is not a loss of faith in charity. It is a renewed and total faith in capitalism - well, it has worked for them. In the end, it was only a hop, skip and a jump to realise that philanthrocapitalism was just more capitalism. And if so, why did you even need the philanthropy? If giving can mirror the market, why not cut out the middleman: capitalism itself is philanthropy. How very convenient.

What the Trump and oligarch era has brought us to is a belief that there is no morality beyond Aleister Crowley’s dictum: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

What they have finally realised is that there is no longer any need to hide what they have long suspected and believed: power is its own morality. The masks are coming off. Their power is now so absolute that they have understood, as Trump has in the field of world politics, that with absolute power comes absolutely no responsibility and and no accountability. Where might is right, money, and desire, are the only real morality.

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What now?

What all of this tells us is that billionaire philanthropy is a direct reflection of the structures of thought of the American oligarchic elite. We are living through a field day for narcissistic power with nothing but its own naïve self-justifications as its moral compass.

And so what? Well, I’m pleased to see a few people in the philanthropy sphere reacting – more so than they did over the Epstein revelations, at least. And yet, the danger is that we find ourselves, in response, arguing for more philanthropy - pleading with these people to return to their giving. But this collapse cannot be solved by persuading billionaires to change their minds.

We need no more billionaires.

We need tax, of wealth as well as income. That likely includes a one fell-swoop windfall tax, as well as, later, on an ongoing redistributive basis.

And we need an end to voluntarism on this scale. Once we have that, philanthropy becomes a pleasant pastime for the community. Not a matter of survival for many and justification for extraction by a few.

We also need to look at how we return wealth to communities we have taken it from. Ongoing taxation cannot solve this problem at root – and nor indeed can welfare or piecemeal programmes of reform and redistribution alone.

And if any remain of that class who are serious about real change and redistribution, every part of their effort should go into arguing for the permanent end of obscene wealth and its destabilising plunder of the planet and its people.

Meanwhile - yes, give the money. Give it all. And give it now.

More comments

Paul Klein made an excellent series of Linkedin posts looking at this, with thoughtful comments from a range of smart people. (I say that because they agree with me, that’s how you know they’re smart.)

Overall, I think what I keep coming back to is that I am not necessarily a ‘philanthropy abolitionist’. I am a ‘philanthropist abolitionist.’

That may be a slightly different thing.

In UK Charity news

The Charities Aid Foundation published a report last week showing that Uk individual charity donations are down by ten percent. We’ve had a lot of worrying about that, and questions as to whether people are becoming ‘less kind’, while I’m just wondering what it takes for people to notice that nobody has any money. Or to ask exactly why we think a wide range of basic care initiatives should be reliant on voluntaristic contributions, especially with UK taxes at their highest level since the second world and services on their knees. I also think it’s very hard to explain to most people that they should have an ‘embedded’ culture of giving, as one commentator put it, when billionaires don’t want to ‘give’.

As ever, the charity sector’s ability to cast aside any questions of political economy and focus on protecting its own industrial concerns is pretty embarrassing. Let’s just talk about donor journeys everyone!

Following on from that, BBC Comic Relief/ ‘Red Nose Day’ has seen its income fall again by £4m. (American visitors, I am so so sorry to tell you about this weird British hangover of the eighties telethon - you have enough to worry about culturally without bering subjected to this). I think the above issues with giving go double for that, but also - who watches this stuff? I would literally pay money not to. This is only on-the-night takings, so perhaps others will contribute later. [Actually someone on Linkedin said they watched it and got very emotional, so I am actually just a horrible person… I don;t really do charity AV.]

In incredibly upsetting news, Girlguiding UK has decided to exclude trans girls from September - giving them a few months to say their goodbyes. This is the latest win for Lawfare against UK charities, about which I have previously written extensively. The monsters of the hate groups have been out in full force to celebrate. I simply cannot understand why people would go out of their way to do this - except, of course, that this whole campaign is funded to the hilt by extremist Christiano-fascist Project 25 groups in the US, not to mention a certain children’s book author. If you care about this, please join Kevin Taylor McKnight’s Third Sector Against Transphobia group on Linkedin (search there.) If you don’t care about this, fine, but remember, whoever you are, you are probably on Project 2025’s list eventually.

In more terrible news for LGBTQI+ people, Metro UK, a 40 year old charity for the queer community, is to close down due to lack of funding. It had been on the cards for some time. It will not be the last - Stonewall seems to me to be on very shaky financial footing. For both, anti-trans activism has probably played a part in their decline, if nothing else making public sector organisations feel emboldened to discount the needs of queer people. The shrinkback of public sector funds - and especially the massive cuts to Integrated Care Board budgets - has taken valuable funding away from health work, which was always an area that LGBT work relied on for funds.

This is bad enough now, but the real problem comes later. Campaigning work is not enough alone. Support services are still needed for LGBT+ people. And those have been largely blasted away over the years as the overwhelmingly metropolitan middle class people in commissioning and foundations people naively read queer equity as a battle that has been won. The more of these organisations we let die, the more it will be nigh-on impossible to restart them. With the possibility of a Reform government on the horizon - with Project 2025-style plans for the UK, we cannot afford to wait for a crisis to help.

Foundations, where are you?

Meanwhile, I recommend on trans issues on Substack.

And finally…

Well, those of you who usually come for the witty and ascerbic critique/ dick jokes will be disappointed this week, but I promise to return to comedy soon. I had a good conversation with fellow substacker this week about all things philanthropy, US culture, and political economy. None of which is to suggest he agrees with me here (or otherwise). Subscribe to his substack, though. Lots of interesting stuff.

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The only good billionaire is, erm, nope.

Asif Aziz, billionaire landlord and owner of Criterion Capital, was standing on a podium, next to Mayor Sadiq Kahn in London. They smiled for a photograph. Above the assembled crowds, the Ramadan lights Aziz funded through his foundation twinkled.

What a scene. A great business leader and philanthropist giving back to his community. Celebrating the diverse population of London. What’s not to like?

Well… Not long before, in another part of the city, doors had been knocked on, and notices pushed through letterboxes, as Criterion Capital had begun turfing out tenants just before the Renters’ Rights Act comes into force. According to London Centric,

“Money from the housing blocks affected was then flowing directly into the Aziz Foundation, the family’s PR-friendly charitable arm. The Aziz Foundation then funded the capital’s Ramadan lights and launched a partnership with the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint, who today distanced themselves from the family.”

Can Sadiq Khan stop Asif Aziz’s mass evictions? Jim Waterson, Cormac Kehoe, and Liv Facey, London Centric, Feb 27th 2026.

London Centric

Can Sadiq Khan stop Asif Aziz's mass evictions?

Early this morning I found myself standing in front of the south west London home of billionaire landlord Asif Aziz. I was there to make a last-ditch attempt, after all other avenues had been exhausted, to get answers f…

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2 months ago · 157 likes · 28 comments · Jim Waterson, Cormac Kehoe, and Liv Facey

Even better, they report that the mass evictions are happening in order to allow Criterion to offer the properties to local authorities as lucrative temporary accommodation. Solving homelessness perhaps?

Aziz’s philanthropy has put him right up on a literal London pedestal, all the while his actions make Londoners homeless.

Shocked, perhaps, Khan then made a public intervention, calling for the evictions to be withdrawn. Reports suggest that residents were bizarrely told face to face on their doorsteps by a mysterious man that if they recorded videos asking to stay, they would be allowed to do so. Criterion denies this happened. And the evictions, as of last report, are continuing. Centrepoint, the homeless charity for young people in London, has cut ties.

I can almost imagine Khan, crestfallen at his desk, shaking his head: ‘But I thought he was one of the good ones…’

The brilliant broke this story. They called the fact that money from evictions is flowing directly into Centrepoint and the Ramadan lights a ‘dark twist’. But this is anything but a dark twist - it is part and parcel and standard practice for elite philanthropy. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Another reckoning for elite philanthropy?

The Epstein files release showed perhaps one of the most blatant and overt cases of elite philanthropy as reputation management, and an enabler of access to power. That was wide-awake bad faith and cynical manipulation. Most philanthropists are not Epstein. Perhaps Aziz and others like him believe deeply in solving homelessness. Perhaps his giving is truly a matter of humanitarian intent. But it would not be unreasonable to question whether there is a level of hypocrisy here – or something even more cynical at the heart of elite philanthropy more broadly.

And how could we not see political influence, status management, laundering of reputation and redirection as a central part of this process in the philanthropic work of Carlos Slim, the Qatar Foundation, the Dangote Foundation? There are countless stories of this kind of practice across the globe. It is likely as old as wealth itself. And yet the sheer level of denialism in the sector takes my breath away. Talk of rotten apples, otherwise ‘pure’ sullied foundations, the endless cry of ‘not all philanthropists’, become louder at these points.

The problem is that these moments of the greatest apparent hypocrisy open up fractures and faultlines in the fictions and mythologies we have to tell ourselves to make peace with our work. To me, there always seems to be a radical, perhaps hysterical, blindness to this in the philanthropy sector, at least in terms of our day-to-day discourses, and on the part of its cheerleaders. Is this in good faith, or just matter of people keeping on trucking and mouthing the right words?

If’s almost as if, if we talk about it, the money will all suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke. And indeed - it probably would.

This blindness, or at least, silence, seems to be something largely confined to the ‘funder’ (supply) side of the equation, and particularly of course to those whose work involves taming, tickling and chucking under the chin those who have proven just how good they are at holding on to money.

In the day-to-day non-profit sphere - the people doing the actual day to day work - I think we are all too aware, and, at least among ourselves, fairly open about these issues. We know what is happening. And in terms of study and discourse, antipathy towards philanthropic donations is common amongst radicals in the nonprofit sector, who see the money in many trusts as ‘twice stolen’ - once through profit extraction, and once, in many cases, through tax avoidance. Indeed, they then often spend a lot of this on the people who stole it - e.g. at the opera or with a new wing of a gallery. (See Ruth Wilson Gilmore in ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 2007).

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But my sense is that the ‘philanthropy’ industry, especially as it relates to the ultra-wealthy donors of philanthrocapitalism, has to internalise those values much more. It would be hard not to. It probably is required for success. And for sheer mental health - better to truly believe the lie you tell yourself.

My sense is that many people working in elite philanthropy have persuaded themselves that their job is actually to secure and spend money to do good. But I think we need to be clear-eyed about the fact that that is only half of the job.

Because surely much of the job is to promote and justify extreme wealth and class privilege. Alongside a good deal of flattery. We are integral parts of the propaganda and PR machine for some of the worst people on the planet. We are not just ‘doing the good work’ with money from ill-gotten gains, but acting as propagandists and mythologisers of the elites that the rest of the world is increasingly coming to realise are parasitic, pathological and near all-powerful.

My question is this: can’t we at least be honest with ourselves? Be honest with our communities and colleagues? And ask ourselves, can those of us who truly believe in ending such rank inequality ever feel right about actively promoting their mythology?

Maybe this ideological work, not a new water well in a Global South village, is what their money is really paying for?

At a structural level, one of the key social, cultural and economic function of philanthrocapitalism - and, I think history shows, its antecedents - is to promote the ruling ideas of the ruling class. As I’ve noted before, whichever class is in charge in society also rules philanthropy. Not just because they have the wealth to give, but because the practice is of greatest benefit to them, in their attempts to ensure society puts their economic interests at the top of the pile. Philanthropy helps shape the ideas of the world to naturalise, to cleanse, and to offer a patina of moral justice to their power. Religion, aristocracy, the rising mercantile classes, the industrial bourgeoisie, the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the technocrats of the state-industrial- nonprofit compacts, and latterly the rise of philanthrocapitalists and tech billionaire oligarchs: all have used ‘philanthropic’ giving to naturalise and justify their privilege.

And that means that as any challenges to the current billionaire plutocracy come up, philanthropy is highly likely to be harnessed to control problematic ideas that may come to challenge their hegemony.

What next?

This maters because times are changing - maybe. Philanthrocapitalism began at a time when the new tech elites were shiny, new and disruptive. They seemed exciting. They seemed to offer prosperity for all.

That is now where we are now. The rise of what the ruling class mouthpieces of the press and politics are derisively, and strategically, calling ‘left populism’, is making more and more people aware that this is a deeply suspect structure that is in no way in their interests. And the ultra-wealthy know it.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic AI, recently reiterated (in a long, involved state of humanity essay about AI and social change) that he believed that philanthropy should play a larger role than ever. He noted with disappointment that the ultra-rich were becoming disillusioned with the idea and its effectiveness. (Almost as if just dumping pocket change on a problem you created turns out not to solve it better than taxation or shared wealth. Imagine.)

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But he was also clear that it is important that the ultra-rich are seen to act generously so that any changes to their status or contributions to society (tax!) are reasonable, and not decided by ‘the mob’. You can imagine who ‘the mob’ is here. (Yes! It’s you and me.)

So, just as people eventually turned on the robber-barons of the Gilded Age, despite their supposedly selfless philanthropy, it is quite possible that this new age of plutocratic empire is nowhere near as permanent as those people would like - and indeed, may be as impermanent as they fear. Gramsci’s insight, among many others, was that hegemony is always retained by the ruling classes partly by giving things away. At its worst that may be taxes. Better if it is an opera house, better still if it is training for people to work better on your coca plantations. Some have recently noted that the ultra rich imagine taxes are the very worst thing for them. But there are much more dangerous (for them) options that go far beyond redistribution through taxation, after all. That, perhaps, is the ‘mob’ they truly fear.

What will this mean for philanthropy cheerleading? I suspect that the defences and defenders of philanthrocapitalism will become more and more shrill, more and more likely to resort to ideas about high-minded transhistorical notions of ‘love of humanity’, just as the global population’s calls for control of the extractive ultra-rich become louder.

I’m not seeking purity

This is not about purity. As I’ve noted before, purity is just not a reality - the whole of the world is trade-offs. Power is everywhere. As Mani Hothi, CEO of Trust for London pointed out, even long-established independent foundations are capitalist enterprises. Trust for London are extremely progressive. But as he notes, they invest their portfolio and rely on the stock market for giving. So does my pension. Nobody is ‘pure’. It’s not even ‘a thing’…

But although being an adult is understanding that the world is about conflict and compromise, that does not mean you can act without a moral compass or a system of ethics. Indeed, what I’m finding increasingly interesting is that philanthrocapitalism has centred consequentialist ethics (what matters is the end result – the consequence).

Because of course, ‘impact’ is all about a focus on the end result. I can’t help feeling that focusing on impact is very helpful if you don’t want anyone to think about what you did to get it. Perhaps, for example, you evicted half of London to donate some pocket change to a youth homelessness charity and then focused on social ‘impact’. I can see how you might want to focus at the end of that chain. No doubt it is part of the reason instrumentalist, impact thinking has been at the dead centre of philanthrocapitalism and its destructive influence over the last 15 or so years.

None of this has an easy solution. And the solution to billionaires does not lie with us. But if there was any interim direction of travel worth pursuing within the world of philanthropy itself, it might be toward tighter regulation of donors - which we often resist tooth and nail at their behest. - Amd perhaps most important of all, discouragements from direct control of donations by those donors. Look forward to squeaking from the foundations, the wealthy, and their promoters if anybody mentions that.

Foundations long-removed from founders and with more democratic structures are usually a much better way forward, but the least democratic and founder-driven are among the loudest, wealthiest, and best represented in the world of philanthropy as elsewhere.

Whatever, perhaps the most pressing need for better philanthropy - pending NO philanthropy as I propose - is to pry open the death-like grip of the philanthrocapitalist. He believes he best knows how to spend the wealth he stole - all for the benefit of the people he stole it from.

And we might also ask: is it perhaps time to refuse to lionise and mythologise these people?

No more gushing plaudits. No more press releases and ad campaigns.

A note in the annual report and a polite thank you.

Maybe a badge. Not enamel; one of those cheap ones with the pins that give you tetanus.

And that does raise again the question: if we stopped worshipping, mythologising, and doing the propaganda work for these people, would the money dry up?

I suspect we would very quickly see who ‘the good ones’ are.

A quick reminder

I have no idea where these (below) came from, but they’ve been on my phone for years now. Time to give them an airing.

DEVEX: Epstein, Philanthropy and Hypocrisy

I was in DEVEX Magazine last week talking about the Epstein fallout, which led to a really interesting and enjoyable meeting with the CEO of a large sexual and reproductive health foundation. We had a great conversation about how to deal with all this stuff. (Did we find the answer? Yes of course. Send me a cheque for £500 and I’ll tell you.)

But if you’re up for a chat about it, drop me a line. I’d like to see how people are parsing this stuff beyond ‘being extra careful with due diligence’.

Meanwhile, DEVEX is super expensive and I can’t afford it, but I’ve pasted my quotes below. Because obviously those are the best bits.

The Thanks to Subscribers Bit

Last week I asked people to consider a paid subscription for the specific purpose of helping me access more periodicals, both to keep up to date, and to look at where I can share more of this work to get beyond the current (wonderful) audience. A handful of people obliged, and I’ve been able to find lots of very interesting general material I will share in the future. Next is an academic library subscription. Thanks again!

Guess what - maybe YOU are the good philanthropists….?

Internet Nonsense

This week, a recommendation of one of my favourite Youtube channels, Scroll Deep. I’ve always been fascinated by the absolute insanity of the internet, and it’s great to find somewhere others are too. Every week it blows my mind…. This one has an adorable surprise at the end too.

Until next time

I think I’m going to give philanthropy a rest for a bit now as I’m also writing an article for a philanthropy magazine and there’s only so many times you can nuke your career and bite the hand that feeds you. I still have like 5 essays I never manage to finish because topical things always come up first. We’ll see.

Notably though, I tried to interest some mainstream outlets in the Epstein and philanthropy story, but no dice. I suspect the invasion of Iran killed that story - which of course was Trump’s intention….

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In a week where the news choice was between Bad Bunny and Jeffrey Epstein, I chose Bad Bunny and his hypnotic jiggling every time.

But, much as every fibre of my being pulls me the other way, we need to focus on the Epstein elephant in the room, and not the elephantine assets of everybody’s new Puerto Rican crush.

After the discussion of appalling philanthropy, we end with some Bad Bunny memes and other frivolous nonsense.

Epstein, Politics and Philanthropy

The Epstein Affair: Is it about sex?

Now, let’s get the caution about legal things out of the way. We must be very clear here: the fact that someone visited an island and/ or knew Epstein and Maxwell doesn’t mean they broke any laws. Some were quite deliberately caught up in the snare. Some were fellow travellers. Many should have known better. And far too many, but not all, were doing terrible things.

But anyway, I want to take this away from individuals to look at a class of people.

And as I want to be clear, I think there is a problem with the whole narrative around the Epstein case: that we are treating this as a ‘sex scandal’ as opposed to as a window into the lives and powers of an elite often invisible to us. And the unexpectedly open revelation of structures of power and privilege that some (not all) had imagined were in decline in the age of capitalist democracy - as if.

There have been different approaches in the - rightful - moral outrage in the press. For example, in the Guardian, Marina Hyde and others connect this with the Me Too moment - that this is yet further evidence of the systematic and appalling abuse of women and girls. She worries about shifted focus: “Obsessing over individual players and political chaos leaves less time to focus on the misogyny. And that’s for the best, isn’t it guys?” She’s right that this does take the focus away from the appalling treatment of women and girls, and we cannot lose sight of this horror. Furthermore, she is right that focusing on individual actors isn a distraction - everyone suddenly discovering Peter Mandelson is a bit of a sleazy shit (no!) isn’t really politics at all in any meaningful or critical way. It’s gossip, horsetrading, machiavellian soap opera. All of which draws us away from the much larger political critique we need to make about democracy and elites. This is politics as sport, not as politics.

Meanwhile, there is Heather Stewart’s approach: that this scandal, epescially where people like Mandelson are involved, is "‘laying bare the dark allure of the “filthy rich”, [and] it also underlines the need for tougher constraints on money in politics.” Like her, I feel we need to focus more on how these elites of fabulous wealth and prestige gain access to political power, and indeed, to make sure they make the political and economic world in their image.

If this model of power ever went into recession with the rise of 20th century liberal democracy, it was brief, shallow, and clearly on its way out again already, like democracy itself. Much of what we are seeing now is a mater of just that: what we are seeing.

The fact that they buy and sell and trade women and children as resources is no surprise at all - to them, everything can be bought, sold, traded, and used as a resource to buy favour or power - as well as something they can use and abuse to gratify their own desires as they see fit. To them, women are like any other resource: theirs for the taking, or to be used as a commodity for their own status and power. So, patriarchy.

Hyde and Stewart’s perspectives are far from incompatible. It seems to me that nowhere do we see more clearly how capitalism/ economy and patriarchy are utterly intertwined.

Philanthropy and class war

And so, we come specifically to philanthropy.

First, let’s be clear: philanthropy is an area where abuse of women is part and parcel of the game. So many of my women colleagues have been abused and harassed by ‘philanthropists’ and potential donors - so much so that I remember having to send a male chaperone to any corporate events where a female fundraiser would be present. Others on Substack have spoken about their treatment, for example, the brilliant . The well-known scandals are the tip of the everyday iceberg.

But as for the the wider issues about power, money and democracy, Alliance magazine very neutrally reported on the prevalence of some of big philanthropy’s top names in the Epstein files. Among the names were Bill Gates, Richard Branson (not known to have visited the island) and Howard Lutnick, all noted for their philanthropic work and prominence in ‘global giving’ circles. All deny any wrongdoing - and that is not really the point I’m making.

Gates is of course founder of the Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest charitable foundations with an endowment of around $77 billion. Through Virgin Unite, Branson has worked with other philanthropists and leaders on initiatives such as The Carbon War Room (market-based solutions to climate issues, but of course!). Howard Lutnick’s net worth is around $2.7 billion, and he set up the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which raised $180 million for 9/11 families and other disasters.

Oh, and let’s not forget noted philanthropist and humanitarian, Donald J Trump.

I’m not massively interested in the individual motivations for giving, even if those will range from the truly charitable to the grossly self-interested. Most will be somewhere in between. What I’m interested in is exploring the strange coincidence of wealth, power, secrecy and anti-democratic influence and philanthropy. Because it’s almost as if philanthropy is just one instrument in the toolbox of global elites for getting what they want, often secretly, surreptitiously, and frankly, for a song.

What we know is that philanthropy was a key part of Epstein’s life, fortunes, and network. As reported in the Guardian, one exchange in the files was between the vile Steve Bannon and Epstein: “First we need to push back on the lies”, “crush the pedo/trafficking narrative”, and “rebuild your image as philanthropist”. There is no beating about the bush here. Philanthropy is front and centre, and well understood by the most devious people on the planet, as a royal route to reputational rehab.

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Now, there is little point here in further making the argument that ‘some philanthropists are awful’. We know. Brian Souter is a particularly loathed home-grown example of mine. Richard Desmond is another. (Neither of whom have been accused of any wrongdoing and have no connection to the Epstein case - my point is simply that some people who claim to be philanthropists are just horrible people). J.K. Rowling is spending millions on hurting trans women because they gave her naff crime book bad reviews.

As for those in the files so far, the Gates Foundation’s philanthropy has been controversial, and the allegations of use of ‘philanthropy’ to feather nests by writing off economic development costs to benefit corporate interests, or bend agriculture out of shape in developing nations are pretty grim, much as they are denied by the foundation itself. We know much donor-advised fund giving involves highly devious ways of maximising corporate profit and minimising taxation.

And many individual philanthropists and corporations are clearly using their wealth to launder their reputations because they have done dreadful things. The Sacklers practically have to beg people to take their cash at this stage.

We can also see that philanthropy can get you access to the people you would never consider possible. Noam Chomsky, an intellectual hero of mine, (incidentally, I’ve always admired his refusal to claim he is a saint) was partly ensnared by Epstein by offers of money for his philanthropic ventures. Having access to Chomsky, with his stellar reputation as a humanitarian, leftist critic and great intellectual, of course gave Epstein more credibility in circles he would never normally have. (As well as one more person he had kompromat on.) Philanthropy was one of the key ways he got into the room with the right people - and what Epstein and his type are best at is finding what people need and what makes them tick. Donations to pet projects are a better route to influence for some than, say, payments for one’s husband’s osteopathy course.

So what’s new?

These are all well-worn critiques of big (and sometimes small) philanthropy itself. You may remember me ranting about this around this time last year. So what does the Epstein case, and his involvement with philanthropy and other philanthropists tell us more broadly?

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I think it tells us that the structures of philanthropy mirror the wider problems in our world with massive, unaccountable, amoral elites. We see that the abuse of women is endemic. We see that global elites of the ultra wealthy have as much influence as, if not more than, states. We see that behind the facade of our democracies, there are more powerful alliances and allegiances which make decisions without reference to the people. That in itself is far from new: this is all patronage, privilege, the giving and receiving of favours. And let’s be clear: while the most profitable playgrounds of philanthropy may be reserved for the very top elites, none of us who has worked in fundraising is unfamiliar with all of these issues writ small and local as well as large and global.

And it tells us that much modern ‘philanthropy’ can only thrive in a world with massive inequities of power, prestige and wealth. But more than that, philanthropy helps to prop it up.

Seeing such philanthropists in proximity to this mass of influence, secretive, conspiratorial deals, and lavish venality tells us, not (just) that they are bad eggs, but what so much philanthropy is really for.

The point is that elite philanthropy is forms part of the horse trading, buying, selling, and exchange of political economic and social power between elites. It tells us that philanthropy is a weapon and a tool of the ruling classes. Because let’s be clear - philanthropy is not something that is just available to anyone.

At best, philanthropy is just another ride in the playground for the ruling class. But it has greater instrumental value than this: it launders reputations. It gives people access to political power and opens doors. It buys credibility and ‘favour’, both political and economic. It throws the plebs off the scent of fair taxation, or worse. It acts as a mythology of the largesse and intellectually superior supposed forward-thinking of a class of people who most often are lucky, greedy, or both.

And it confirms again that the issue we are dealing with here is not just a matter of goodies and baddies and individuals who are gold or brass. This is a systemic issue, not just individual morality. The ruling economic elites, with their shared interests for profit and power, use philanthropy to grease the wheels and reinscribe their hegemony - that is, their dominating influence, especially at the cultural and political level. We must stop believing their mythology.

The Epstein files should act as the starkest possible case study of how philanthropy serves as an ever-present tool in the undemocratic power-broking of the ruling class in late capitalism.

What to do?

So everyone always wants a simple solution. This is people’s most common objection to these critiques - we know all this but what are we supposed to DO about it? (‘Waaaah’ is also often involved.)

I think the answer is fairly simple - I’m a strategist in my day job, and we’re weirdly resistant to long term strategy in the leftist world. Flooding the zone with shit, keeping everyone squawking and running around is part of the strategy of our enemies.

And everybody in the sector and beyond constantly wanting immediate fixes is part of the problem.

So my solution is a simple phased strategy. Over maybe 20 years. (I will be pushing 70, but most of you will still be plugging away and may even have survived the MAGA era.)

• Short term: MORE philanthropy

• Medium term: BETTER philanthropy - democratic philanthropy, in particular.

• Long term: NO philanthropy

Can we get our heads around that? It’s not rocket science is it?

But if you have a strategy in phases, you have to plan for all of them, and work out how to get to each one.

I’m most interested in the last one. And yet, our whole world of philanthropy and charity simply refuses to consider it.

Meme time

You’ve been very good and now deserve the Bad Bunny memes.

Meanwhile, I do love it when Americans are so batshit insane they make that Megatw*t Piers Morgan look reasonable.

Other Internet nonsense

And finally…

I can still barely feel my nose after my return from Copenhagen, which was honestly a bit dismal, apart from the pastries, and a fantastic museum called the Glyptotek. Ironically, set up by a philanthropist of the Carlsberg empire. Great museum, crap beer, not my first hypocritical brush with philanthropy for sure.

Anyway, I shall see you again in a week or three with one of the essays I have been piling up, if I can finish them…

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Wvery

Hello everyone, and welcome to nearly February. I’ve spent the last week doing grant application interviews and have learned a lot, not least that vodka takes the edge off, but it’s best not to start before11am. Also, don’t mix it with anti-dizziness medication. Oh, and people are doing amazing stuff - probably too much, which is also the case for me. Apart from the amazing bit.

In general news, democracy strikes again as Andy Burnham is prevented from returning to the parliamentary Labour party. Suella Braverman joins Reform, which is not the coup they think it is because everyone knows she’s mad as a f*cking brush. Same with Jenrick. It’s bad for the Tories but not necessarily good for Reform…

America has descended into total fascism and quickly discovered that people aren’t just going to quietly accept that, especially in a place like Minneapolis. This is really interesting: Minneapolis is what they call Mall of America territory - this is not Portland. Go Prince fans!

Next week, I am off to Copenhagen, which every single person I speak to tells me is the best place they have ever been, but also, not to bother with the Little Mermaid. I’m looking forward to it, albeit wrapping up warm….

Liberal Democracy Returns to the Third Sector

Charity Commission CEO David Holdsworth spoke this week at the annual charity conference of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. (Wow, I can’t believe I missed that no doubt Bacchanalian celebration.) I’m quoting it at length because it was sort of buried in reporting, but I think it was the most important thing that he said.

Charity not expected to be ‘fluffy’

‘Holdsworth discussed the distinction between public trust and approval, saying that “none of us will support every single charity on the register”.

“We all have different worldviews, passions and interests. It’s one of the sector’s great strengths - how broad the sector is. And as regulator, we don’t expect charities to be uncontroversial,” […]

“In fact, it’s my personal conviction that societal progress over the decades has come about precisely because of the work of charities whose missions have been at odds with what was, at the time, comfortable, respectable or common ground amongst the general public.” […] “We shouldn’t expect charity to be fluffy. Sometimes charity is and must be disruptive, but – and this is an important but – the ability and freedom of charities to pursue controversial charitable aims rests on a collective commitment to integrity in how charities are run.”

David Holdsworth, quoted in Civil Society, 23rd Jan 2026

I cannot stress enough how heartening I find Holdsworth’s speech - compare this to the insanity and intense politicisation of the Orlando years. It fits with the notion of the Civil Society Covenant. It acts as a reset. This is all the more important in a week where another conference found larger charities (always the only ones who get invited to talk, of course) were talking about the ‘self-censorship’ of charities.

Make no mistake, this goes down to the level of individual censorship of those who work for charities daring to have an opinion or a persona beyond their work one, as we have seen with those struggling with trustee disapprobation if they speak out of turn.

Let’s be clear: This is the speech the CC needed to make, and I’m impressed that they have done so.

Stress test: trans inclusion and the law

Meanwhile, in the same week, the Charity Commission asked theGoverment for guidance on how they should deal with requests to include trans people in charities whose objects state they are solely for women. This is absolutely predictable but also likely to have a very bad result for those trans little girls who want to go to a youth club with their friends, given the Government and the EHRC’s outright hostility to trans rights.

At the end of the day, this is a moral, ethical, and political question about kindness and inclusion - and the Labour government and the EHRC have been hostile to trans rights for some time. So this is like the teacher asking the bullies whether it’s okay to bully you. But what else can they do? They have to apply the law - and indeed, their interpretation has to rely on the interpretation in turn of hostile actors and judiciary. My take: we are going to hasve to win hearts and minds and build a groundswell here, in the charity sector as much as anywhere else. Fiddling with governance and the law is not going to cut it alone - because governance and the law are currently on the side of the most powerful.

Overall, the Charity Commission is setting out a pluralist, dialogic, highly liberal democratic vision of charity. But the reality of the climate in which that is taking place is increasingly fraught - and all the benevolent and democratic will in the world can’t help when the judiciary and the interpreters of the law are powerfully hostile to certain aspects of justice.

Why Lawfare Has Charities in its Sights

Meanwhile, working with colleagues opposed to anti-trans bigotry, we’ve been shocked, if not entirely surprised, by the weaponisation of the law to intimidate and frighten enemies. This is not just about charities and civil society per se - it’s making me think about the wider impacts on law in the world and politics as it changes, where we have to decide between law as dsialogue and law as a weapon.

The growth of ‘lawfare’ in the charity sector is frightening. Test cases, appeals, and various other legal instruments of change are one thing. The Good Law Project is doing an excellent job here, and of course, the Mumsnet Meanies backed by Wizardy Enid Blyton are doing a great job of, not winning them (because in fact often they are losing and spinning it as success), but of presenting victory.

But there is a more sinister kind of lawfare happening, where legal threats - and people’s fear of legal attack, and inability to legally defend themsevles - is being used to frighten, coerce and blackmail people and organisations into positions they don’t want to take. Small charities and individuals now being approached by anti-trans legal activists and told they will be personally sued if they don’t comply in advance with excluding trans people is a somewhat different thing than a discursive process of legal argument in the courts.

This is just a type of juridico-legal violence, where the process is used to terrify and intimidate. This is deeply sinister.

You can see the law as a set of fixed rules that govern behaviour and apply punishment or favour based on absolute moral precepts handed down from a higher power. You can also see law as a kind of neutral umpire for managing conflicts, and avoiding the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’. Since the Enlightenment most of all, it has been seen as a place of dialogue where we slowly come, through discourse, debate, and rational argument, to new agreements of social and moral norms. In this, we find the fundamental belief of liberal democracy: respect for the rule of law, and the ability to challenge and change society through legal discourse and legislation. But that model only works (if it does) when institutions accept the premise of social progress as dialogue - and in good faith.

Marxist approaches to the law have always stressed the idea that laws are outgrowths of the ruling class (those who have the greatest share of the wealth) at any time. Alongside this we see the insights of things like Critical Legal Studies which developed in the US in response to new social movements and indeed their experiences of the limitations of legal arguments in the context of civil rights. Both approaches were sceptical of liberal democratic claims about the law, to my mind rightly, at least in part.

But there is a newer approach to law (well, newer in focus), very much born of the aggressively litigious culture of the US, and of the increasingly emboldened New Right: law as a matter of explicitly asserting dominance and exerting power over its enemies. It does this through terror and intimidation, leveraging fear of personal, financial and reputational ruin. It is basically using the law as a weapon of blackmail. In a sense it is seeing the law as part of the ‘war of all against all’, not as a way of avoiding or overcoming it.

This has grown out of political ‘realism’, very much the core belief of the right in the US since at least the 1980s, and most of all in international frameworks - essentially the idea that ‘might is right’. 1

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The end of law?

As Mark Carney put it this week, quoting Thucydides from the Melian Dialogues (no, I just looked it up) we are approaching an international legal order where “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

The rule of law is evaporating at an international level (let’s be clear, that was indeed largely the international ‘law’ prior to the 20th century). But evaporating that law is also a key strategy on a day to day, micro and national political level by the rising right wing forces across the globe. Authoritarians despise the authority of ‘law’ as a social and civic function of democracy, because they only love their own authority. As Judge Dredd would have it: ‘I am the law.’ Laws just get in the way of authoritarians - unless, of course, they make them. Project 2025 and its various local implementations are precisely designed to erode the rule of law and put in its place authoritarian executive systems which act purely on coercion and might.

At the same time, the attack dogs of the New Right know that law, including civil law, is a powerful weapon. The New Right treat law as something that is useful in as much as it can be used to command and coerce, even if in its liberal democratic form it is also a barrier, if it can be used to temper their power. They attack ‘the law’ but replace it with laws of their own, and stuff judiciaries with their own people, to enshrine their own authority (see for example the US Supreme Court). Access to vast funds to do so is almost always a pre-requisite.

In this mode, law usually attacks the ‘other’ and protects the ‘us’ (per critical legal studies views), supports the wealthy and their property (per Marxist views), and more generally, allows the absolute power of fascists (per realists). And its only purpose is instrumental: to reinforce or take power. There is a famous recent quote about conservatism:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

— Frank Wilhoit

For democrats, liberals, and even leftists to an extent, dialogue, debate, and rational discourse are goals in themselves. They are not just instrumental in achieving a good society, they are a central part of it.

But for political realists, process has no inherent value; all that matters is whether it gets you what you want. This is the approach that lawfare takes, and the scorched earth tactics of the anti-trans meanies’ legal strategies are designed to do nothing else but destroy their enemies. These are two different ideas about how we approach law and social change in a liberal democracy.

At the same time, I am not arguing here for a naive return to a politics of liberal democratic process. AIDS, LGBT activism, and any number of other social and justice movements suggest it is not enough. For all the Neocon political realism, there is a left, progressive, and anti-authoritarian tradition of realism too. I’m reminded of Michel Foucault’s take: “Shall we say, politics is war pursued by other means?” A Machiavellian streak runs right through any movement that plans to make change.

Nothing is simple.

Why charities?

So why are these attacks are coming for charities? Well, because, whatever people like the IEA and Orlando Fraser will tell you, charities are a fundamental part of civil society. And civil society, central to flourishing liberal democracies, is where norms are formed, dissent is organised, and power is either normalised or challenged.

Italian Marxist theorist of culture and politics, Antonio Gramsci, whose work has now been explicitly co-opted by the New Right, was very clear that civil society is not a sideshow to state power – it’s where hegemony (dominating influence over society) is made, normalised, and contested. Civil society is not peripheral to politics but one of its central battlegrounds.

What could help?

Well, clearly, I’m not going to suggst how to fix the decline of liberal democracy - although Edward Luce has written an excellent book about that. You may also want to take a look at the work of Thomas Piketty.

But as for UK civil society, I’ve talked a lot here about the problem. I’m not one for easy solutions. And yet, I do think there is one very brave but potentially powerful solution that could happen in civil society and in the shape of our market, where funds are held by massive unacountable (but hence extremely free) foundations.

Charities in particular fear legal action, and easily-triggered trustees fear litigation and the costs it will bring - and indeed, are bound to do so by law. So non-profits will remain an easy target, and indeed, a prime target, for those who are looking for a place to attack.

If there was anything that might help, it is simple: a legal fund, from several of the major UK funders to decentre risk, to defend charities who wish to protect trans women’s right to exist. Perhaps even the biggest cannot compete with the resources of JK Rowling (what kind of a world do we live in?). But a sense that somebody with money and power has their back is something that charities need to feel at the moment.

STOP PRESS

YAAAAAAASSSSSSSSS!

Quick bits

Is the Government a Charity?

Surely the most bonkers story in the last few weeks has been the decision that a charity set up in the early 20th century to pay off the national debt - yes really - has to close, and give its money direct to the Government to be used to pay off £600m of the national debt. Of around £3 trillion.

But this is like using your Auntie Brenda’s 50p for sweeties to help towards your deposit on a house. Just buy some sweets, FFS.

Even the Government has said “thanks, but it’s not even worth getting out of bed for”. Oddly, they didn’t say ‘the national debt is just money we’ve made up anyway because national debts don’t actually exist if you have currency sovereignty.’ Which they should….

Meanwhile, what I noticed was how quickly people jumped to say that the judgement had been correct because it very much was what the charity’s objects said. Of that, I have no doubt - my question is in what universe this is a charitable object in 2026, even if people were dumb enough to think it was one 100 years ago. This also struck me as the classic problem again with regulation, governance, and the law in charities: we’re very quick to affirm that if the process has beeen followed, the end result must be correct. Why? Is this not an absolutely obvious case of the process being followed to arrive at an utterly pointless outcome?

It also worries me that we are allowing the blur of boundaries between the statutory and voluntary sectors again. This always makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Of course, others were quick to suggest that the Government should simply put the money directly into the charity sector where £600m would go down very nicely thank you. And voila, a few days later, the Government announced a new ‘covenant fund’ for chaarities. Aha, I thought!… This is it!

Checks headline….

£11.6m….

So, that’ll be some cola bottles and a jelly snake for me, please. Thanks, Auntie Brenda.

Meanwhile, I guarantee this will go straight to local authorities to pay for their existing local grants - if not directly, it will just be used to replace them. (You’ve got that bit of funding so you don’t need our grant…)

More charities - seriously?

Meanwhile, with another increase in the number of charities registering (although not a massive one, it must be said), we confront the ongoing mystery. If such a comparatively large number of people in the public does not trust or like charities, why does everyone want to set one up?

I can only assume that people are doing this because, as we’ve said before, existing charities have set themselves apart from social movements, and turned themselves into factories for volunteering or donation gathering, taking away people’s sense of agency for doing ‘charitable’ work.

But another question is, what is so attractive about charity status? Is it just the access to charitable funding thing? The tax break? Business rates? A lack of awareness of other models?

I’d like to see some proper research on this: can the CC shed light on it, or help arrange some research to understand what the drivers are for so many people?

High streets are a life or death issue for democracy

You’ve seen my long lament for the death of high streets, especially in my local area. This article confirms that the loss of high streets is a matter of national and political life and death. The thing that most confirms a sense of national decline for people is looking at a place that used to be a place they felt they belonged, and could spend time interacting with others, and seeing it decayed and dilapidated - and therefore increasingly empty. That fact that often, in the place of larger businesses, small migrant businesses start up in their place, only adds to the tendency for people to wrongly blame those ‘others’ for the decline.

My take? All this ‘social investment’ nonsense going into charities is often quite damaging. If you want to invest in society and the economy, with low return but high social impact, start higher risk investment with patient capital for independent high street businesses. Sumerian and the rest, Office for Impact Economy, are you listening? (Erm, nope…)

Or, you could just use the money to pay off the national debt.

Or maybe some of those foam bananas I used to love?

Thanks especially this week to Civil Society News whose daily email updates are a lifesaver - their reporting has been really helpful here.

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Okay, so I lied, it’s a shitshow. But hey, that’s what you’re here for, and indeed, what we kind of signed up for. Just keep on keeping on. Have fun when you can. The most formidable CEO colleague I ever worked with, Jacky, used to say, “It’ll be alright. And if it’s not alright, it’ll be alright.” That is the best advice I’ve ever had for this game.

So I ended last year with a fairly popular (4000+ readers) review of the year. And now it’s time to draw some of those observations into the future. Not predictions, so much as analysing trends and trajectories. Because honestly, who can possibly hazard a guess about what is going to happen, even in nonprofits, in a world where the US is about to invade Greenland? Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

The thing is, we’re in a very difficult place, which even the Guardian has now discovered. What they have noticed is that, positive as the Civil Society Covenant is, what charities really need is, erm, cash.

It gives a good historical and political perspective as well as a demand for change. But what we perhaps need to further emphasise is that the cultural ‘glue’ of community charity does not appear magically between interventions for diabetes or cancer or parenting workshops. Fund the glue, and then force the state to take back its role in creating interventions to solve problems it creates and maintains, often by refusing to challenge exploitative and antisocial economic forces.

Now is the time to put aside our obsessions with intervention and focus on what voluntarism is really for: bringing together communities and society.

Anyway, nice for us all to be in the Grauniad, innit? It’s like being famous.

DYNAMIC CEOS AND THEIR MASSIVE HARD IMPACT

It’s a new year and the ‘up-for-it’ dynamic hard-ass charity CEOs are setting out their warplans on Linkedin with speeches worthy of Henry V via Chat GPT. They’ve always got a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War and the latest Stephen Bartlett crayon-masterpiece in their back pocket.

‘Hard decisions’, ‘tough times’ ‘massive impact’, and ‘dynamic power of charity’ are everything, and you’re sometimes hard pressed to work out if it’s Barry’s Bootcamp, Harvard Business School or a Grindr profile.

The promise is always, ‘This will be a difficult year - this is what you can do.’

But strangely it’s exactly what you’ve been doing for twenty five years, repackaged with all the same mix of solemn-yet-bloodless charity jargon and business babble that seems to be the only way we can speak now.

There is always a list of great sins that ‘we’ must avoid, always written from the perspective of some almighty powers who must be appeased. One such speech I saw this year told us that we will see “reduced tolerance for unclear impact.” Who exactly is doing the tolerating here? Who gets to choose the level of tolerance? Is Daddy watching? Do you secretly enjoy that?

Then we will hear the old saw “collaborate more!” - always especially popular for larger charities who are really saying “don’t compete with us, or we will crush you.” Or perhaps like the Borg: “You will be assimilated….” One very special post even then wheeled out “work smarter not harder.” If that’s the best you can come up with, I doubt smarter is on the agenda. Others tell us that technology will solve our problems. But AI will not unblock that toilet.

Much of this is like being told to levitate through the power of pure thought. What we are doing is packaging endurance and acceptance as change. And it’s the same old prescriptions for the same problems, albeit writ larger and deeper than before.

Isn’t there a future beyond the next funding round?

What I would add is that it may be time for us all to start asking whether, at the start of such a year (that, fortunately, most of us will survive and occasionally thrive through) there might be genuine or deeper change. Perhaps even in another 25 years - which could be a radically different version of the current reality we see. If nothing else, the order of the world is being thrown up in the air.

It’s not going well, have you noticed? But if in the wider economy there is to be what Resolution Foundation calls ‘creative destruction’ (see later), perhaps it’s time to think about what could come after. That goes double for our little corner of the economy and the world.

In so many ways, the current crisis is just business as usual. But wouldn’t you like a sense of a future beyond just that?

This week, I’m going to give you a sense of what I expect to see this year, especially in terms of wider politics and economics, and how that is likely to affect UK nonprofits.

In the following issue, I want to look far beyond the next year and offer some ‘What ifs.’ What ifs are not about predicting the future - they are about imagining possibility. And it’s remarkable how much nobody wants you to think about that.

A reminder:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

— James Baldwin

The economy

This year, we have to remember that we’re not the only ones in a recession. Before people pile in and tell me the definition of a recession, come off it: look outside.

The Resolution Foundation, Torsten Bell’s economic think tank which is sort of what passes for centre-left-ish if you squint, is going for the glass half-full approach. But even if this glass is half full, it’s a reminder you need to ask what’s in the glass before you drink it.

“Experts have warned for several years that Britain has been held back by so-called “zombie firms” – companies which barely make enough money to cover their costs but just about stay in business – preventing the allocation of resources to more productive sectors of the economy. […]

The Resolution Foundation said there were early signs that Britain’s productivity growth was being boosted by “creative destruction”, whereby newer and better firms, products or processes replace older, less-efficient, ones. Adoption of artificial intelligence technologies could also be playing a role, it said.”

But there is a problem here: market capitalism’s survival of the fittest takes no account of the value of a business beyond its financial value.

For example: the Costa coffee (yes, owned by Coca-Cola, but a franchise, remember) in Catford, rammed every day for ten years but apparently unable to make sufficient profit, has just closed. The community cinema went last year, as did all four pubs, all because they were financially ‘underperforming’. But these ‘zombie’ businesses were not crowding out alternative, stronger businesses. Not least, nobody else can afford the rent. And the impact of their loss to the community is vast. Furthermore, the loss of those businesses impacts the wider local economy - the death spiral of the high street continues. What replaces them is usually zombies of even greater putrescence - more money-laundering phone shops or ‘club venues’ that strangely never open.

All of this can be reflected at a larger, national/ macro-economic level as well. The underperforming productive economy will continue to be replaced by an AI bubble and more and more financialised zombie speculation and private equity firms. What is really ‘productive’ here? We should also note that the death of all these ‘zombie’ businesses, as the report makes clear, means unemployment - bad for charities who look after poor communities. We risk dead zones of social fabric, with more and more people falling into greater poverty.

So even the case for a clearout for private enterprise is far from clear-cut.

Zombie charities?

But what of charities then?

The idea that ‘zombie’ businesses going under is ‘creative destruction’ is also often used to argue for the death of many struggling charities, by charity hawks and, essentially, those who are doing well. Are there zombie charities who just need a well-judged headshot to bring the tender mercies of oblivion?

We;ve been here before. People who go under are not necessarily the ones who are not needed. Sometimes they are just unpopular causes. Sometimes they fall foul of the desire to fund only targeted interventions - community centres, for example. And sometimes, they just have a run of bad luck, often following a run of good luck (time for a ‘break’ from all the big funders at once). I’m still reeling from the loss of the only UK charity for LGBT older people - dropped like a stone by its parent charity and cut adrift by all its funders at the first sign of trouble. That was desperately needed.

Let’s be clear. Charity business strategy is a big part of my day job. (I’m a Marxist who finds business really interesting.. Like Engels…) If I’m being brutally honest, there are a few charities which are absolutely zombies whose time has long past. I can think of organisations who have spent literally 10 years of not just dwindling resources and finances, but also, dwindling effectiveness, and indeed, usefulness. The financial and the ‘impact’ are intertwined, but there is often a particular kind of death spiral in which complaints about lack of income conceal the fact that other things are very wrong. Youth charities, for all the desperate need, are often problematic here. Years of dwindling attendance and a failure to change has combined with the lack of income in a self-reinforcing spiral for many. That ends in disaster.

So, much as I want to offer encouragement, I always encourage perople to ask themselves: as you approach the new financial year, is it really worth it? We can never take out personal needs entirely, and it’s scary to lose a job, but a graceful exit is much better than a crash and burn with staff (including you) heading off to government compensation schemes for their redundancy pay. But people can be incredily resistant to hearing this.

At the same time, we can celebrate the resilience of what former Lloyds Foundation CEO Paul Streets calls not zombies, but ‘cockroaches’. Small charities, he famously said, are like cockroaches - you can’t believe they’re still there, every year, surviving beyond all expectations.

So, if things are a nightmare this year again, you probably need to work out whether you’re a zombie or a cockroach.

I expect more charities to close but I suspect more and more will start shrinking services instead. And they should. Meanwhile, those doing well will do well - that is the ongoing pattern. The larger and most government-focused charities will either hoover up, or go under. Much of that will depend on their location and the particular poilitial stripe of their local authority or relationship with the NHS.

Meanwhile, with some of the big grantmakers reopening, there may be hope for some - but many have pivoted. Is the funding matched to the needs? Are you the new chosen ones…? And can you get through the front door when the queue is this long?

Other 2026 predictions: key trends

Politics and power

Expect significant turmoil with May elections testing Labour’s position as anti-migrant rhetoric follows Reform rightward. Starmer is unlikely to survive those elections unless there is a surprisingly good result for Labour. In this crazy world, the latter is still not unthinkable. But more likely, there will be a huge crash and we will see someone else in charge until the next election. Who? There are no good options. Meanwhile, if more Reform councils appear, bad things will happen for a wide range of services for people who rely on charities. The old pattern of increasing need, dwindling public services, and charities without resources will play out even stronger than before. You can also expect anti-DEI and anti-migrant sentiment to infect commissioning as it has in the US.

At the same time, politically, it’s far from certain that Reform’s resurgence will continue - for one thing, their clear fecklessness is becoming more and more apparent, and if they do win more councils, that will be difficult to ignore for all but those who literally vote for them because they’re nutcases. The Greens may do well, or it may be still disappointing. The Lib Dems will stay the party of ex-Headteachers and librarians. Some claim the Tories are in a final closure stage. I’m not so sure: we thought that in ‘97, and people forget very quickly. So the question, then, is where will people turn? One danger may be that they turn away from party politics - and to different kinds of political action. Everybody I know expects more civil unrest this year.

Meanwhile, in the charity world, the Civil Society Covenant is likely to face its first real tests of tolerance for challenge of the Government, as migrant rhetoric, and indeed, likely cuts to welfare, directly impact charitable missions. How brave charities feel will be a big decider. With a new Charity Commission regime, there is testing to be done.

On this note, I think we should be braver. But I also realise how dangerous openness is for charity leaders: what I have recently found is that CEOs who speak out politically (on a clearly personal basis, even) are not so much at risk from funders, as at risk from their own trustees. This tells us a lot about how trustees work to contain discourse in the sector.

Culture wars

On that front, I’m expecting the culture wars to intensify in the charity sector, particularly around trans inclusion and who counts as “deserving” of support. Make sure you join Kevin’s Third Sector Against Transphobia group. And look, you don’t have to be a radical trans activist (whatever that is) to think it’s just mean and shitty to boot out some poor kid from their Brownies group because somebody has decided they’re too ‘manly’. Just don’t be horrible.

A previously quieter far-right wing in the charity sector is already becoming more visible - that includes people raising extremist anti-migrant views openly. The danger, conversely, is that a true anti-authoritarian left wing, beyond pronouncements about deserving ‘vulnerable’ people and DEI industry talk, has been very effectively silenced over the last 15 years.

The rise of Christian Nationalism (really ethno-nationalism) should be of concern to Christian charities (and indeed, the rest of us). It will be all too easy to find boards being infiltrated as they have been so effectively in the US.

I highly recommend this video by the brilliant and adorable Tom Nicholas.

Community and society

Libraries, cinemas, pubs, shops, all manner of social spaces closing, is probably driving more people into the arms of the far right as they become more afraid and distrustful of others. What the far-right in the US has realised long ago is that they can offer the sense of comfort and camaraderie that people are losing in their communities in an age of ‘bowling alone’. The latest discovery by the Guardian and indeed some funders is that community centres and other types of third spaces (including in the private sector) are vital. But I fear we can expect more talk about shared community spaces without actual funding - the eternal expectation that if you fund interventions, community glue will miraculously transsubstantiate around it. Promises of Government investment will be backed only by money already earmarked long ago.

The further rise of strategic grantmaking is only exacerbating the decline of whole-community support and development. Whether some of the larger funders can pivot meaningfully to support this will be the make or break. But it can probably only happen if multiple funders collaborate strategically, and if funding is not only short term or project focused, or indeed, capital only. We do not need another white elephant communiy asset in the bottom of a tower block that nobody can afford to do anything in. And no, children’s parties or a barely-open cafe will not pay for it.

As I write, trying to find somewhere to have a coffee in Catford instead of the now closed Costa, I decided to go to the cold, inhospitable new community/ social enterprise ‘not just a pub’ which the council has given to a shake-and-bake community ‘regeneration’ CIC. They were the first to post on Facebook that those who lamented the loss of Costa could come and support a real community venue. That’s something, I thought, and turned up. D’oh! They’re closed in the daytime all week…. Of course, they got capital funding, and then zero revenue funding for a from-scratch new venue with uncertain purpose. Sigh.

Let’s be clear: the new social clubs and so on that are opening and developing need to make sure they have a purpose. Community centres without community activities are just empty spaces. Libraries without books are just empty spaces. Socila enterprise coffeee shops with horrible food and coffee that are never open are just empty spaces. There is no way to avoid revenue funding for 99.9% of ventures with any kind of social goal.

Economic trends

And on that note, there has been a clear increase in talk about social finance recently, and the development of the Office for the Impact Economy (seriously, for what, now…?) is part of this. It is certainly no coincidence that such talk comes at a time of massive charity sector collapse, as indeed it it did in the Big Society crunch of 2010-11. Social finance for actual businesses and private enterprises seems to me to be a potential positive - so many of the basic social fabric businesses we need are now incresibly high risk and need patient capital banks refuse, especially in poorer areas. But the push towards further social finance for genuinely charitable projects has the opposite effect, as we saw the last time. This creates capital projects with no revenue funding, or underfunded ventures on ridiculous timescales doomed to fail within two years. The failures are then used to justify further cuts or refused further lending for similar work. ‘People just don’t want it. It can’t work.’ But charities are charities for a reason. They cannot just fund themselves - otherwise, they can just be businesses.

This article is well worth a read. I don’t necessarily agree with it all - I think the grey area might actually be exactly where it is most helpful (for example, funding low-profit but high community regeneration value retail, leisure or hospitality ventures with truly patient capital). But in spirit, it squares very closely with my own experience.

The ‘impact’ data lust in the sector seems to be continuing, with ever more talk about having to ‘demonstrate real impact’. And yet, I do think I am seeing (and I hope, in some way modestly supporting) a growing schism between those believing in perfect data and total surveillance, versus those who favour doing good stuff because it’s the right thing to do. Clearly neither approach alone is helpful. But ask yourself, what still needs to be statistically proven about most charity work? And in that case, what is the point of simply proving it again? And who really wants this data? What change will it actually unlock? What are we doing with this data apart from putting it in a database and wondering why it still doesn’t tell us anything of value?

Technology

I imagine funders will be using AI to sift applications by year’s end. We’re also seeing a burgeoning of ‘innovative’ fundraising databases from fundraisers who fear the collapse of the bid-writing market. They’re right to worry! But how many more databases do we need? One good one would be a start.

More generally, especially around AI, I’m seing more predatory sniffing around from private sector rip-off merchants who see charities as easy marks. Beware people using pretend ‘donations’ to lock organisations into subscriptions for later enshittification. The last charity tech boom was 2010-11; economic drivers suggest another is coming. It achieved very little and saddled a lot of charities with systems that never worked and wasted millions of pounds.

In an age of enshittification and data piracy, you should also watch for systems hoovering up all VCS data across the UK. When these businesses have your data which they are helpfully organising for you, what are they doing with it? Many fundraising databases seem to be now using the research you input as a fundraiser to crowdsource their own databases and trade their own services. What is remarkable is that this is exactly how a collaborative, crowdsourced service like Jo Jeffery’s The List works. But in a classic turn around of capitalist extraction and techno-feudalism, some companies have learned from this and used them same model to extract value and generate profit for themselves.

Charities need computer-literate ethics and healthy cynicism. Being luddites is stupid. Being credulous and inviting in predators is equally so. Charities need to develop their own skills and knowledge - enough at least to know when they are getting a good or bad deal.

As for the wider world of technology: is that AI bubble really going to burst? I’m not sure now. One of the things that is becoming more and more clear is that so many people have a vested interest in not blinking first. Why would anyone be the one to start selling off in a fire sale? Why would anyone pull the plug on credit to these massive ventures when they know that in itself would damage their own assets? Perhaps what we are seeing is the final absolute triumph of fake money and fake assets. Maybe our whole economy at this stage is basically a load of Bored Ape NFTs - and people have just agreed not to let this one die. In the case of NFTs, those were after all ‘memestock’ - and sold mostly to credulous/ defrauded individuals, not banks or major investors.

As for replacing people with AI: I know a friend working in qualitative research for a major bank has just seen her team of 75 people made redundant and replaced by AI. We’ll see how it goes. What I might say is that the kind of qualitative research done in commercial settings is really the kind of stuff that lends itelf to automation.

Certainly, middle management losses and cuts in marketing, research, and coding will happen. And yet, my sense is that people will quite soon discover that there are things humans can do that AI can’t. But first, they will indeed have to learn that. It may be a few years for the full learning to take place, and in the meantime, a lot of people with good jobs and good degrees are going to find themselves picking fruit.

So much more to say here, but I have to start proper work. Expect more predictions and analysis of trends as time goes on….

General news

Sackler Trust

Two charities that received £1.1m from Sackler Trust kept anonymous to prevent ‘serious prejudice’ | Charities | The Guardian

This is so interesting: where once charities would be asked to keep their donors secret, now donors are being asked to keep their recpients secret. Hilarious. Of course, it doesn’t really make any difference to the laundering of reputations since even the headline guarantees a virtuous sparkle.

What is worrying, however, is that this comes alongside a wider rise in anonymous donations. In the US, foundations, and increasingly the UK, donor-advised funds, give hundreds of millions to extreme-right think tanks and cultural associations, often without any information on where that money was directed. Dark money has its own dangers.

And what of taking money from Sackler? Would I take their money…? Would you…?

I’m honestly not sure I know…. I think I would advise small charities to just cash the cheque and pray for the death of capitalism.

Have a read of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Major Barbara’. Don’t know if the film has the same message.

Meanwhile, more bad news for Stonewall, whose reserves, at £100,000, are now lower than those of any of even the smallest charities I currently work with (eg. one with a £200k turnover...) I have a bad feeling here….

“Stonewall’s income and expenditure both declined by more than £2m year-on-year to £4.74m and £5.65m, respectively, in 2024-25. Corporate donations to the charity more than halved in 2024-25 to £143,000 while programmes income declined by 48% to £254,000. The charity’s events income fell by 42% to £331,000 while fees from organisations subscribing to its various programmes declined by a quarter to £1.82m. A Stonewall spokesperson said it underwent a “significant period of transformation and change” in 2024-25.”

See more at: https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/stonewall-reports-44-redundancies-and-drop-in-reserves.html#sthash.HCweLuzQ.dpuf

Internet nonsense

If small d*ck energy was a job advertisement

Amazing CEO job…

I actually worked with people like this in my first CEO job….

They even left the Chat GPT options in at the end.

Godspeed, guys.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon

Love this=>

Zack Polanski

And finally…

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It’s nearly Christmas, most of us are sick as dogs, half of us have lost our jobs.

Even I’m not reading so much social theory and hardcore politics at the moment. So let’s just say it’s end of term and we’re bringing toys - and booze. I think Foucault would approve anyway. A largely frivolous end to a rather serious year.

As an update: I decided not to announce the last edition about Trans issues on LinkedIn because of the nasty bunch on there. You’ll be horrified to hear, however, that I suffered the biggest ever loss of subscribers - 4! Yes four. So I didn’t lose too much sleep and good riddance. Back to the bogs with them.

We start with a somewhat acid review of a challenging year. And then move on to a Christmas treat in the form of an absolutely totally real charity sector party which totally happened and is pretty much the nichest bit of puerile comedy ever written. But hey, why not.

If you just want the funny bit, I don’t blame you - scroll towards the second half.

Well, That Was a Shitshow 2025: a review of the year

Much like in many company parties, you now have to listen to some Berk tell you about the past year before you can shake loose and start eating the free food. So I’ll try to keep this short, and light on SORP.

Winter

So in January, the oligarchs took over the US and a mentally-addled satsuma and Commander Data from Star Trek (if he was much less convincingly human and a Nazi) took over. They quickly froze the USAID budget, which hit a lot of nonprofits (and just as many public sector handout-hoovers from the private sector, admittedly). This hit UK charities as well, not just those in the international development space, but even domestic, including Stonewall, which was forced to make significant redundancies.

That helped pile the pressure on a UK charity industry already reeling from many of the big funders deciding to ‘pause’ for a little rest the previous year (and continuing into 2025).

Meanwhile we all started railing against growing fascism in the US, despite having kept fairly quiet when Suella Braverman was actively trying to get mobs to set fire to community and law centres in case there were migrants in them. That was different, we said, because, you know, it might have affected our funding.

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It’s been a big year for the Charity Commission. The Torygraph published an article about senior charity pay, making it seem as if every charity CEO in the UK was earning a king’s ransom. The Charity Commission then responded by not really denying it, and saying that some of the big wigs (nb. mostly men) deserved stellar pay, but they expected most people in charities to be ‘selfless’. Charity leaders ‘criticised commission chief’s tone-deaf comments on senior pay’, by which we mean, did a primal scream in their office and had to be talked down off the roof by the caretaker. But it did emphasise the yawning gulf between the vast majority of the voluntary sector, and a different breed of massive, essentially, corporations and cultural behemoths.

The Commission began the year still Chaired by a politicised Conservative called Orlando who seemed preoccupied with crushing ‘woke’ and believed charities should stay quiet on politics. Unless, that is, they were an extremely right-wing neoliberal think-tank (charity) called the Institute of Economic Affairs; for which, coincidentally, he and several other former CC trustees appointed by the Tory Government used to work. He had spent several years decrying the ‘culture wars’ in charities, especially when the wrong side was winning. This was always much like Russia claiming it is trying to end war in Ukraine - by winning it. Fortunately. Orlando lived up to his Shakespearean nomenclature and exited stage left. Even on his way out, he stressed that “If a charity decides it’s not so much a charity but an engine for social progress, we can step in,” he said in a valedictory interview in, of course the Times.

The following interim Chair seemed much less ideological, and the new one, Julia Unwin, who arrived in November, is from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. This may be the end of the Tories’ 14 year attack on charities, which they saw as dangerous obstacles to ideological total domination. Fingers crossed.

In November the Festival of Trusteeship had a speech from David Holdsworth which was widely respected. (Meanwhile I hinted it was time to get rid of trustees in the ‘Radical ideas for trusteeship’ session I compèred with Penny Wilson and Eastside People a few hours later. Don’t think he was there. 😎 )

Back to the timeline. By February, Wes ‘I will fight you’ Streeting was saying he wanted to “break the culture of the voluntary sector”, which was nice of him. I still think he looks like his eyes stick on in the morning.

Meanwhile ACEVO and NCVO (the Acronyms™) came together to create a new ‘Civil Society Covenant’ which agreed that the Government would not ask for community centres to be burned to the ground, and that charities were allowed to question Government policy. For now. It took a while, but it finally got signed off. The sheer effort of getting that signed was by all accounts monumental - it’s not like the Government didn’t have other priorities. Meanwhile, while many are sceptical about its likely longevity or effectiveness, there’s no question about the amount of work it took to achieve it.

In youth work, when Axel Rudakubana was convicted of the horrific murders of three schoolgirls in Southport, everybody started asking why ‘Prevent’ hadn’t prevented it by bundling him into a high security prison as an extremist. Reasonable to ask, but also, nobody asked whether the decimation of CAMHS and youth services or chucking everything into ‘knife crime’ might have been unwise. The Government has spent a year on its new strategy for youth and, well, when it finally appeared in December, it is basically what you would expect - and what was there before Tory destruction. But with much less resource, and of course in much worse times economically. In a sense, people are more relieved than anything that there is a strategy at all: because it’s proof of life. Our expectations are that low.

Incidentally in BCS that month, I used again a term I’d first used years ago, and first wrote about in 2019 to describe these failures: ‘interventionitis’. Interventionitis is where we throw tiny interventions at individual symptoms and social ills, usually drawn from newspaper headlines, without ever thinking about the whole problem or considering prevention, maintenance or a holistic view.

Weirdly this has now appeared in an academic paper recently where some academics ‘coined’ it. Oi! Ah well, great minds think alike!

In March, ‘leading UK philanthropists’, including the homophobic activist and businessman Brian Souter (who ran a campaign in the 2000s to keep Clause 28), and that bloke off Dragon’s Den who runs some hotel gyms, wrote a barnstorming introduction (intro-suction?) to ‘Supercharging Philanthropy’ by the Centre for Social Injustice, set up by Iain Duncan Smith, (whose Big Society-era welfare cuts led to thousands of deaths). They claimed that they “stand ready to respond” to the challenges faced by the UK and to “propel the nation forward”. Indeed, they told us that “Philanthropy can do far more than the sum of its parts, taking risks and driving innovation in a way that taxpayers’ money cannot.” [My emphasis.]

Not subtle is it? Meanwhile, public sentiment against oligarchs, broligarchs and billionaires was rising, and people started burning Teslas, with people like Patriotic Millionaires suggesting that throwing a few coins might be less helpful than paying the tax you owe. The discomfort of philanthropy in a world of billionaires and oligarchs was a key theme for me at least in the year, but very much swept aside for the mainstream of the sector, as indeed there seemed to be more enthusiasm than ever for asking rich people to tell us all what to do.

Spring

By mid-March, as I went to my Mum’s wedding, the ‘Labour’ government’s new budget decided that disabled people seemed like a pretty decent target for welfare cuts, presumably because they thought they were less likely to be able to run with a pitchfork. Swingeing cuts were proposed, eventually reversed, but not before one of The Acronyms™ had posted on Linkedin that they wanted the Government to involve the voluntary sector to make sure cuts were made humanely. That post disappeared fairly sharpish.

April was a weird one, Trump’s insanity with tariffs had started to hit trusts and foundations’ investments and there were worries - later proving unfounded - that their income was take a huge hit. Just wait ‘til the AI bubble bursts and see how that feels. Meta gave a grant (or did it?) to the charity suporting kids bullied on social media, set up in memory of Molly Russell. Then a London trust turned out to be fighting a legal case against freehold reform because it would give it less money to spend on grants to the poor. Better to uphold feudalism than reduce your grants for kids’ football, right? Then the National Lottery Community Fund launched their new priorities. Big Local finally closed, having spent a quarter of a billion pounds on Big Society boondoggles. With all this said, the NLCF’s importance, not just for our industry, but for the kind of things we need to achieve in our society, only gets stronger.

Later in the year, Henry Smith became a Foundation, and launched a new strategy, moving towards strategic grantmaking in common with many others in the sector, and the first ever grantmaker I’m aware of that explicitly included LGBT youth. I have concerns about losing responsive grantmakers, but nobody could deny their new focuses are good areas to focus if that’s your approach.

Sadly, the charity sector recession continued, and Jo Jeffery published her ‘A Very Quiet Crisis’ blogpost looking at the wide range of charity closures. Some have continued to deny this process, but even some funders, such as Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, have noted that they have seen substantially more closures than ever before. Infrastructure charities were among them, and are struggling, but even some larger charities have disappeared unexpectedly. By June it was being reported that nearly half of small charities were facing closure. People then started claiming there were just too many charities. The question remains, too many for whom? Or what?

As for trusts and foundations, they had come in for significant criticism in 2024 (guilty), and even more worryingly for them, in the US there is a new drive to make foundations pay tax on their interest (they also have minimum giving rules in the US). These things make UK foundations anxious about their ‘autonomy’, so a funder-focused acronym mounted a fight back, along with 360 Giving, and set up a new ‘UK Grantmakers’ platform. Their first report claimed that for the first year ever there was more money in grants from philanthropy than the Government. Only partially a cause for celebration, because the cuts in Government were no doubt partly the result of private donors avoiding (or being allowed to avoid) taxation.

The danger was how this may contribute to the narratives of generous philanthropy which are being used for political purposes (cf. Supercharging Philanthropy). This was not growing philanthropy so much as a shrinking state. The two are far more connected than either would like to have you believe.

For some, it wasn’t really clear who they were trying to persuade - for many charities, such brazen self-promotion at a time when there was a huge crisis, and many of the funders had been closed, seemed rather tone deaf. And nobody had claimed they were giving out less money - a straw man they invented and repeatedly returned to, perhaps to obfuscate the disruption they caused, the effects of which the sector (and they themselves) are still feeling.

Then Captain Tom’s daughter, the rich woman with the same perm everyone in Preston had in 1980, got done for building a swimming pool with the money from her Dad’s fundraising. Everybody in charities shook their head and said, ‘No. You think? I never expected it.’

Summer

Honestly, I’ve no idea. I wrote some big essays about socialism and queer civil society. I might have been drunk. There was a lot of Foucault and Marx and Wilde and Kropotkin. And gin.

Autumn

The rise of the the far right continued across the globe, and activists here were emboldened and whipped up by the field day for morons in the US. By the time we were having marches of the Far-right in central London, moving in from the burning trash fires outside hotels housing asylum seekers, charities were of course finally, rightly, speaking out. Nobody in mainstream discourse however had noticed that slashing and burning all kinds of community assets and support across the UK might have contributed to this along the way.

By December, the Guardian had set up a telethon fund for local community charities, and Labour had decided youth work might be a good idea - with funding from, well, somewhere. The Rayne Foundation had set up a fund for community centres - very positive indeed although £2m and vast numbers of applications of course. We can only hope the NLCF continues to make multipurpose community organisations a central part of its work, even if it means creating more committees than communities.

It was a bit galling people realised this was a thing after years of trashing community centres as surplus to requirements, and with trusts and foundations and public sector alike refusing to support anything but care-based interventions. What was considered ‘nice to have’ suddenly seems urgently necessary when there are Nazis marching on Whitehall. Perhaps that glue was needed after all?

In October, CAF revealed that only 25% of UK companies give anything at all to charities. This was surely a surprise to no-one except all the people who have been singing the praises of corporates who gave them a packet of mince pies and good vibes for running their staff christmas party on the cheap (see below).

In policy, two of the remaining major think-tanks in 2025 underwent big changes: one merged with a philanthropy brokerage, and in another case, made massive cuts, and was badgering Government to create another What Works centre, about six months after those had all been closed down. Again, the goal was to prove the worth of charities. The data mountain grows and still nobody knows what to do with it, like the cans of just-in-case chickpeas I amass at Tesco every week and never seem to use. The worry is that all of the policy and think work in the sector is essentially shaped by philanthrocapitalism. Part of the goal of the less satirical parts of this blog is to change this.

On which note, me and Felicia Willow and Dorothea Jones set the cat among the pigeons by finally talking about class in the voluntary sector on a well-received podcast. It was a good programme, I loved talking to them both, but I did have a bit of an ‘am I completely insane’ moment of when I saw how in the later commentary everyone ignored all the Marxist and political change stuff I talked about. (Which Felicia also noted.) Instead, while further discussion on class is vital, it’s a shame we’re broadly focusing on a version of identity politics, DEI and not being judgey about people’s accents. That isn’t going to change much, I’m afraid.

More charities were closing by October, with Scotland worst hit in a ‘slow-motion apocalypse’, while Oxfam and other majors made mass cuts to their staff - cuts which had far-reaching consequences.

Jo Jeffery’s list website went live, which meant you could finally see all the opportunities for funding that weren’t there…

Freelanceageddon really got going. Over the course of the year, mass redundancies led to what apeared to be a massive growth in charity people taking ‘the exciting and brave step that they’d always wanted to take’ of ‘launching out on their own journey as a dynamic independent charity consultant’.

‘So brave!’ ‘Congratulations!’ the Linkedin followers say. But what we all knew was a lot of people were being forced into a gig economy, as the middle was hollowed out of the sector. This mirrors wider patterns across society and the economy in a ‘k-shaped’ recovery…

Third Sector reported on this workforce development in their podcast with an excellent interviewee called Alex Evans - oh wait, me!! And we talked about Blume’s survey which showed both how much people enjoyed the work (which probably has a lot of survivor bias), but also having a stark picture of their previous work conditions in employment. Meanwhile, others were upset at being treated like money-grabbing monsters as a freelancer (what money?) - especially when they had not chosen it at all….

Winter

Throughout the year, UK foundations were themselves under massive pressure, with between triple and in one case almost 200-fold increases in applications. Many were hit much worse by the result of their own previous closures, but others were put under pressure by the reducing pool of alternatives, with knock-on effects of reduced individual giving and public sector contracts. This created a perfect storm when it hit technology: over the year, AI and chatbots had continued their ascendancy in the charity sphere, especially as relates to fundraising. Few could deny by the end of the year that AI had played a role in collapsing the fundraising applications system. Bid-writers probably have good reason to be worried in the future, not because they don’t write better than an AI, but because people don’t really care if they do. The same race to the bottom is hitting journalism and all other writing professions of course.

This does raise the question of whether most of the crap we write in businesses and bureaucracy needs to happen - and many of us have said for years that bid-writing may be one of those things. This is unfortunate, as bid-writers are a creative bunch. Their skills will still be needed - but their paymasters will need to be educated aboiut what the real skill is. A sector obsessed with price and not value will be tricky to navigate.

By December, nasty meanie Tory leader Kemi Bad Enoch had decided that it was unChristian to pay taxes and that charitable giving on a voluntary basis was better - based on her own D grade GSCE version of history. Of course the main reason these kind of people like voluntarism is because they would never, ever volunteer anything. Hopefully she’ll be gone, likely with Starmer, by the next Christmas Shitshow edition. The replacements may be ten times worse, however.

As a special early Christmas present, the EHRC’s prejudiced and ideological overstep of the For Women Scotland judgement about women’s human rights (which led to the exclusion of trans women from basics like toilets in some cases), came to visit us like the curtain-twitching ghost of Christmas past. Girlguiding UK, and quickly, the Women’s Institute, both previously trans-inclusive, decided to exclude trans girls and women from their services. This was followed by much delighted ululation and gleeful stabbing of voodoo dolls by people who have nothing better to do with their time - the same people who would have been writing poison pen letters blackmailing the local queers in the 1950s. The two charities both claimed it was legal threats that had forced them to do this - but some doubt this.

Suffice to say, the Third Sector Against Transphobia group on Linkedin (and soon beyond) set up by Kevin Taylor McKnight, and which I’m happy to be part of with Penny Wilson, Felicia Willow and Debra Allcock-Tyler among many others, had double the number of members within a week than the one set up by the Mean Girls who want to look down people’s pants and bully them. Penny Wilson wrote an excellent letter to the Charity Commission asking them to make a series of changes - and the CC at least clarified that it did not see holding charities to the equalities laws as part of its remit. That has upsides and downsides.

Overall, what this tells you is that yes, the charity sector is full of decent people. But we have to be brave. If you want to help, join the Third Sector Against Transphobia group and give to the Good Law Project. We need to get these monomaniacs of mean-ness and small-mindness out of the charity sector (and beyond) for good.

Bringing things full circle, by the end of the year, reports apeared suggesting that thousands of people had died as a result of Trump and Musk’s cuts to the USAID budget. As I go to press (which sounds very professional…) Oxfam’s CEO has been forced to resign, partly (it’s is said) because she lost the confidence of her staff during the aforementioned redundancies. According to the Guardian, ‘a restructuring of the organisation she led had created “widespread animosity”. They claimed it created an “intense climate of fear” that had become “deeply rooted in Oxfam, including a very real fear of retribution from senior management”.’ Some claim she is the victim of racism and sexism, some that this was a bullying culture and a badly-run change programme. None of which is good news, however you cut it: big changes often lead to a febrile atmosphere in a sector which is in significant recession.

We need to end on a high. Well, a high based from the viewpoint of a mouse’s nethers. I’ve been enjoying seeing small acts of resistance in civil society. So for me, perhaps the most uplifting story of the year is the success of the Everyone Hates Elon campaign, which raised £100,000 for causes hated by Elon Musk: asylum and migrants, anti-racism, trans people and so on. They did this by getting people to pledge money every time Musk wrote a hateful tweet. A roaring success of course….

It was a year of the rise of oligarchs, a return to the worship of philanthropists alongside a shrinking state, and rising intolerance, enabled by transatlantic far-right nutcases, as well as a year of massive economic uncertainty and rising inequality, with a hollowing out of the middle class. Alongside that, a failing, flailing left has allowed much of this to go unchallenged - and people desperately need a new vision of a fairer, kinder and more just society.

All of this impacted - and perhaps was impacted, in its own small way - by the UK nonprofit sector. There is a rethinking and restructuring underway driven by all of these forces, but it is mostly unthinking, and as ever, drivne by ideas and ideologies form outside our own culture. It’s up to us to fight to make sure whatever new shape we see in our work, not just as an industry, but as custodians of social and cultural practices of love, care and community, finds us on the right side of history. There is no room for complacency, and everything to play for.

And now the party…

And so, well done everyone for listening to that. The bar is now open and there is some free food, but I would give it a sniff first. As the youth workers among you will know, make sure you get to the buffet before the kids do. Otherwise you’ll be munching your way through piss-contaminated vol-au-vents and dodging licked sausages half-submerged in the hummus.

Anything in packets is safe.

WELCOME TO THE ANNUAL UK CHARITY SECTOR CHRISTMAS PARTY!!!

Hello, hello, hello! Come in. Before I take you through, just to say I’m contractually obliged to tell you this is sponsored by a leading database company, and some techbros are going to be using your personal data and selling it to Peter Thiel for unknown purposes. But they do have a LOVELY website. And 150 quid is 150 quid.

Anyway, would you like the tour first? Well, as you can see, this is a delightful community centre with attractive period features like bars on the windows and toilets from the Victorian era. We’ve gone for a particular look: think ruin chic.

So come this way.

Just leave your coat there - don’t leave anything in the pockets though.

And then come through to the main hall. Shall we find you somewhere to sit?

So, as is traditional, we’ve separated people out so they can talk to their own social class, I mean, subsector. Yes, funders, policy, delivery people (don’t make eye contact with them) and some trustees. There’s an MP too. Yes, he’s pissed again.

So, over here we have the funder table. Yes, they needed quiet space so they could talk about how hard their role is. Don’t let them think you’re going to ask for money though, they get frightened. Approach them calmly from the front and don’t smile, it makes them nervous.

So if you fancy a game, some of the biggest funders at that end are playing that game where you stick a post-it on your forehead and have to guess what you are. It is a bit strange, yes, all the post-its say ‘CLOSED’ and they don’t seem to have noticed that all their friends have the same thing on them. There’s a fundraiser trying to reason with them. I think she got in through the window.

That’s the ACF. They’ve been changing the text on the post-its to say ‘PAUSED FOR REFLECTION.’

Yes, you’re right, they do seem a bit ensconced in their own thing. Well, at the other end, if you fancy a bit of glamour, there’s a guy from a local corporate. Arrived in a Jag. He’s always up for a free christmas party run for him by charities. He does keep shouting about how much money he’s given, but so far it seems to be a fiver.

Oh but there have been lots of offers of pro-bono advice. Most of which has been, ‘Get a better job’.

He’s a bit of a character, he started urinating in the corners to ‘make sure people know he’s been here,’ and I think he’s been sexually harrassing the Christmas tree. Then he was hanging around the coats. Eventually he’ll make a really big donation, I’m sure of it. He’s already announced it in the press, although no cheque yet.

He says he’s ‘supercharging philanthropy’ although he seems to be mostly supercharging it up his nose in the bathroom. He’s waving that fiver again isn’t he. Yes, he’s very proud of it.

Now over here… Ah you’ve noticed. Yes, I would avoid this table if I were you.

They’re the delivery people. You know they do that stuff, like, in rooms with kids and old people and… well I’m not really sure to be honest. What is it, workshops? Bingo? But they’re so dedicated, you know. Yeah, so we didn’t give them any food, you’ll need to take some from another table, although not from the funders, or you’ll be filling in forms til tomorrow morning.

Yes, they do seem to mostly be crying and drunk.

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Not that table then? No, well, I quite understand. Well you’ve got one more option. That one there is the top table. It’s where the policy people are, you know, the “clever” ones. I think we could sit you there, yes, no problem.

So at that end you’ve got the think tanks. Yes, in the crèche, they’re the ones with the crayons. Tell them you like their drawings, I mean, diagrams, they like that. They keep showing them to the funders, they’re the only ones who like them really. They’re not allowed out very often because they just keep going around shouting IMPACT in people’s faces and then asking for money.

Oh and that guy’s from Bayes. I know, he just keeps shouting EFFICIENCY at everyone and rattling an abacus.

Yes, there’s the Acronyms. I’m not sure, they’ve just been going around nodding and agreeing with everybody.

So, which one tickles your fancy? You have to pick one, they all hate each other and once you’ve chosen you’re stuck there.

Oh… the table in the hallway? Oh that’s the trustees. I know what you mean, they do look a bit confused. And they’re quite, um, mature… We’ve written on their hands ‘CHARITY’ so they can remember why they’re here, but it is tricky. They’re mostly sleeping I think. Careful not to wake them up though, that’s even worse...

So, where do you fancy? Which table?

The bathrooms? Oh, yes of course, I should have shown you - just out there. Yes, next to the women with the Harry Potter books. If they ask to see your genitals, you’re better just letting them; you don’t want to get sued.

You’re going to just wait? Well, if you can. The Girlguiding lot have just gone in the bushes outside. Easier, I suppose. But if the neighbours see them, we’ll lose our late licence.

Oh, running off so soon? Another appointment, gotcha.

Got your coat?

You’ve lost a fiver? Ah. Well, I did warn you to empty your pockets… At least he’s going to donate it. Eventually.

Well, toodleloo. Lovely to see you.

Yes, next year. We’ll probably be here next year, or, well, you know...

Have a lovely breakdown. I mean break.

Merry Christmas from Barely Civil Society

This has been an especially frivolous edition. But there are big plans for the new year, which I look forward to sharing. I dream of a world covered in bunting.

For charities and society there has to be a better way - and there has to be a place to say that. That’s why I’m planning, with some good people, to expand this work and really change how people think about nonprofits, philanthropy and a society where care for people and community is the norm, not just an industry. Are you in?

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Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest edition of Barely Civil Society, where UK charity people come to drink and forget.

This week: I’ve been struck by how many absolutely terrible meanies there are out there. It is painful to watch. And several of those meanies have washed up on the charity news shores this week, so prepare to hold your nose.

I fully expect to lose some readers, but you have to stand for something. I’ve (we’ve) seen all this before…

The Meanie Mummies Strike Again

It was with some horror that I saw the headlines relating to Girlguiding UK deciding it must exclude trans girls from its services.1 Then, not long after, the Women’s Institute did the same.2 Both have been powerfully inclusive to now. What this tells us is that the vicious anti-trans movement has moved on to attacking charities as one of its key battlegrounds.

Apparently they won’t exclude existing members - that is something. And I see how they have been pushed into this by incredibly powerful and well-funded legal bullies. As the Good Law Project explained,

“They say this is because of the ruling of the Supreme Court earlier this year on the meaning of sex under the Equality Act 2010. Both have said that they do not want to exclude trans people – but feel that they have been forced to by legal threats.

Perhaps they’ve got the law wrong – it doesn’t require trans women and girls to be excluded. Indeed we think that a change in policy to exclude trans members may well be unlawful. It is unclear, for example, how the inclusion of trans girls in Girl Guiding can have been impacted by the decision in For Women Scotland. This is because the decision was about whether the definition of sex under the Equality Act 2010 included trans people with Gender Recognition Certificates – something under 18s have never been able to obtain. But it is more likely they have been bullied into submission by the costs of defending their policies of inclusion – they have decided they have no financial choice but to give in to the bullying.”3

Sometimes I wonder how people can manage the sheer level of spite. And I wonder why this issue of all the things.

Hate and disgust

But there’s a myth being pushed at the moment that all social hatred eventually comes from fear. I’m not sure. If it is fear, it isn’t fear alone: it’s disgust, quite a different emotion. Disgust is, quite literally, a gut feeling, and happens that happens to all animals in response to a pollutant:

“Disgust is typically said to be a bodily sensation experienced as nausea: repelling and expelling that which causes the nausea is its chief goal. People respond with disgust to things that will supposedly taint or poison them.” The Power of Emotions: A History of Germany from 1900 to the Present

Look at the faces of transphobia. Look at the screwed up face and the upturned lip. That is the face of somebody disgusted, not afraid. People are selling this as fear because they know that in our culture these days, fear denotes victimhood. But this is just a strategy.

Disgust is what happens when humans feel there is a threat to their purity. Those instagram videos of cats who retch when someone puts food they don’t like near them - that is what humans are doing when they are disgusted. The goal is to purge and refuse the contaminant. Shit, blood, body fluids, vermin. The strange thing about the human animal is that in our development of social and cultural imaginations, we developed the same response for our sense of social contaminants - those things we perceive to be fundamental really damaging to our shared cultural beliefs. And indeed, that tends to map onto ‘others’ - those who may threaten ur way of life.

Disgust, therefore, is the greatest dehumaniser. Disgust reduces the disgusted themselves to animals (that is, an animalistic response), just as it reduces the objects of disgust to something less than human: Jews, gay people, other races, trans people.

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Much of the work on propaganda and disgust comes, tellingly, from studies of the Third Reich. It’s no surprise to discover that Hitler was a germophobe. His disgust at the idea of contaminants mapped from the biological to the social and racial. Then comes the antisemitic propaganda of the Third Reich: rats, vermin, filth, disease, pollution, are all harnessed to transmit the disgust to others, and on-to ‘others’. (Not new to the Nazis - building on ancient myths - for example the ‘blood libel’, itself designed to evoke disgust in the name of hatred.)

As a sidebar: there is a rolling anti-trans oh-so-innocent claim that they are not hateful at all (they just love ‘real’ women and want to protect children from being allowed to act out their mental illness). The claim isn’t going to wash with queer people who have spent decades hearing evangelical Christians say they’re not persecuting us because they hate us, but because they love us.

Trans toilets

Perhaps the most evident mobilisation of disgust for trans people has been around toilets. There’s a powerful human disgust about toileting, and toilets can be used as sites to differentiate and ‘other’ human beings unlike us. I’m sure many of us remember the jokes about the French hole in the ground toilets. I remember foul mythological stories told about Indian people’s toileting practices when I was a child in a racist northern town.4

But it’s not just the fear of contamination by excrement - the fear we developed as a species to ensure we kept our waste separate from our food in order to avoid infection. Toilets are also a site of one of the most fundamental oppositions we perceive in our society, of man and woman. Perhaps one of our earliest memories of sexual difference is when suddenly we have to go into separate toilets with a parent - male or female. When we are told that mysterious others inhabit the opposite side, just on the other side of a wall. When we are told of the palpable threat that exists there. But we are also told that there is something unspeakable and dirty on ‘the other side’. The toilet wall is the seventh veil.

Meanwhile, the privacy and seclusion of toilets makes them sites of dangerous unknowing. What might people get up to in there? We want to know, it’s an object of fascination, and yet one of profound disgust. Remember, disgust also has a fascination - humans are also strangely drawn to the things that disgust them. Toilet humour, obsessive jokes about sex and sexuality, all betray an innate fascination with what we render abject. The horror is thrilling. And destroying what disgusts also helps to alleviate the sensation.5

Note also that disgust, contrary to our general beliefs, is not ‘natural’. Humans’ natural disgust at, for example, excrement, is taught: children are initially fascinated by it; we just teach them not to be. But we learn early to feel disgust at certain abject objects deeply, physically, so that it feels as natural and absolute as possible. That is its social function.

Toilets have long featured in the dehumanising mythology of gay men: cottagers, toilet traders, the fear of the dangerous others floating around filth.6 In the AIDS crisis, blood, semen, excrement, drug use, prostitution, the dark continent of Africa and its horrors of impurity and pollution were all used to dehumanise sufferers, and to justify their abjection and ejection from society to die. Their impurity was evident by their disease, but their disease was seen to be caused by their impurity.

Sexual difference, contamination, and the terrifying liminality of private and public spaces enmesh around toilets for trans people just as they did for gay men. This meets infantile enculturation around the banal rituals of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality.

And of course, the deep belief that fundamentally, boys smell worse than girls. Disgusting and dirty, they must be separated from girls who are clean and pure. Boys and girls alike are fed this utterly banal and infantile myth in our culture.

Again what goes here is not fear, but disgust. Keeping the two ‘sides’ separate is about purity. And this reinforces the idea of purity and separation between sexes. When that boundary is broken, something disgusting, emetic, nauseating, and disturbing to the core, literally to the stomach, happens. This is how trans people are seen, and toilets are the theatre of this lame psychodrama.

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These infantile responses have been weaponised by right wing forces, as they always are. What is perhaps most horrifying is that they have done so so successfully for grown-ups who should know better.

Threats to children

And speaking of grown-ups, another common trope of organised social hatred is the threat to children. As toilets have taken a no doubt temporary back seat, children and their protection has taken over in the latest flap.

(Although ‘how would you feel if a trans woman followed your little girl into a publc toilet’ is a pretty common ‘what if’ raised by transphobes on social media. The weird thing is their genuine expectation I would say, ‘Ooh, now you mention it, yes, I would be terrified and immediately shoot them, like in a really bad 1980s Brian De Palma movie.)

Protecting the children is one of the oldest strategies in the book. (As indeed is protecting womenfolk: witness the vile history of lynchings to protect the purity of white women in the Deep South.)

“What intrigues and worries us is that, as it brings children into the picture to construct an exclusionary “us”, the far right heightens the ostensible innocence and vulnerability of the nation as well as the apparent ethical righteousness of those who claim to be its protectors. Children, therefore, have become a powerful instrument of the far right.”7

Protecting children has been used by every right wing authoritarian group. We see it happening across Europe and the US now. Children are harnessed to the lurid fantasies of their parents - and often, not even to their own parents, but to other members of the moral ‘majority’ who think they know better. Indeed, children whose parents do not make their children beholden to this ideology are seen as substandard, unparental, and dangerous.

Most of all, what we have always seen is that those who demand the protection of children have precious little interest in children they consider ‘other’. Brown children on small boats are not included. Jewish children in the Third Reich were not included. Queer kids going to prom were not included. Trans kids going to their girl guiding group are not included.

In this case as in many other, the protection is not of children, it’s a protection of wholly constructed and culturally imagined purity. Children are useful as the symbol of that purity, but real children who don’t appear ‘pure’ are of no more value than the adults who inspire such direct disgust. Perhaps some can be ‘saved’. But if not, they are not real children at all; they are unworthy of protection - and worse.

So we infantilise a society demanding protection, and render real children something less than human if we think they threaten the purity of the social body.

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Hatred and civil society

Back to charities. What we know is that social hatred works its way through every aspect of society and develops power through threats and intimidation. The hateful appear in all manner of spaces. In the Third Reich, for example, hospitals and nursing were involved in euthanasia for the disabled and learning disabled. Many teachers happily accepted that Jewish and Roma children were not children. I can remember very well the treatment my gay friends and I received from medical professionals or at the hands of teachers. Caring did not apply to us. Friendship was not available. At best, we should stick to our own. Perhaps we just needed to be cured.

Being ‘caring’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re immune to deciding some people don’t deserve care - or indeed, quite the opposite. Nazi Germany had the charitable ‘Winterhilfswerk’ where food, clothing and other needs were met by National Socialists (sic) in the winter - and of course, denied to those who were not racially pure.

Meanwhile, controlling and terrorising civil socety - and those who are in a caring role - is a classic authoritarian move, especially where it relates to social hatred and out groups. Not only was there Section 28 targeting teachers and youth workers and health workers, but civil society organisations are always a key target for despots. Trump has done this most recently, but Suella Braverman tried her hand at it in the last Government. Now, in the third sector itself, there are plenty of people, organised groups, who desire the exclusion of trans people from charitable services, but more than that to use them as a beach head and a soft target to change hearts and minds and normalise the cruelty of excluding kids who have it pretty tough in their lives.

This is one reason that without putting a profound and absolute liberatory freedom and unconditional love at the heart of charity, we are doomed to simply be the implementers of whatever current - sometimes horrific - fashion mainstream society chooses.

What I find particularly tragic in all of this is that there are many people pushing this kind of rhetoric who do not see themselves as far-right at all, and indeed, beyond this specific issue, probably are not. And I don’t doubt some truly do feel they are protecting kids - or at least, the ‘good’ ones.

With that said, they are being harnessed to those causes - as I explained in my previous article about Arendt and the Tommy Robinson march, that is increasingly how far-right movements are working across the globe. Indeed, many cis lesbians have been at the heart of the stoking of this hatred (EDIT: alongside a huge number of those who are supportive. My point is that people who have experienced prejudice and cruelty directly should know better.] The problem is, people never see themselves as the bad guy. They always see themselves as the victim, or protecting the ‘vulnerable’.

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This constant projection of their own hatred and disgust onto a dangerous other, versus a fragile one of ‘us’ can stop us, and them, seeing the selfishness and sometimes sadism at the heart of the hatred.

And in case anyone wants to object to my, even implicitly, comparing patterns of social hatred to what happened in the Third Reich (where, remember, trans people were imprisoned and then sent to their deaths with homosexuals), let’s be clear. I am not suggesting that this is the plan. This not about hyperbole or equivalence, it is about understanding a trajectory, and a structure of thought, underneath which we find a deep, dehumanising cruelty we are capable of.

I’m reminded of the words of my favourite (gay, Jewish) playwright, Tony Kushner:

“If you have a standard of evil like the Holocaust or the Third Reich and you make the decision that it is absolutely forbidden to compare anything to the standard, then everything else is on another spectrum somehow, and the standard is alone, this peak of isolated awfulness, then you’re essentially turning what should be the standard for political evil into […] reassurance. Nothing looks like that. So it’s not that bad.”8

If we don’t see the continuity between extremes of evil and the stirrings of hate, we have no chance of stopping anything, or indeed, becoming better.

At that point, of course, comes the inevitable Martin Niemöller quote.

We must stand up to these people. They are dangerous.

How to help in the third sector

Kevin Taylor-McKnight has set up a Linkedin group for trans-supportive people in the third sector. Please join it - and be supportive of others who post. My advice: don’t feed the trolls in comments on posts. You won’t change any minds, and the bullies just enjoy it. I literally turn them off for anyone but my connections when it relates to this subject.

Meanwhile, please see these excellent posts by Penny Wilson, Kevin Taylor McKnight, Amsel Page-Von Sprecken, and Ellen Jones.

What if the transphobes come for your charity?

If the transphobes come for your charity - and they might - don’t go down without a fight. Speak to the Good Law project or your local law centre, or your solicitor if you have one, straight away. Don’t accept the immediate advice to just fold to avoid financial risk. Boards are there to manage not just legal and financial risk, but also to steer the mission and ethics of the charity. Changing your charitable objects is an option, although very much the long game…. [Update: the Charity Commission has made it clear that it does not see its role as enforcing or policing how organisations interpret the Equalities Act. Well, tbh that sounds kind of obvious, but given that some have been claiming they have to exclude trans kids because of the Charity Commission, I guess it needed saying. And I imagine Orlando would not have made that clarification….]

Be very careful about these people infiltrating your board - those are, again, the tactics adopted, and advised, by Project 2025 and the US hate groups. This is not a matter of ‘agreeing to differ’ in most cases. We’ve seen what happened to the National Trust and similar organisations before the current ones. They also have a tendency to seek out and punish and threaten individuals with doxxing and threats to careers etc. This is partly behind people’s fear of speaking out.

I did have someone ask me on Linkedin in the comments rather haughtily and disapprovingly ‘if this kind of thing was what I advised my consultancy clients?’ As if I was about to say, ‘Oh no! I am completely unbiased! I never have an opinion because all I care about is money!’ Yes obviously it’s what I advise my clients, if relevant or asked. But it’s not advice is it, it’s a matter of moral and ethical judgement. Do I advise you not to be mean to trans kids? Yes, and, also, weird that you asked.

More generally

Most importantly, give JK Rowling a run for her oodles of money. Support the Good Law project. The law is where these battles are being fought most effectively.

Meanwhile some good news

The New York legislature is considering a bill to legalise the presence of Bodega cats.

And meanwhile this reminds me of when we had two moggies. (A brother and sister with so much drama.)

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Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of Barely Civil Society, a window into the career-self destruction of an increasingly shrill and disappointed queer libertarian democratic socialist working in perhaps the most conservative industry in the UK. First, the monthly essay, and then some more personal nonsense is at the end.

Please like and share this post on Substack to help me break through the social media embargo that a brief refusal to enslave my content generation to an algorithm may produce.

The Essay: The Crisis of Bureaucracy

Introduction: The unnoticed crisis

If you want to clear a room in philanthropy or charity at the moment, say ‘AI’. As using acronyms go, it’s like saying LGBT on LinkedIn, or DEI at a White House party. But say it I must. Because whatever anyone tells you, it is having very substantial impacts on the nonprofit and philanthropy world, especially as it relates to trusts and foundations. I’m talking here more specifically about ‘LLMs’ – Large Language Models (chatbots) like Chat GPT and Gemini. But broader machine learning and ‘intelligent’ decision-making tools will become more important towards the end of the article.

But I guarantee this is much more relevant and much more interesting than you think. Because this isn’t another panic piece or a sale pitch about some charity database NOW WITH ADDED AI. This is about how it’s creating a crisis in some of the main practices we use to manage our microeconomy, and beyond that, our society. Within our industry, trusts and foundations need to understand this, even if the solutions are not simple.

But as ever, the non-profit shoptalk isn’t of primary interest to me here. (I’ll put some practical stuff on LinkedIn.) it’s about what it tells us about the wider world and what is changing for all of us. And how the culture and practices of the nonprofit world relate to our society, politics and culture.

So, yes, the kicking off point is AI in grant applications, where there has been an unprecedented avalanche of applications which has driven many funders to close their doors, repeatedly.

But the problem in the nonprofit world, just as it has been in governments the world over, is that people have been unwilling to look at the massive disruption and how to get ahead of it, rather than to watch it all slowly collapse with no plans for what comes next.

Application overload goes beyond the non-profit world and shows the coming crisis of bureaucracy itself.

The perfect storm: world context

So AI is pretty much definitely about to crash the world economy - with a ludicrous bubble which has been allowed to develop simply because it benefits the short term finances of so many ultra-rich people. Isn’t it always? Meanwhile, several industries and industrial practices have been significantly disrupted, especially where tasks related to writing and the bureaucratic process of application has taken place.

Anybody who has done any recruitment in the last year knows that the game has radically changed. AI-written applications - bad, meaningless, often heartbreaking in their naivety - have swamped the process and condemned many, especially younger, people to the scrap heap. Others are crowded out by the sheer volume. This has helped those who demand ever more complex recruitment processes where a quick letter or resume is replaced by endless tests and rounds of interviews. In fields like IT, people’s ability to use LLMs to write code, or at least to answer questions convincingly and at speed, has helped lead to live assessment, and it is common to have to endure up to ten interviews, take home tests, pair programming, and examinations.

This sits alongside a broader flooding of markets with skilled people in industries, and professions – in fact, a whole ‘middle’ and professional class of workers and a in an economy hollowing out in the centre. More and more, getting a basic job is going to be like trying to join the civil service in Imperial China.

What we’re witnessing across all these domains is something more fundamental than disruption - it’s the relationships between applicants and institutions that are breaking down. LLMs create a breakdown in trust, but through a kind of tipping over of the power relationship inherent in the systems themselves. That means much bureaucracy can no longer work as it once did, as a mechanical, rigid, system of exchange of letters, statements, evidences, memoranda and tick boxes or mouse clicks to make fundamental decisions about resources, people and power through distinct one way hierarchies. The system of exchange of submissions and decisions, or reading and writing, becomes transformed and radically undermined.

LLMs (what we colloquially call ‘AI’) are becoming the crisis point of bureaucracy itself. They form a breakdown in trust - but do this through a kind of even-ing of the power relationship inherent in the systems –That then means bureaucracy can no longer work as it once did. .

But to understand where this is leading, we need to look at specific cases.

Literary pursuits

Outside of non-profits, specific industries have been damaged by technologies that allow fast access to applications. One area I happen to know is the literary and creative magazine scene in the US. After a platform called ‘Submittable’ set up a way for writers to email hundreds of journals and magazines at once with their work, with barely any real checking, the burden was put onto the magazine. Editors returned to the age-old practice of only publishing people they knew. What was already an inwardly focused club became something more approaching a pyramid scheme. But the technology that allowed subversion of bureaucracy crashed the bureaucracy and forced its replacement with something perhaps not less fair but unfair in a different way. This changed perceptions of fairness and rightness in an industry where application or submission was a critical part. Applications and submissions, after all, are a quintessential, some might say definitive, process of bureaucracy. Submittable has since moved into bulk systems of all types of applications, including grant applications. It now markets itself as ‘Giving and granting software that never makes you compromise.’

Planning and Legal Systems

Another place we have seen this reported recently is in UK urban planning. For some time now, I have been working with people in community law who fight against city planners (those who decide what gets built or not) who quite deliberately obscure planning decisions and consultations with legal information designed to baffle and bamboozle. This benefits those with massive legal teams (such as massive property developers), but disadvantages residents in areas destined to be gentrified and ethnically/socially cleansed.

My own discovery was that, as I undertook a research project on community activism for a law centre, with the help of the UK Law AI bot I was able to understand and translate legal information (confirmed by the legal experts I was working with) in ways I could understand. This could, I have since advised campaigners, help them to at least understand systems designed to exclude them. They could even use it, perhaps to generate letters in the baroque formats required.

Recently in the Guardian, a typically Millennial headline claimed that AI systems now offering translation and submission of objections as a service for a fee (as usual, some techbro dickhead comes along and charges you extra money to do what normal LLMS will do out of the box) were simply designed to allow mass ‘NIMBYism.’

Well, not all planning objections are from NIMBYs, Guardian, and you would be the first to complain about many of the shocking environmental and human rights abuses by developers that activists have to contest. But also, this practice offers a kind of even-ing of the odds, a rebalancing of the power, and a sudden ability to circumvent some of the guardrails of the bureaucratic juridicolegal process. That may indeed allow the gumming up of an already creaking system. It evens the odds, and rebalances power, but the point is that a power, and resource imbalance is all that ever held the social practices of bureaucracy together. When power is pushed to crisis, however, it has to make decisions about how it will respond. Because it is powerful, that often goes the wrong way for those who came to challenge it: for example, shutting down or circumventing any remaining avenues for challenge through the system they have lost control of.

The non-profit world

And now this same pattern is hitting the charity sector. The ‘Oh shit’ moment á la Brexit has caught them unawares. The closures of funds due to up to 400% increases in applications are indeed heavily influenced by this.

Let’s be clear, the massive crash, panicked-applications, and tsunami of refused requests is not just a result of AI, any more than the macroeconomic tanking economy and jobs market is. Worldwide economic collapse, underinvestment, and reduced giving, all play their part in the contraction happening at pace in the non-profit world, including Trump’s dismantling of the USAID programme which has affected non-profits globally. But the point I’m trying to make is that the wider and industry-specific economic and cultural conditions have combined with a technological change to create a perfect storm. A few foundations who now who say they are ‘not seeing it’ are, precisely, just not seeing it - that’s not the same as it not being there. And the whole point of LLMs is to be convincing.

What will happen? Hard to say. But I already see some changes which I think have much wider significance for the whole of our culture. One is a potential return to individual relationships, and ‘who you know’. Already I am seeing this in funders; most of the recent successes I am seeing are with organisations winning money from those they already know. In many ways, this is what people have been asking for, for years, when they ask funders to fund longer and larger, and with fewer applications….

It’s a return to patronage. But to understand why such a return would be so significant, we need to understand what bureaucracy was meant to solve in the first place.

What bureaucracy was meant to solve

Modern bureaucracy developed, but especially took off, in the West alongside liberal democracy. The idea was that managerial approaches could allow access to juridicolegal systems that would previously have been available only to those who had personal contacts and connections with kings. By filling in a form, you were able to join a system that, on the surface, made decisions without prejudice. The sheer formality and managerial remove meant that a more equitable system - and one which privileged the literate middle classes - was available to anyone who could write.

Of course, part of that system was always a kind of epistemological coercion that prevented or delayed access to favour, or indeed justice, for those least well-equipped to deal with bureaucratic systems. Those people included the poor with oral cultures, colonised peoples with a different language, working class people without a high level of literacy education. Bureaucracy was both an expansion of access to fair process and an attempt to contain it. Remember that another word for, say, an application is ‘submission’. The word itself betrays its origins in what it is meant to replace, but also to continue by indirect means. (That is, direct supplication to a lord or king.)

Practical implications

So what’s happening in the philanthropy sector’s bureaucracy? In the microcosmic world of the day-to-day charitable philanthrosphere, these changes are afoot.

Funders are starting to see AI-generated bids. Some are poorly written - the absolute guff I’ve seen is similar to what I’ve seen in recruitment. But bad applications existed long before AI. AI can be used to fabricate or exaggerate claims. But people could always do that: it’s the number one risk of fundraising and funding. But there’s a bigger thing at play here, as application systems are being overwhelmed by mass input. And this brings us to the most likely outcome for our whole technological society.

The decentring of the sector means key policies around LLMs will be decided piecemeal. The National Lottery Community Fund is now accepting bids by AI, but not by actual humans – if they are those pesky parasites of the nonprofit world, ‘consultants’ and freelancers, who now make up a massive proportion of the workforce. More broadly, there has been little to no leadership from the big beasts of infrastructure (who are now not so big). People like me and the Institute of Fundraising have tried to get bid-writers to use LLMs ‘responsibly’. For me, using LLMs properly means doing pretty much the same work as I have all along, but more efficiently, and sometimes in a more ‘collaborative’ way with the LLM as an editing partner.

Increasing efficiency in applications is what we have been demanding funders allow us to do for years.

And indeed, funders have been claiming for years that they wanted that too, especially for those without professional bid writing skills. But what replaces the application ‘process’ may be even less fair than knocking on a door and handing in your 20-page letter to Santa with full costings. Be careful what you wish for.

As new systems take hold like two-stage processes, and many funders start to expand resources by taking on additional outsourced bid assessors, there remains a more fundamental problem: that in a system where bureaucracy’s power dynamic is evened out, the systems no longer work. This could lead to collapse – quiet in some cases, or ‘loud’ in others.

Where does this end?

One of the goals of bureaucracy was also to remove the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘emotion’ in decision making. This always has been one of the fundamental dreams of bureaucracy - a bloodless, fully ‘objective’ reason above favour or personal sentiment. Of course this brings significant risk and dangers of its own. That modern bureaucracy developed alongside science, with its focus on rationality and process, is no accident; nor indeed is the later development of ‘management science.’

As we move now to become the ‘Impact Industry’ (the latest term being used to describe people who try to make the world a bit better in an institutional setting), this desire to neutralise decision making will only be stronger. Indeed, ‘social investment’ is bound to increase the sheer quantification and dehumanisation of processes as much as ‘performance’ (how many, and how much?).

The thing is, most human beings don’t like making decisions, because they then have to take responsibility, and, god forbid, be accountable for them. The more we hide the decisions, the more we can set the terms of the system and claim bad decisions are accidents. Or indeed, that they are unpleasant for some, but the ‘right’ ones ‘objectively’ - as decided by an algorithm. The implacable ‘black box’ of bureaucracy – the Kafkaesque citadel of filing cabinets which can only be accessed by a phoneline or a form sent up an airtube – potentially comes of age with AI.

‘Faceless’ bureaucracy is meant to make sure nobody needs to see the applicant cry. A pen stroke, key strike, and an email that means Number Go Up Or Down – this is a profoundly comforting things for humans in power. It’s how people who aren’t complete sociopaths manage to do pretty awful things. And the question of to what extent we want to remove the ‘human’, emotional, or subjective element of decisions that bureaucracy promises, has been something of an ongoing theme for humankind for 200 years or more.

In the grant-writing/ awarding sphere, deciding what to fund is less often, although not never, such a matter of life and death or overt ‘violence’ as, say, the use of bureacrcy in wartime. But it certainly does have very live and real effects on individuals and communities. Where bureaucracy originally seemed to promise fairness by removing subjectivity, we might also ask to what extent, or to what level, the removal of subjectivity – the actual thinking of a human agent - is actually desirable.

Solutions? Or more problems?

In the non-profit foundation world, we’re heading towards a situation where writing bots will meet reading bots. We will start to see AI being used to read and decide on bids as well as write them. I know for a fact that is already happening on an individual basis as people use LLMs to summarise applications they receive. (An irony - long bids are demanded by funders, which are then too long to read....) That process then writes all manner of truncations, themselves with selections made by AI, which will undoubtedly affect the final decisions. But I think it is highly unlikely that is where it will end, and we are facing a situation where at least initial ‘sifts’ are done automatically by AI and machine learning. This has long been the case in recruitment, especially in the US.

Much as we developed systems in marketing to craft SEO junk to be crawled by bots, which no human will ever read, this creates a fundamental question: do we need the process of reading and writing at all in ‘application’? If no human is involved, is application and reception the best method? Does bureaucracy need a human? Do we just let the black box do its thing and achieve the ultimate removal of subjectivity and embracing of an ‘objectivity’ which can in the end only be embodied by a machine? (Leaving aside the very obvious fact that these machines are far from without bias.)

If so, what does that look like? It is likely to be some kind of passive crawling of databases. Some tech people already have this in their sights, including, it would appear, Submittable, as well as at least one UK database tool. Their plan is likely to create a system that becomes the absolute interrelation and interlocutor between funder and fundee, applicant and institution, job-seeker and employer, from invitation to to outcome and beyond. Make no mistake, their goal is to replace all fundraising or recruitment – with themselves taking the money ‘saved’. The fact that these companies sell a perfect system which allows more room for ‘relationships’ sounds great. But exactly how that works is a different matter.

The Crisis of Bureaucracy?

So here we are at the fundamental point: LLMs have created what I call the crisis of bureaucracy: the old administrative systems (forms, long applications, human review) are being overwhelmed because everyone can now generate text, and make ‘submissions’ or ‘applications’ at scale.

And for me, the greatest disruption that LLMs have produced so far is not some kind of major cost saving or transformation of working practices in organisations. (Indeed, research recently showed that there was little saving within organisations – tellingly, because the effort of writing was removed, and transferred to the reader, who had to read absolute bollocks created by an LLM.) It’s in the relationships between ‘applicants’ and ‘institutions.’ The mismatch of resource: a substantial, if painfully slow machinery for reading, set against the effort premium of individual writing, was essential to the power balance that bureaucracy and the power regimes it held up relied on. The gatekeepers have lost their gate. Time to build a new one.

The point is that while we are seeing massive disruptions for funders in the UK (with more to come), the crisis is not just in funding applications. It is in the very idea of ‘applications’ across our society, right at the heart of bureaucracy. Jobs, legal discourse, academic pursuits, banking and investment of course, creative arts, goodness knows what else. What we face is logjam, power upturned, and the high likelihood of the more powerful gatekeepers shifting strategy entirely.

So what is this strategy?

In all of this, I see two possibilities. This may be the final apotheosis of bureaucracy. The bloodless removal of human subjectivity, with everything decided by an algorithm.

Or it could be the last crash and crisis of bureaucracy, where bureaucracy as a system can no longer cope with volume and the even-ing out of systems power between applicant and institution. That leads to a world where bureaucracy evaporates, taking us back to… what?

Well, what it replaced. A system of relationships and patronage. Grace and favour. I don’t think any of us could wish for that the process involved fewer human relationships in most aspects of our work. Indeed, grant-makers and even recruiters talk more and more about the importance of the ‘relational’ approach. But what kind of human relationships will it take us back to? And what power relations will that create?

So patronage, ‘who you know’ and the sheer hustle may become even more vital. And indeed, at the front of the queue will be those who learn this best, or who are put there by power imbalances at the outset. Class, race, gender, sexuality, all of these things will be affected. I don’t suggest that these relationships cannot be managed or that we cannot seek to introduce a certain ethical balance and some level of ‘fairness’ to any return to subjectivity. (And we will no doubt claim this process is ‘objective somehow – it’s one of those words and concepts we can never reach, and yet remain relentlessly focused on attaining.) But it may be that the human relationships it takes us back to are far from what most of us, even those of us who innately distrust bureaucracy, would want.

The fundamental questions at this point: is this the crisis of bureaucracy, or its apotheosis? If no human is involved, is application and reception even a meaningful process? And if not, what replaces it? And does this restore humanity and save effort, or entrench unfairness and exclusion from power?

The (not very) funny personal bit

Last week I chaired a session on radical ideas for trustees at the Festival of Trusteeship, where several people presnted such radical ideas as, you know, maybe trustees doing some training every now and then. You may have read my previous work questioning what role trustees ought to play - and have played, over the least thousand years. I did end by suggesting that perhaps the whole shitshow was too shitty to continue the show, but subtly. You can see it here - some great ideas to be tried while we rearrange the deckchairs, anyway…

Shout out to Hannah Kowzun, who won the vote and tore standard trusteeship a new one. We may have to set up a nursing home for exhausted and angry nonprofit people. Let me know if you can fund it - maybe the Mercers, if you’re reading?

Prir to this, I spent two weeks on holiday. A few days in Kent (a weird graveyard), and then 10 days in London on a staycation. Mostly,I watched horror movies and read Hegel. I also visited several cultural institutions and now have a second mortgage to pay off. The Transport Museum refused to give me a local’s discount, because apparently that is only for people in North London. ‘Oh,’ I said - ‘you mean like the tube?’ They didn’t laugh, and I was in a foul mood, but improved it by glaring at parents who let their children run around and enjoy themselves. How dare they.

Meanwhile in politics, Starmer is in trouble. Sadly, the two potential frontrunners to replace the stiff-with-a-quiff we currently have are even further to the right. Streeting is a neoliberal worse-than Blairite shill, who just enjoys scorched earth politics, and Shabana Mahmood is another entrenched social conservative.

I’m hoping Keir stays until Burnham can get back into parliament. But can you imagine them letting him back?

Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed this about Wes Streeting (see image)? Amusingly, he congratulated Mamdani online and said he felt hopeful to see new voices breaking through against the forces of conservatism. As somebody noted on social media, he seems to have failed to notice that, in this scenario, he is Andrew Cuomo.

And finally - watch to the end….

See you in two or three weeks.

- Alex

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Welcome, all four readers and a dog, to the latest issue of Barely Civil Society. This time, I talk about the rise of charity freelancers in the UK and to what extent this is to be welcomed or otherwise. As ever, I’m looking into the wider historical, political and economic trends that are shaping this, both inside, and beyond, this particular industry.

BTW If you’re looking for the funny personal bit, it’s now at the end.

Work work work

It’s become fairly undeniable that swathes of redundancies have taken place in the UK’s voluntary sector over the last couple of years, particularly in the mid-to-senior management level. This seems to be one of the reasons we’re seeing significant increases in the number of freelancers in the sector. Beyond the specifics of freelancing, which, as I’ve said elsewhere, increases the precarity of skilled and ‘professional’ workers, we’re seeing a hollowing out of management and senior roles as a whole, especially in specific skills.

What we’re watching in the voluntary sector mirrors patterns across the wider economy: the disappearance of mid-level roles, the rise of short-term contracts, and the quiet normalisation of insecurity as the price of ‘flexibility’. As ever, I’m not so interested in the ‘inside baseball’ trade talk. I’m much more interested in how this maps to wider changes in our society, economy, and culture. For some time, there has been a hollowing out of middle incomes in the West - people in clerical, skilled manufacturing jobs. In the VCS this seems to be expanding further up the tree and into senior roles. I think we are canaries in the mineshaft of the next recession (or even crash) likely to engulf the wider economy before long.

What’s happening in the VCS?

In the Third Sector podcast, we were looking at a survey by freelancer network, Blume undertaken by Jenny Raschbauer. The top line figures showed that very few freelancers would want to return to F/T permanent employment (7%). But also that many had not really chosen their current situation. There’s also a certain amount of survivor bias in that survey, I suppose. You’re much less likely to complete it if freelancing didn’t work out for you. Either you’re not doing it any more, or the last thing you want is to tell anyone about it. (Of course, some will choose to do so because of the strength of negative feeling too - and there was some of that in the raw data…)

The survey data gives a snapshot of this tension between choice and necessity: and shows that an apparent boom in autonomy can disguise a collapse in security. So, while some are starting out on ‘an exciting and enterprising new chapter’ (as the Linkedin posts always say...), at least 20% of them are coming from redundancy, the survey shows. Or horribly toxic workplaces. And there’s always a danger that we welcome a new flexibility without noticing that much of this is a result of massive sector contraction. Some people are finding that there is no longer an alternative, as restricted funding, refusal to pay for management costs, and wider cuts risk creating a new precariat where managers/ specialists used to have job security. Others - especially fundraisers & CEOs - are fleeing toxic burnout cultures.

Add to this that many others find they have to freelance because of childcare, health needs, and so on. The constant refrain was of women especially having to do freelance work in order to given them time and flexibility for childcare. This is obviously part of the pregnancy pay gap. But alongside that, there is the fact that those who are able to freelance - who have this as a choice - are more likely to have things like a stable second income from a partner, or a financial cushion.1 (I’m not talking about the fabulously wealthy here - remember that many people have no more than even a single month of income in savings and live paycheque to paycheque. Often we don’t realise just how bad things can be, and how often they are.) So class plays into this heavily too - also, of course, in the skills we are able to accrue, the networks we have (this, I think, is perhaps the biggest driver, and so dependent on professional class-based skills and culture).

So, while some, (like me, this week, mostly) enjoy this work, others would find anything but permanent stable employment not only anxious, but dangerous. Let’s be clear: the fear never goes away. Uncertainty and fear was a universal negative in the Blume survey.

To understand what’s happening, it helps to zoom out: the new freelance precariat in the charity sector isn’t an isolated phenomenon. It seems to me to sit within a much broader story about the decline of the post-war middle class.

The hollowing out of the middle classes

The US consultancy firm, McKinsey, categorises ‘independent’ workers into four types: Free Agents, Casual Earners, Reluctants, and the Financially Strapped. Our sector has all four. The first two are to be welcomed: ‘enterprising’ folks who’ve found the thing that works for them partly through skill, and partly luck.

“While demographically diverse, independent workers largely fit into four segments (exhibit): free agents, who actively choose independent work and derive their primary income from it; casual earners, who use independent work for supplemental income and do so by choice; reluctants, who make their primary living from independent work but would prefer traditional jobs; and the financially strapped, who do supplemental independent work out of necessity.”

McKinsey on Independents and the gig economy

The last two that should concern us. Across the world, the growth of the Deliveroo/ Uberised model of the gig economy is sometimes dressed up as lifestyle choice. But we know that isn’t always what’s happening. Yes, many benefit from the flexibility of self-employment. The people who don’t - but still have to do it - are the problem.

The new precarious middle classes have been the subject of concern for commentators and economists for some time. And it is likely that this sense of increased anxiety and middle class precarity adds to the rise of voting for right wing parties in groups who might normally find them rather too déclassé. When you lose a property owning middle class, more and more of that wealth is sucked up to the super-wealthy. Economists and popular economic commentators like Gary Stevenson have warned about the hollowing out of the middle classes, as resources get siphoned out of the working and middle classes and into an ever-increasing share of wealth for the super-wealthy, whether corporate or individual.

Elsewhere the brilliant Barbara Ehrenreich has written about ‘Fear of Falling’ and sees that fear of losing hard-won and fleeting privileges as part of the essential experience of the modern middle classes (compare this with, for example, the past supposed solidity and unchallengability of hereditary wealth). What we’re seeing now is not the end of that class, but its transformation into something even more anxious and less secure; that is, a middle class without any of the small guarantees that started to develop for it after the Second World War.

This comes after the post-war creation of a property-owning middle class, which is one of the reasons we ended up with comparative stability and prosperity for some time. In other places, for example some parts of Europe, better controls on housing profits/ public ownership and more redistributive economics have done a better job at reducing absolute poverty as well as relative - but in the anglosphere and many other market capitalist economies, this property-owning middle class has been vital.

A recent study by the OECD shows that the middle classes, faced with stagnant incomes and rising costs, are becoming less able to save and falling into debt. We also know that home ownership is becoming less and less likely for even middle class households. Of course the ‘middle class’ is constantly shifting, and has many nooks and crannies, and levels of wealth, autonomy, power and privilege. Where it begins and ends is a constant source of debate and discussion. And many would point out that most of the people who we describe as ‘middle class’ in the UK are in actual fact, much like in the US, really ‘working class’. They may have the trappings of respectability, perhaps some savings, may (decreasingly) own their own home, or may have been to university, but as the OECD points out, all of those things are being erased. We’re seeing downward social mobility over the generations (I’ve seen this in my own family). And the fundamental of having to sell labour to those who extract profit is an economic characteristic of most ‘middle class’ experiences, until we reach the upper limits where we may find those who have invested in property, or enjoy some level of hereditary wealth.

But the point is, the middle classes have always in some ways been defined by their precarity, because that is what sets them apart from the hereditary wealth of the aristocracy who preceded them. As the bourgeoisie’s ‘new money’ solidified, many became wealthy across generations. But most, in the shape our economies and societies now, are much more precarious than our ideas tend to suggest.

Those who set up businesses and extract profit from the labour of others often tend to see themselves as somehow more independent, or as members of a different class than the ‘working class’: you make money from other people’s work, not your own’ as the saying goes. But remember that the majority of people who own small businesses are not making a ‘profit’ - they are making a living. The dream of becoming some business magnate who extracts profit from the labour of many others and reinvests this into more profit-making is not universally held, and certainly, not universally real.

Even more so for the self-employed. While we appear to have a high level of independence, our need to continue to sell our labour even with control over whether we supply or withdraw it, means we are highly and directly reliant on markets and purchasers. The idea that we are employed by ‘ourselves’ is often not really the case. We still sell our labour for the profit of others. We just choose who we sell it to, and can up sticks when we want to. Are we working class or middle class, petit-bourgeois, or bourgeois? It all depends on where you draw lines - and of course, the lines are not really lines so much as axes, or forces. Our power changes over history.

Freelancers and the Black Death: an aside

This tension between worker dependence and autonomy runs pretty deep, and I think that’s why talk about freelancers often turns into ad hominem critiques about their supposed greed or lack of scruple. Some in the Blume survey noticed what I did, that there is an assumption that freelancers are trying to inflate their work, or their price, or get away with something, or don’t feel a sense of allegiance to their cause. In the podcast I talk about people’s ludicrous objections to day rates - usually because they don’t know the first thing about any kind of business.

So why do people treat freelancers with a deep level of distrust? Well, first of all because they often can. As I said in the podcast, I see a lot of projection of anxieties about paying people fairly for their work in the non-profit sector onto those who have to ask (invoice) for money regularly, rather than just having to await a monthly bank transfer. But there is often something beyond that: a level of disdain.

The thing is, freelancing and self-employment has always unsettled long-standing expectations about loyalty, hierarchy, and control for employers. We seem like dangerous, anti-social lone wolves. We might be hard to control. Nobody ‘owns’ us.

Some of this is no doubt simply because of the dynamic itself: you’re an outsider and easy to exploit, or, in some situations, expected to exploit. (I have often said that the difference between a freelancer and a consultants is: a freelancer is someone you think you can exploit; a consultant is someone you think is going to exploit you…)

But I sometimes wonder if this is woven into our culture more deeply. After the Black Death, with at least a third of Europe’s population dead, the feudal system was in disarray. Serfs were given leave to remain on the land of feudal lords (erm, hence landlords), to till the soil, and give up the larger portion of what they grew as payment, in return for protection (when it suited….). Suddenly, with a massively reduced workforce, peasant workers found that they were in high demand. Whereas in the past they would remain where they were and ‘pledge fielty’ to the lord and the land, some realised they could demand better deals in other places by moving around. All the bargaining power made them unpopular.

This struck landlords as a bloody cheek because they had been generously terrorising and exploiting these serfs for a centuries, and now these scrubbers thought they could just go off and sell their labour to anybody they fancied. Somthing had to be done.

Soon, any slutty roaming peasants hoeing around with anybody who paid them were controlled by the Statute of Labourers (1351). This introduced wage controls, restrictions on movement, compulsory work, and price controls on food and goods. Labourers still moved around, and employers broke the rules when it suited them, but it marked an important moment in the history of capitalism: it was one of the first legal attempts to regulate the labour market, to turn ‘free’ peasants into an immobile workforce because suddenly there was an element of choice. The goal was to manage and win class conflict, between the labourers, and those who controlled and exploited their labour.

Deep down, ‘employers’ have many elements remaining of the feudal landlords. They expect a great deal of loyalty, and often express a desire to control all aspects of what we can say, do, and think. (They can tell you when you can go to the toilet, or fire you for speaking ill of your ‘lord’.) What changes over time is the extent to which lords feel like they have reciprocal responsibility to their labourers - and what the role of central government (and welfare/ charity) is in those relationships.

As we have developed our economy and society over time, we have constantly batted it back and forth. There’s the desire for a self-reliant labouring class to whom lords have no responsibility beyond the immediate provision of labour - and who therefore retain a level of self-determination and independence. And then there is the demand for a workforce who are reliant on those lords, and indeed, might show deference to them. Of course, the main goal of neoliberal capitalist wage and labour relations post Thatcher has been to create a relationship of total reliance by workers on the employer and zero responsibility from the employer to the worker. The battle continues.

Anyway, it’s worth bearing in mind that when a potential buyer talks about freelancers or consultants as greedy, thieving, disloyal parasites, they are just parroting the same ideas feudal landlords had in the 14th century. And indeed, there is likely to be some deep-down cultural continuity in those ideas, even in a sector that likes to think of itself as above the moral fray of economic extraction. (As if! Much more to say here….)

Back to charities

Now you might say: charities don’t make a profit, so this isn’t relevant. Well, yes and no. Charity culture is not immune from wider economic ideology. We see all of the charitable funders who flatly refuse to pay for management costs. Fund your CEO? Ha! Pay for a senior manager? Double ha!

This hostility to paying for ‘management’ isn’t just about efficient budgeting. It’s an ideological stance that sees professional labour as wasteful or self-serving, while idealising low-paid or unpaid labour as virtuous. You can see funders’ determination that management posts will not be funded as an expression of wealth privilege and its ideology: that the middle classes and professionals are not to be valued. And indeed, historically, the middle classes have been seen as a threat to class systems and to the privilege of the wealthiest. They tend to vote, for example. And, indeed, given that the middle class has long been the greatest competitor for wealth and resources, and there has long been a battle within the charity sector over which elite is in charge (the priests, the aristocracy, the merchants, the bourgeoisie or the political elite), you are likely to find these ideas and practices leaking over into our perceptions and practices.

That may hang heavy over the ideas of a sector driven by a battle between the managerial classes and the ultra rich who drive and guide giving (whether directly through their giving, or through the ideology that the bourgeois elites who often steer trustee boards mimic). Once you see it this way, the sector’s funding patterns and refusal to fund managers look less like neutral financial decisions and more like a reproduction of class hierarchy and ideology.

So, if the origin is cultural and ideological, the end point is economic. Again, it serves to hollow out professional labour, and drive wages to the bottom. It also leaves us without people with the skills to challenge those ideologies and the power of the funders who hold the power over charitable delivery, and industrial conditions, through their wealth: in many cases, directly representing massive capital of either private or corporate/ shareholder origin (at differing levels of remove and control).

This goes far beyond the idea of casualisation and freelancers, but now if you take it to the stage where there is no funding for permanent or lasting employees in senior roles, the only way for charities to get people into those roles is by outsourcing the task to others and through casualisation. This also ‘hides’ the work to an extent. But it transfers precarity to some who would previously have had stability and employment rights, as well as the responsibility for cost cutting, and managing impossible systems set up by funders, to charities.

We’re seeing the precarity long expected of workers at the bottom of the pile being expanded and extended further and further up the tree in terms of employment and earning. Youth workers and care workers on sessional rates? Not a problem! They love it. It’s better than Tesco, what are they complaining about? Don’t they care about the people we work with? Managers? Hold on a minute…

Overall, within the charity sector and without, the balance is complex, and a matter of ongoing conflict and change. It is in many ways this is the sharp end of class conflict. And the gender and class lines in the charity world are deeply knitted into this changing picture of how we do, and pay, work in the deeply class-riddled world of the charity sector. (A sector where a deeply enculturated class system sometimes shows itself more overtly than in sectors more directly opened to the ravages of neoliberal profit incentives.)

So we end up with a sector where the work once done by stable employees is dispersed across freelancers and temporary contracts (I didn’t have a permanent contract once until I first became a CEO), without anyone addressing the structural problem beneath it: the collapse of financial security itself for all but those with wealth. Yes, in the charity industry, but far beyond that, to our whole changing economy.

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Enterprise and UBI

Now, none of this is just to sing the praises of employment. Much as there are moments I want to drop the consultancy game (when there’s no work, duh…), there are many things to be said for individual or even small enterprise. And not just for our personal experience/ lifestyle, but for society: enterprise and small businesses are pretty fantastic drivers of innovation and creativity. Alongside a tendency to unseat our human relationships and concentrate profits at the top, market capitalism tends to kill small business and enterprise. That’s bad for everyone. 

And weirdly, I have always admired the Enterprise Allowance scheme run by Thatcher’s Government, which was strikingly effective in some ways (probably not those that Thatcher intended). Not only were there many new artists, creatives, and all sorts of interesting self employed people and business created. It also gave people who otherwise would never have the access to start up capital a chance to make a business happen. Let’s think about this: that lack of a cushion and any chance to invest is indeed the kind of thing that perpetuates the class system.

Complaints (as you often see about EA programme) that up to one in six businesses failed in the first year seem bonkers. Surely at least one in six businesses fail in the first year anyway? And what does ‘fail’ mean? And I thought a survival of the fittest economy was what we are all about? Isn’t this the glorious logic of the market?

So I was very interested to discover the Irish Government is introducing a scheme providing £325 week as a basic income for artists. Let’s face it, with the rise of AI and so on they are in even greater trouble than they have been for some time in an economy that values bulk and ‘content’ over art or craft. Providing this opportunity has a chance to open up the possibility of self-employment and enterprise in creative industries in ways that would otherwise be off the scale unachievable for anyone without rich parents. (We all know about this trap.)

The appeal of enterprise lies in its promise of autonomy, but it risks recreating the same inequalities unless there’s some shared foundation of security beneath it. And what this brings us to is the idea of universal basic income.2

UBI is perhaps one of the most potentially powerful ideas for the ‘charity’ or nonprofit sector that exists on the left today.3 That’s partly because it may improve the lot of the people we work with. It’s also of massive significance to volunteering - it would open up the potential for all to become an active part of a caring society. They might even have the time to care for their own families and friends!

And the overlap with volunteering and what we call ‘freelance’ and consultants in the sector is signficant. Not least, many of us will have seen wealthy professionals from other sectors volunteering to do the work we might be paid for, for free. (They do it badly, it’s not worth worrying about.)

But the point overall is that if we looked more to models like UBI, the ability for people to balance childcare/ health, lifestyle, earning, and contributing to a cause or something they care about would potentially be greatly increased. Match this with the potential for seeking investment for business ideas, and there is significant potential for the development of an enterprise culture not based on financial profit, but on social profit.

If this seems a sidestep, well, yes, it is. But my point is that with many of us choosing to do this work in a way that allows us to exercise creativity, freedom, and contribution to cause, retaining independence and driving enterprise, while at the same time making this more equitable and accessible, could be a massive benefit to the civil society we work in. In a way, this brings the argument full circle. The pressures driving freelancing and precarity are the same ones that make ideas like UBI so compelling: a search for ways to reclaim agency, stability, and meaning in work without returning to old hierarchies - especially as AI and technological developments threaten many of the entry level professional jobs which have developed since the rise of bureaucracy.

In the meantime, balancing complex conflicts in a labour market rapidly contracting in the centre, and having to do ‘more with less,’ will remain a very tricky way to work in the charity sector, and indeed, the wider world of labour.

What are our values?

What’s at stake here isn’t just how we work, but what kind of (civil) society we’re building. Hannah Kowzun, for example, has been looking recently at how charity sector values seem not to follow through into their relationships with employees. What always worries me is that where capitalist enterprises extract profit from labour and put it into shareholder value, we extract that same profit and put it into ‘noble causes’. Exploiting employees for a good cause is not much better than doing so for your shareholders. Perhaps even less so when we are very often replacing public welfare systems that were killed to allow greater profits for private shareholders.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all freelancing is extractive or exploiting - but the message starting to be pedalled is that greater ‘flexibility’ (precarity) is better for ‘charities’. To my mind, that’s a narrow view that fails to see how quickly we can prop up the social ills we fight against, with our very own practices.

If care, community, and social change work are only possible through financial precarity, and then only available to those best placed to weather that uncertainty, there’s a risk we’re just further institutionalising exploitation in the name of diverse ‘causes’. As well as making participation in civil society itself - a fundamental of democracy - more than ever a privilege of the better off.

What can we do?

So what can charities do? Some people don’t like it when I don’t provide ‘3 weird tricks that doctors hate’, to fix complex social and economic problems in civil society. And yet the answers are usually obvious and well-trodden.

First, funders need to give truly unrestricted funding. That way we can make it possible to hire proper staff to do the things we need, at whatever level, and whatever level of specialism, at least when there is enough money. Underinvestment is one problem; simply refusing to let people spend money in the way they need to is another. That way, if you can afford a proper senior post, you can have one.

Second, people with caring responsibilities, health issues, and so on, need flexible working. We need to continue to make this more possible. (Maybe I could have stayed in my last permanent job if they had allowed me to do more home working while I was ill.) And while this is a problem across our whole economy and society, we need to recognise we’re not immune to it in the VCS.

Thirdly, a lot of people are leaving senior jobs to be freelance because of a toxic culture of more-with-less and excessive and unreasonable demands, especially of fundraisers. That only stops with culture change, especially among leaders and trustees. Demanding fundraisers raise more as people give less is magical thinking. They are not machines or a dirty secret - they are vital partners who care about whatever cause you adopt just as much as delivery staff, if not sometimes more.

And finally, treat people who freelance with respect, dignity, and fairness. Either they’re enterprising souls who have chosen to do something risky to share their skills and balance their work. Or they may be people who have been cast aside from a labour market in free fall due to neoliberal economic policies of the last 15 years.

Most of all, do not use their precarity to exploit them. Pay reasonable, serious rates that recognise their skill, value, and their need to pay for the time they will be without work. That is how people make a living. 4Overall, you may not be able to get as good a ‘deal’ for your charity that way. But do we want to (non)profit at the expense of others?

The funny personal bit

The last couple of weeks have been especially stressful since my toilet broke. You’ve heard me say that I want to ‘smash the system’? Well, somebody misheard and instead, I just cracked the cistern.

After many attempts, I managed to get it replaced yesterday by my usual plumber. I felt weirdly guilty about how unpleasant a job it clearly was, and I felt he was judging me for having done appalling things through what is, after all, a hole in the bathroom floor for the last ten years. I’‘m sure he glared at me accusingly at one point. Anyway, the new convenience has a truly terrifying flush that booms like a crack of thunder - as if Thor himself had recently dropped a hammer. Try that at 3am.

Meanwhile, the diet continues, and it’s hard to keep food interesting when you can’t eat most of it. Yesterday, my special indulgence was buying the most beautiful pomegranate: a crimson and magenta mottled orb the size of a bowling ball, with a perfectly pursed top like a signet ring. Very beautiful, almost regal. My bag was full, so I carried it home proudly in the palm of my hand. As the bus went past, in the reflection in the window, I realised I looked like a symbol for something. ‘You looked like a Tarot card,’ said my partner.

On Saturday, for my sins, I saw the new ‘Tron: Ares’ movie. Every time I see the poster I’m convinced it’s called Tron: Arse. Turns out that would be more apposite. What a yawn. But at the other end of the culture scale, I’ve been reading George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. His personal experiences of class are complex, and he is full of the same neuroses he criticises in others, much as he is perhaps more aware of (some) of them.

But even more interesting was noticing how much time he spends frothing about working class men’s bodies. Seriously, it’s like a gay pulp novel from the 1950s; all ‘magnificent buttocks’ and proud broad shoulders glietening with sweat. I then discovered he was appallingly homophobic. Oh, George, you complete cliché.

Beyond that, what really comes across is that pretty much everybody is apparently awful except… well, George Orwell…

I fear I am reaching podcast over-exposure at this stage, as well as over-exhaustion, but have no other current celebrity appearances planned. Except, that is, for opening a branch of Poundland in Wigan, followed by a nightclub PA appearance at JAZZY NITES Danceteria. I’ll be sharing the charity DJ booth with Pudsey Bear and Katie Price.

On that note, I am considering reducing output. I’ll see you in three or four weeks, after a holiday break. I’ve written around 120,000 words in this blog in the last year. So it might be time for a slight slowing of production….

Weekly internet nonsense

The above is very interesting - a documentary explaining how despotism happens, to Americans in the 1950s. Pretty spooky stuff.

I always hate these kind of posts (above) on LinkedIn, so this is a hoot.

And finally: this one’s for Emma and Lauren.

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The brief introduction

Welcome to another week of Barely Civil Society. No big essay this week, just a newsy roundup.

I’ve had to take a break from fascism for the last couple of weeks. No, not because, as my partner suggested, ‘My arm was getting tired’.

Because it’s all too depressing and I needed a week or so news-lite, if not entirely free. Still squeaking in, there has been some stuff from the Labour party conference, which seems to have made everything a thousand times worse, so, nice one Keir. I did rather like the Guardian’s description of him having the ‘reverse Midas-touch’.

I guess we’ll see if we get Andy Burnham, and then at least someone easier on the eye can ferk it all up.

Onto the news…

Most corporates officially do not give a fahrk

The latest report from the Charities Aid Foundation on corporate giving shows that only 25% of British businesses support charities with cash, time or goods. You will be aware of my rather dim view on the role of corporate giving - and indeed, that it is one of my hard(ish) red lines in terms of things I won’t get involved in, not least because of the high risk of appalling toxic behaviour being unleashed upon charity staff.

But I suppose my concerns are a bit like the old Jackie Mason (I think…) joke:

When corporates do give, it is mostly about them, and them alone - and you need to always be aware that they must be somehow profiting from, extracting from, the charity through what they ‘give’. (Obviously, say, an owner run business could be different - that’s actually different than ‘corporate’ after all.) Perhaps in a few cases, this works both ways and you get different things you need - you launder my reputation, I pay for your soap powder. But very often, the sheer effrontery of it is mind-blowing.

For example, this little doozy - a corporate ‘award’ - always the very shittiest of all deals for charities - run by a major insurance corporation.

First of all, quite why the corporation thinks they are best placed to ‘award’ a grassroots charity for its contributions to diversity and inclusion is pretty mind-boggling. Talk about hubris.

But then look at the ‘prize’. £10k first prize. Second £5k. Third £3k. Hmm, couldn’t spring for a fourth? No wait - that’s admin costs!

It’s like: ‘Tell me you had £20k for CSR in your marketing budget, without telling me you had £20k for CSR in your marketing budget….’

Meanwhile, not to belabour the point, I’ll just leave this here:

As for CAF recommending everyone donate 1% of their profits. I’ve got another idea, and it rhymes with ‘make them pay more tax’. Sorry, wait, it is ‘make them pay more tax’.

More on class: I appear on a podcast and everybody runs away screaming

CLASS. Yes, it’s a thing. You may have heard me mention this once or twice.

I’m on this this month’s Benefact Group podcast talking to Felicia Willow along with, Dorothea Jones FRSA FIEDP and Duncan Exley, about the ongoing problems with class in the voluntary sector.

As you may know, my focus is historical, and about economic/ material factors that have shaped the sector over at least a millennium: changing ruling class structures that hoard power and tell us who is worthy of ‘charity’ in our society. We started with a church control by priests, moved on to royal control, then to the mercantile classes, then to the bourgeoisie. In every stage of our society, the most powerful/ ruling class has been in charge of charity; either through the purse strings, or through regulatory and administrative regimes.

I care about individuals and their experience of class, but I’m most concerned about how structures and regulations in our sector prevent real and lasting socio-economic change. So yes, underneath it all, I’m, whisper it, a Marxian.1 (Turns out Dorothea is too - respect to you Dorothea!!!) What I’m noticing more and more is that people are treating ‘class’ like a tick box on a DEI sheet - but what they are really describing is something more like ‘the poor’. Class is far more complex than that, because it’s about ruling ideas and relationships to power - and economic/ material means of production. I’m talking about economic class rather than what people sometimes call ‘social class’.

So what are the means of production? Well, think about it like this. If you own a building, machinery, some start up cash, some labour, some land for agriculture, anything like this, you own ‘productive forces’. Having this stuff allows you to ‘produce’ more money and then buy more resources. Then you can generate more profit and buy more resources. And so on. Of course, you do this by getting more money in than you spent out. That’s what profit is, and most of it comes from employing wage labour. So when we look at that, we ask, are you part of the owning class, or part of the working/ earning class? That makes a big difference, right?

Excluding the voices of people from ‘working class backgrounds’ (which I think often is really just a rephrasing of ‘from socioeconomically deprived backgrounds’ as we would once have said) from work or leadership is a massive problem. But there are much bigger, more systemic factors. Class is not a DEI characteristic alone. You see, poverty is a result of class, not class itself. That’s why you can’t usually just work yourself out of poverty if you start from nothing, whatever Centre for Rehabilitating Iain Duncan Smith’s Legacy thinks.

Classes are not just our lifestyles or where we went to school, or how much cash we have. They’re about our economic relationships to material and economic power, again, to productive forces or the means of production. Do you make your money from wealth or work? Do you own your labour or sell it? Do you extract profit from the labour of others? Do you have ‘capital’ - that is money, land, resources - that will make you more money?

The ‘lifestyling’ of class isn’t necessarily helpful. For example, people from poorer backgrounds, very understandably, will object to ‘middle class people’ trying to ‘pretend’ they are working class - like me, some might say. (Lattes are too déclassé for me - mine’s an oat milk cortado.) They’re right that your class expresses itself through lifestyle, and that lifestyle can go on to affect your class (and your children’s). That’s what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘cultural capital’. But we ignore the material forces that shape that at our peril.

So, much as I recognise these other things as vitally important, I think it’s most important of all to remember that ‘classes’ in Marxian and anticapitalist critique are really talking about people in our society who share particular relationships to material and economic forces. Because what happens then is that those ‘classes’ of people in society battle it out to decide who is in charge, and who gets to exploit whom.

For example: what do we tax more? Wealth, or work? Businesses or employees? Different ‘classes’ in our society will have very different ideas about that, because people who have a lot of wealth want us to tax work. People who do a lot of work will want to tax wealth - unless they read the tabloid press in which case they will be begging to have their homes repossessed by the Duke of Westminster because Rupert Murdoch told them to.

Those ‘classes’ will come with all sorts of reasons why they are the ones who should be top dog. We call these kind of ideas and ‘reasons’ ideology. They’re justifications of the way things are, or should be (and we all have them…. You’re listening to mine now).

So you can see there are big structural questions being decided and fought out by ‘classes’ which are much more than just who gets a job interview because of their accent. The point is that when we treat this like an HR problem, or a ‘community consultation’ issue, or even a matter of ‘social mobility’ (helping poor people work harder to be less poor), we miss the need for massive systemic changes to how we organise our society and our economy, and who owns and benefits from our collective assets. Changing education systems, redistributive tax policies, and an intersectional (in its positive sense) approach to social change are vitally important. But even beyond economic redistribution and the engineering of more equitable opportunities for mobility, there is also a question of how much we are letting capitalism, and its extraction of profit, and its theft of resources by the few from the many, shape our society. Ownership is just as vital as redistribution and social inclusion.

Back to charities, who have so often been given the role historically of preserving class relations: we are the apolitical safety valve for the poor masses to avoid deeper change. That’s why whichever class is in charge at any point has ended up being in charge of charities. But I think that can change. It starts with us making more noise. It starts by us being willing to challenge the dominant narratives. And by refusing to simply act as the window dressing on capitalist profit extraction when we know better than anyone how unsatisfactory our work is for economic change.

One of the bits I recorded that didn’t quite make the cut was that there are a lot of different things that charities can do to make themselves a pain in the arse for capitalism. For example, the law centres I’ve worked with who are holding property developers to account for their attempts to ride roughshod over social housing regulations, or to displace unprofitable tenants from city centres. There is much more capacity for disruption than we imagine, if we are brave, creative and strategic.

As for our industry itself - central to change is interrogating and starting to shift the trustee machine, and challenging the regulatory, depoliticising role of the Charity Commission. Meanwhile, while rejecting our role as piecemeal redistributors, we can wholeheartedly campaign for deeper change.

Check out the podcast anyway, and try not to notice that my voice sounds like it’s coming through a cardboard tube, not for technical reasons, but because I had flu.

Thanks again to Felicia for having me on - she’s such a ray of sunshine.

The above dude is so right, and both his intelligence, and his pecs, are intimidating.

Meanwhile, you can find more discussions on class and the charity sector in BCS here:

Class in the charity sector

What do I mean by class, and why does it matter?

The Charity Sector’s Class Ceiling: Central, but unspeakable, class is the elephant in the charity sector’s room

It’s not just about ‘DEI’: Resisting the far-right means asking questions about class and wealth inequality

Beyond charity: A glimpse of a socialist future

Beyond charity part two: Beyond socialism?

Beware the Centre for Social (Victorian) Justice

Disappointing meanwhile to see the Charities Aid Foundation sharing the podium with the right-wing neo-liberal Victorian-styled philanthropy organisation set up by Iain Duncan Smith to justify austerity and welfare cuts.

Apparently, the relationship between charities and Government is often poor. Well, tell us something we don’t know. But hey, I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in who is behind this organisation, start here.

Here come the data pixies….

More data. More impact. More pixie dust. I honestly felt depressed when I saw the announcement about the latest DCMS magical data pixie proposals. No shade on PBE, although I do feel they could prioritise different approaches.

But my point is that we keep returning to data as a panacea - or a sprinkling of magical pixie dust - as if ‘knowledge’ or ‘evidence’ or ‘understanding’ is what our problems in the third sector, or even more broadly in social care, are really about.

What bothers me is the swell of starry eyed tech bro data-hyping, and the third sector people who hang on their every word, after this and every other announcement about ‘data’ ‘sharing’. (This is a part of a wider societal obsession I’ll discuss in a future essay - but suffice to say, it’s not just AI that is a bubble. It’s data hoarding itself.)

On this particular development, I have so many questions.

1. Why did we close the What Works centres if this is what was needed? (It wasn’t, and it isn’t.) What happened to the data and evidence that learned ‘what worked’? Did it ‘work’?

2. What or who is this intended to influence? The State to provide more money to commission the voluntary sector? Really? We already know things are effective, there are endless stacks of ‘evidence’ and ‘data’ and the VCS is already provides vast amounts of public services at low cost. What has happened to all the other ‘evidence’ and ‘data’ we have been hoarding for years? What new information do we want to know? What do we not believe there is ‘evidence’ for already? Being nice to people is better for society? Surely not.

3. I find it disappointing that we are still putting our efforts into ‘proving’ the value of the VCS when we could be challenging the threadbare, evidence-free economics of the latest neoliberal Government and the terrible decisions, against the advice of even the IMF, that affect the people charities work with, and indeed our whole society. Too few think tanks and economists are doing this. PBE are wasting thier considerable expertise and platform.

4. If we really believe that arguments on the basis of cost and ‘value’ rather than ‘values’ will tell us the best use of resources, can someone tell me the financial value and return of this exercise?

5. People who believe the VCS still has to ‘prove’ its value by a financial metric, or by other forms of the holy grail/ fairy dust of data (BEHOLD! ABSOLUTE REALITY!) are not people who want to support it. Seriously, Just say ‘no’.

6. You can collect all the data in the world into ‘one big database’ as some dude fantasised on LinkedIn, and then what? Crappy junk data that nobody agrees on, comparing apples with anacondas, and with more null values than the list of IQs at a Reform party conference.

7. What would this magical, passively collected, data allow anyone to do? What structure would we agree on to ensure it has even the very smallest chance of being more useful when centralised than it is when spread across a thousand different sources?

8. What data, and to whose purposes is this to be applied?

But I think it is all starting to drive me to an overall question that came to me this week:

Has anyone noticed charitable delivery getting better since we started obsessing about ‘impact’ and data all the time about 20 years ago? If it did, would we know? And if it hasn’t, what makes us think it will if we just keep collecting and sharing more of it?

Anyway, £2.5m, and £600k per annum isn’t much in the scheme of things. The annual cost is about half a local CVS - so why not?

But I do worry about any time anyone pretends that ‘data’ is what is needed to demonstrate ‘value’ and ‘unlock’ public, or indeed, private funding. Once more for those at the back: the paymasters don’t need data. They. Just. Don’t. Want. To. Pay. Demands for data are very often simply another way of saying ‘go away’. It’s the equivalent of miming throwing the ball for a not very smart dog but keeping it in your hand. It keeps the dog occupied while you eat your ice cream.

Meanwhile, a few books about the critique of what is called ‘data’ (usually just meaning the metrics of neoliberal statecraft) for those who think this is the critique of one crazy person in the voluntary sector.

The Cult of Efficiency - Janice Gross Stein

The Metric Society - On the Quantification of the Social - Steffen Mau

Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? - Mark Fisher

The Tyranny of Metrics - Jerry Z. Mueller

Some Social Implications of Modern Technology - Herbert Marcuse

Charity closures hit the press

It’s encouraging - in a way - to see the national press in England and Scotland covering closures and contractions of charities. With that said, I’m sure the numbers quoted are the tip of the iceberg. The level of redundancies seems to me to be even more striking. It also fails to look at who and what is closing. Jo Jeffery has a briefing note on this coming out soon.

The List goes Live

Meanwhile, Jo’s Magnum Opus, ‘The List’, of ongoing UK charity funder changes and now has its own live website, and it looks beautiful.

That’s it for this week. See you again in a couple of weeks or so for - if there is time - a another essay.

Have a good first half of October.

Alex

Weekly internet nonsense

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This week, we’ve all talked - and panicked - a lot about the far-right rally in London at the weekend. I work near Millwall football club, famous for its history of violence and racism, a reputation that in many ways it still deserves.

When my colleague went back to work on Monday, he asked how business had been at the market on Saturday. ‘Terrible,’ a stallholder said. ‘Absolutely dead.’ We didn’t need to ask why, or where everyone was.

Now, a local charity organisation who were going to do outreach work in the area have pulled out because they are too scared of far-right activity. People are being frightened into submission. The ripples are being felt. As a charity in the thick of things, we’re moving to a new footing where we move from community cohesion work to having an anti-racism strategy. We are looking at frameworks and ways to keep people safe. But really, we knew this was coming. We will continue that community cohesion work, and yet, at the same time, recognise that the threats now go beyond divisions and distrust, and to something more immediate and dangerous.

Meanwhile, at the centre of that march on Saturday was a mob of angry and violent men. There has been a great deal of frightening news coverage about that, and a huge amount of rightful outrage and horror in response from the progressive mediasphere. But I want to suggest that, if we focus on that, we’re missing something of massive importance.

Outside the bull ring - full of the kind of men who would have been on National Front marches when I was a kid - were families of multiple generations including kids. And thousands of women. I saw them all arriving together on the trains at Waterloo.

Several posters were right on Linkedin to talk about the very visible problem of white (straight) male violence in the UK.1 (Just the UK?) But to me, focusing too much on the mob of men is ignoring the huge and wider danger that rally showed us. If we think this is just a minority problem of male underclass animus, there is a surprise coming at the ballot box - just as there was in the US. Twice. What is happening is much wider and cuts across gender and class more than many progressives are willing to admit.

Let’s be clear up front: this is not an essay complaining that ‘women/ the middle class are just as bad’. (I am sure that some will skim or see the headline and presume that….) But no: that is pretty pointless stuff and helps nobody. It’s about trying to understand more about how that violent mob relates to a much wider movement. And how that wider movement works to bring in a far wider range of people across class, gender and even race and sexuality.

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The mob, the masses, and the people

Philosopher of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, talked about ‘the mob’, ‘the masses’, and ‘the people’.

‘The mob’ is what you saw in the middle there: angry, violent people who are the déclassé of all classes, many of them criminal. These are the people who help fascism2 scare people into silence. They are a terrorising spectacle. They do often come to take on a leadership role - already you see people of this type taking on key roles in Reform. Hitler was from the rabble.

‘The people’, for Arendt, are the whole representative body of the populace. She notes that, because there is often a wide range of participants in these movements, it can appear to be somehow representative of ‘the people’ as a whole. She cautions that this is not the case, and that making that mistake is dangerous. In this case, despite the wide range of people across the march, there were clearly many groups of people missing. This is an assemblage of sorts, but not a representative ‘people’ in any real sense - despite what they may tell you.

They’re what Arendt called ‘the masses’: the people who feel disenfranchised, unrepresented by parliament, unheard and angry about something inchoate they have lost. If it’s hard to say what, they will find a close source to blame. Usually a type of person. She’s clear that they have not been ‘incorporated’ - and cannot be - into the whole ‘people’ and polis because they have been rendered outsiders. That doesn’t mean they are outlaws - many of them, then as now, are petit-bourgeois and day to day ‘respectable’ people, who simply come to believe that the ‘polis’ no longer speaks for them. These groups of the unheard and unengaged start to cohere. And they start to find each other once leaders and ideologies with easy answers appear.

What happens is that the sense of anger starts to connect all sorts of people who previously weren’t political, indeed, felt excluded by politics. They come from a range of backgrounds, often previously little connected. Those are the people who will support - and eventually vote for - far right parties.3o

Returning to the mob, however. We have a tendency to focus on the mob - violent, frightening, mostly male - because it is spectacular, frightening, somehow exciting, and also, especially for those of us who feel in any way connected to the ‘polis’, seems profoundly, perhaps reassuringly ‘other’. It allows us to believe that the people calling for things that shock us are just a few truly awful dangerous criminals scrapping in public or smashing windows. But when we do, we are ignoring the people who will give us a far right government. Focusing our fears solely on violent white working class male mob allows us to displace our fears onto one group - and not recognise a mass movement.

Often, we have created a sort of simplistic homonculus of right wing voters and activists which is a gross oversimplification. I want to challenge this in terms of gender and class here.

Fascists are women too

There, I’ve said it. As I mentioned, there were thousands of women, of multiple generations, and of some socio-economic class variety, taking part in that march. Interviewed on TV, they spouted the same hate as the men, the same ideas. They were just as likely to be openly racist, anti-migrant, xenophobic, and transphobic.

And yet, across social media (most of all on Linkedin where I am in with a very middle class female professional crowd because, hello, charity sector) there were, as I mentioned, many posts about how this all boiled down to a serious problem with ‘male violence’ in the UK. Well, no disagreement on that in itself - but there is an almost wilful blindness there which pushes the (far-)right-wing behaviour away as something that ‘female’ subjects could not countenance. I’m afraid neither the reality of the march, nor the history of these movements bear this out.

How we can still suggest this in the face of Trumpism, I don’t know. Women turned up at the Capitol riot, not just as followers but as organisers and recruiters. Groups like Women for America First helped stage “Stop the Steal” rallies. Others spread conspiracy theories online, raised money, and mobilised networks. They may not always be in the frontline violence, but they are deeply involved in sustaining and spreading the movement.

White women have always been part of white supremacy. They were active slave-owners in the American South, often exercising brutality in their own right. They opposed school integration in the mid-20th century, leading parent groups and protests. Many joined the Ku Klux Klan or its auxiliaries. Again and again, women have taken up roles as organisers, moral guardians, and enforcers — helping to preserve racial hierarchies under the banner of protecting family, children, or community.4 The fact that women did not fight on battlefields does not mean they have not been complicit, and often had significant agency, in violence of physical, bureaucratic, and cultural forms throughout history.

As Sara Salem points out, when women do things like voting for Trump (or Thatcher) even if people do pay attention and do not simply write the whole phenomenon off as rampaging men, despite evidence to the contrary, there is a sort of performance of shock that women could do this. We’re not noticing that this is a continuation, not an exception. There is quite a memory hole here.

The problem is that we have got so used to aligning patriarchy alone with racism, that we ignore the realities of history.

“Like Salem, as a non-American (albeit one with permanent U.S. residency), I am keen to place U.S. politics in global context. The truth is, as I explain in my book White Tears/Brown Scars, white American women along with their counterparts across the former British Empire have always been heavily invested in maintaining white power structures, even if seemingly to their own detriment. What’s more, they often did this by not merely neglecting, but actively throwing other women under the proverbial bus.

Patriarchy discourse is obstructing our understanding of how power operates in the West.”

Ruby Hamad, We Shouldn’t Be Surprised by White Women’s Complicity, 2020.

Patriarchy alone cannot explain racism - although they overlap/ ‘intersect’ considerably. But pushing all right-wing activism and violence onto pathological men is just a way of abrogating shared responsibility for white middle class feminists. So it’s absolutely right to critique patriarchy, and indeed, the actions of ‘men’ (straight, white mostly). And there is no doubt that there is a serious problem with white working class male animus, born of a sense of injustice at post-industrialisation, and the perceived connections with the rise of identity politics. But there is also a self-serving blindness to some progressive straight white women’s refusal to acknowledge the complicity of their sisters in racism, homophobia and indeed, misogyny in the way that, say, I have to when considering my role as a problematic ‘man’.5

Is it just working class people?

Gender isn’t the only place where denial creeps in. Class is the other big comfort blanket – blaming it all on the white ‘working class’ - especially when the behaviour seems vulgar, irrational or violent. But these are not uniform class movements at all, much as class and material/ economic factors are huge determinants and drivers in different sections.

Arendt is clear that the ‘working class’ can’t explain ‘the masses’ in fascist movements - they are born of much wider groupings, usually more economically diverse than you might expect, and originally apolitical (indeed, their concerns are still apolitical in any real sense - they just know they feel angry). They have no specific class consciousness. Indeed, some Marxists would say that is where the problem lies.

While Farage is reaching out to industrial towns and the poor huddled dispossessed, he is also making great, ahem, strides with the petit-bourgeois middle classes who dream of ‘common sense’ and see social erosion and a perceived lack of decency and safety (as well as just plain of dislike of difference) as the reason for the sense of grief and loss they feel. Particularly as the cost of a latte continues to increase. (Hey, we all feel it….)

Again, even in the central ‘mob’, you will see people with expensive watches and designer clothes as well as those who are clearly poor and deprived. That has also always been the case when you look at football hooligan gangs.

Likewise, with Trump, while we see massive support from the Hillbilly Elegy types, we also see large numbers of fairly affluent, solidly middle and upper middle class Christian and socially conservative people in all corners of the country rallying to the MAGA flag. And indeed, some extremely wealthy people drawn to the tax policy, and indeed by their own personal pathologies and interests.

What you see in the US, and sadly now in the UK, is a mass movement which is being comprised and drawn together from multiple groups, from multiple classes and backgrounds (even Black and Latino people in Trump’s case), of different ages and agendas, who feel somehow despairing or disenfranchised for reasons real or imagined. They are all looking to a leader and a simple idea of a few enemies to unite them.

And this is how far-right movements are born. Right wing extremists are amazing at ‘intersectional’ collaborations in a way that progressives always struggle - indeed, they have taken on the moves of the Marxist activist and theorist Antonio Gramsci, who advocates exactly that sort of action to build mass movements for the left. We were too busy arguing with each other to notice that Project 2025 was two volumes ahead of us in The Prison Notebooks - and actually doing it.

We ought to note just how amazingly good right wingers tend to be at building community, and a thriving civil society. However uncivil.

A mass in formation: anti-trans uneasy alliances

And the way these coalitions form today is clearest in the culture wars: for example, all around trans rights. Meanwhile, the focuses of social conservatives - anti trans, homophobia, sex fear - unite multiple backgrounds and strands too. Note in the UK the desire to protect young women and girls from asylum seekers and trans people among the flag-shaggers, which quickly overlaps with anti-trans gender-critical feminists, who in turn are finding common cause with Christian Nationalist tradwives - and bloody JK Rowling, previously a die-hard supporter of the UK Labour Party.

If the US has its tradwives and Christian Nationalists, in the UK there is a deep undercurrent of petit-bourgeois anti-trans nastiness I call ‘Mumsnet fascism’ driven by obsessive protection (it is said) of home, family and child.6 Gender critical feminism has a very strong lesbian strand. Some gay and bisexual men have distanced themselves from trans people they see as less ‘normal’ than them.

And then, of course, there comes a ready made seam for the millions of racist, homophobic, misogynistic and transphobic men we tend to foreground in our progressive rhetoric come in. Find a connection, any connection, particularly one that is simple and based on simple single solution like closing asylum hotels or banning trans women from the bogs, and you are starting to form the kind of alliances the left can only dream of. These groups do not agree on many things - but their overlap on elements is what produces the sheer numbers an electoral shift requires.

These alliances are bound to end badly, but, whatever the faultlines, a movement and a yoking together of disparate grievances is again being formed. Not based on class, or gender, but on specific enemies, grievances, lurid fantasies and inchoate angers barely able to be rationalised, and with zero evidence in reality.

‘They’ are everywhere

So, I can’t be clear enough that I am far from claiming that violent men are not a serious problem. That patriarchy shapes and in many ways drives far-right (and especially Christian Nationalist) movements. And that class is a huge driver of the anger and resentment that has led to the increase in far-right sentiment (which many of us on the left have been screaming would happen for twenty years and more). But I do want to warn off those who would simplify what is happening into an ‘othered’ gang of poor angry men (the ‘mob’ spectacle who frighten us all, and indeed, are intended to).

Charity worker Rebecca White, Kevin Taylor-McKnight and I have all experienced a particular troll on Linkedin who pushes anti-trans, anti-migrant sentiment, all the while insulting us. She doesn’t use her full name, or an image, but she does show her employer - a large arts and culture charity working to ‘bring people together’ in Glasgow.

‘Other’ these people all you like - they are right there next to you. Even worse, they probably believe in some things you do. I think we should close asylum hotels and that they are a waste of money too - because we should have built a housing supply that could house our own population, as well as additional capacity for specific issues. I think asylum-seekers should be allowed to work so that they are not reliant on what others call ‘handouts’ (and I call vital assistance) where we set them up to fail and beg in the worst of all possible worlds, and have the chance to live a life and have some autonomy in a bad situation. Indeed, they might even then be able to pay rent and find their own their own space - who knows, even have friends round, somewhere for their kids to sleep, or a kitchen to cook in. You know: living.

I want to protect women and girls from violence too - but I know their uncles and husbands, or indeed, Andrew Tate and r*pe culture, are a far greater risk than a person who has changed their gender. The simple solutions are offered, in soundbites and little sadistic chunks of rage and cruelty and fantasy, and they work so much better than evidence, especially when it mobilises a wider sense of anger.

Meanwhile I do also agree that working class white people - yes, even men - have been left behind in a post-industrial age. Their mental health is abysmal (hence the violence and aggression). Their pain and sadness and grief and lack of agency in many cases are minimised or indeed mocked. (See Owen Jones’ ‘Chavs’.) Their prospects and health are poor. But this does not make Black or other minority groups either less important, or the cause of their pain. And that pain, as my white working class dad and my friends would have said, is ‘no excuse to be a c*nt’. As you can see, he was far from ‘woke’, but he knew when he was being manipulated by people like Nigel Farage - and that they offered zero solution to any of the problems that others around him raged against. (He was an anarchist btw, not a socialist. He took a very dim view of humanity, which I inherited.)

As Amhara Spence notes, nobody else is organising poor white people who are of special interest to both Labour and Reform: we all know that much of the reason people feel ‘left behind’ is the massive and increasing wealth inequality in the UK and US. The progressive left has spectacularly failed to address those people. Others have noted that political organising on the left has totally abandoned these groups - and the right have been incredibly adept at getting people actively involved. Not just donating or turning up to vote. This is partly because it fails to see them as anything other than a problem. And it has to be said calling them racists and fascists probably isn’t helping, even if, in many cases, it is true. I hold my hand up here - but it is important if it means the rest of us start to take this seriously.

Again, the collapse of local civil society and community has been one of the greatest enablers of the far right And they have swooped in and recreated what mainstream society and neoliberal economy has taken away, in their own nasty image.

Amahra Spence

Who Is Organising Poor White Folks Towards Liberation?

Now, I want to be really choiceful in my language and intention here. This is not a pity party. Nor is this easy to write, as someone who dedicates her life, practice, study and politics to the liberation and emancipation of African-descendent people. I’m digging deep. But my political commitments have always been wide enough to acknowledge that such li…

Read more

7 months ago · 92 likes · 9 comments · Amahra Spence

The point of all this is not just to say ‘women are bad too’, or ‘not all men’. Or to somehow argue that white poor nationalists should be pitied for their rage and cruelty. The point is to notice that, however easy and in some ways comforting it is to think of a this as a problem for badly behaved men, we are ignoring the whole process of creation of a mass movement for extreme right nationalism which goes far beyond that. The contours reach into all sorts of places where women, and even, god forbid, respectable middle class people, might be. That is the skill, and the power, of successful fascist movements. We ignore that at our peril.

What will happen?

A Reform victory may be just a nightmarish phantasm - I hope so. It has been warned about many times before (a social media commenter the same age as me reminds me that people have been predicting a win for the Front Nationale in France at every election for 30 years - she’s right. Likewise we’ve had panics about UKIP, Reform, the BNP here fairly regularly). But then again, perhaps it has only been prevented as a result of us finally screaming and panicking when we see the real potential: and the face of the mob fighting in the streets. Perhaps we will have that to thank Tommy Robinson for, at least. Furthermore, that was a march of only 130,000 people. That is big, but there have been considerably bigger.

Nonetheless, I will point out again that James Callaghan’s Labour Government returned from the electoral wilderness in the mid seventies. Then, beset by strikes and disputes, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and a national and world economic crisis, they handed over power to the most right-wing Government the UK had ever seen in 1979. And note: the majority of union members - largely voted for Thatcher (talk about self-mutilation), and by 1983, the skilled working class were voting evenly for Thatcher and Labour. A small majority of women voted for her in 1979, rising to a huge majority (up to 47%) in following years.

Meanwhile, we have to tell our leaders: those are not ‘the people’. No small force, sure, but they’re a ragged coalition of people who have been told their lives are worse because of a common enemy. When the real common enemy is somewhere else entirely. Stopping the Overton window of mainstream politics shifting further to the extreme right is one of the things we must do most urgently.7 Keir Starmer is not listening.

And finally, a note again: the level of community organising and mobilisation of civil society we are seeing here on the right is impressive. If we learn anything, it’s that our own methods work - and those of us on the left need to redouble them, or be left behind.

Other interesting stuff

Some good linkedin posts from Kevin TM and Rachel Reese.

Couldn;t agree more with this post from Charlotte Ashlock:

Weekly internet nonsense

This has been very stressful, and you have been very good. So here is a lynx in a cardboard box.

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If you buy me a coffee, you can help me spend more time researching and writing - including some bigger projects I’m working towards. As I mentioned, the price of a latte (oat milk cortado actually) is still going up, and I may need to turn to blaming migrants and trans people if that continues. See: there’s something practical you can to do stop fascism.

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The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! What made sense to you? And what didn’t? (Be nice.)

The Philanthropy Bros

Linkedin posts like these are why I have a very serious problem with the notion of philanthropy. Truly emetic. Have a read:

It gets better:

“Your donors aren't the problem. Your team's attitude toward donors is the problem.
[..]
Either hire fundraisers who genuinely appreciate successful people, or help your current team work through their wealth-related biases.
[..]
”Stop expecting people who are uncomfortable with wealth to be successful at wealth-based fundraising.

Because in fundraising, your team's attitude toward donors determines your donors' attitude toward you.”

- American bloke, Linkedin post 3rd September

What I increasingly find is that fundraisers are indeed uncomfortable with wealth. (And they write to me all the time to tell me this.) As I’ve noted elsewhere, the sense of discomfort in the pit of the stomach for many fundraisers who sit between the greedy and the needy is leading to burnout from the sheer toxicity of working constantly against their core beliefs. We’re all well aware of “donors’ attitude towards us.”

All the professionals the poster lists as the ‘problem’ in nonprofits are precisely the people who should be in charge. Because, yes, strangely, people who see the sharp end of inequality don't believe the wealthy are magical humans. They know these are most often the greedy lucky children of the wealthy. (“Not all of them!” Well, perhaps. But the ‘working class made good’ are often the worst of the worst.)

As I said to a Linkedin commenter who added the obligatory ‘not all philanthropists’ volley, we need to change this narrative. Even if some individuals are decent, the system should be doing more to make less money available for philanthropy, frankly. If the wealthy truly believe they’re doing the lord’s work, as someone who hoards wealth then throws some crumbs (or even a handful) to the poor, there are a few key checks: would you be just as happy to pay that money in taxation? Would you be happy for the money to be given with absolutely no evidence to the outside world of your giving? Would you be willing to give it to fund toilet paper and printing? And would you be happy for the use of that money to be decided democratically? If not, you can jog on.1

I’ve written extensively elsewhere about the Tech Bros (as an example) who detoxify themselves with the most self-interested forms of philanthropy in the tradition of the Gilded Age billionaires. But within the philanthropy industry itself, there are very identifable Philanthropy Bros. (To be fair, they aren’t all of the male variety.) You can guarantee the word ‘portfolio’ will appear rapidly, not to mention a hell of a lot of macho impact. They like to swagger around and pretend that they are ‘comfortable with wealth’ and ‘genuinely appreciative of successful people.’ But to me, I’m always put in mind of the tiny fish that hang around the mouths of sharks, whose teeth they clean. They might well imagine they are best buds with the sharks - but the sharks just find them useful. And not even worth eating.

In the comments, alongside significant concerns from decent people, more wealth-cult bullshit nuggets bobbed around like it was a Kentish beach. Honestly, I was expecting some of them to start quoting the Kardashians, The Secret or indeed, Donald Trump. Maybe we should all just manifest.

As I’ve been arguing for the last year, I think we all need to get much less comfortable with wealth and the wealthy. We need to stop asking, and start taking, through taxation and legislation. We need to recognise that most wealth in philanthropy is twice stolen - once through profit exploitation, and once through tax avoidance. And there is much more to be done in actively shaming the extremely wealthy - not flattering.

As charities and nonprofits start to recognise and embrace their own values, rather than those imposed by ‘philanthropy’, and fight to end this inequality rather than simply mop up after it, we won't need hot takes like this polluting our work. And we won't need to keep courting the kind of philanthropists who require them. ‘Your donors aren’t the problem’ is so wrong. They are EXACTLY the problem.2

[As an aside: I couldn’t help seeing something of an on-ramp here, through expectations of ‘genuine appreciation of successful people’, with the culture that has led to notorious sexual abuse scandals in the philanthropy sector. Some of my fellow Substackers will well recognise this….]

Go deeper: and criticise the right things

That post did put a lot of people’s backs up: some excellent take downs followed and the Good Eggs were close to cracking on our LinkedIn chat. But as ever, elsewhere many went to a place of individualised diversity rage as opposed to challenging the more fundamental injustice. “What about working class people!?” they cried. “You’re excluding them from these jobs.”

Okay, so, let me get this straight: our critique is “But that means that people from poor backgrounds can’t beg rich people for money - to fix the society those same people broke.” Are we saying “everybody should be equally allowed to beg rich people for money”?

Excuse me for a moment.

It is not enough to say ‘we need to help a wider range of people be exploited by capitalism.’ These are the kinds of arguments I’m so tired of seeing in the DEI industry.

My suggestion: working class people should avoid these jobs like the plague, and redouble campaigning and activism to make this unecessary. This may be through the formal nonprofit sector, or it might be using skills they have built there - for example, as fundraisers - to take action which will be far more valuable in the long term than just begging for scraps for a soup kitchen.

We need much bigger ambitions than voluntary capitalist giving, run by Philanthropy Bros who get excited at the thought of a rich Zaddy giving them a ride in their Tesla.

And if you must have the ride (it’s okay if you enjoy it, I won’t tell anyone), at least go back later and steal the hubcaps.3

I’m a realist. We need these people’s money. Day by day, do your best to smile and show your appreciation of their success. But please don’t forget what this is really about. The end goal of our work should be that Philanthropy is unnecessary, beyond the odd wing of a gallery or opera house.

Quick bits

Black Rock and Lloyds are stealing your homes

There are some very concerning things happening in the rush to build in housing markets that we aren’t talking about enough. These are global changes and dangers.

Black Rock, the asset management company who won’t get out of my LinkedIn feed, are buying up thousands of homes across the world because they recognise this is an asset that will provide ongoing income ad eternam - and remove all possibility of control over their own living situation from the hands of mortals.

Meanwhile in the UK, Lloyds PLC plans to own 30,000 homes by 2030 for rent. Again, some of this will add to the stock (others will just be taken into private ownership - some by repossession on mortgage defaults when the crunch happens) - but what it will also do is put more and more capital and wealth into the hands of the 1%.

None of this is to be welcomed. It is not the solution to the problem: it is more of the same problem.

Oh, great. Rachel Reeves is reshuffling the Treasury. 🙄

Rachel Reeves reshuffling her team goes way beyond rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is more like letting the iceberg decide the seating plan.

Letting Torsten Bell come and work directly on the budget is wise, and politically savvy, I think, given that at some point the unthinkable may need to happen and Reeves will shuffle off. Obviously, Bell has the most actual economic expertise in the Government.

Amusingly, Gary Stevenson recently called him ‘the poshest man I have ever met’ when he was on Campbell and Stewart’s The Rest is Politics. I don’t think that interview was Stevenson’s finest moment, but it was certainly amusing to hear, and to see Alastair Campbell almost shoot his drink out of his nose.

Meanwhile, Owen Jones doesn’t think much of Bell, and I must say Bell’s performances in the hot seat on political interviews are pretty amateurish. He does come across as incredibly arrogant and snooty. I’m hopeful it’s because he is being wheeled out to defend the indefensible rather than a sheer lack of ability or understanding.

Bell’s economics are focused on growth through investment and reducing inequality. Or at least, they were when he wrote his book and before he became a junior minister. What his input can be at this stage, when Labour have still decided to live with their pre-election acts of policy self-mutilation, remains to be seen. More and more in Government, Bell has seemed to be an arch Blairite. But even a Blairite would be an improvement to the Cameron 2.0 government we are currently experiencing.

Impact, Impact, Impact and Delivery, Delivery, Delivery

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the obsessive focus on instrumental terms to describe our work in the voluntary sector: impact, change, tranformation, rather than meaningful words like love, hope, care, community. And now Keir Starmer is pushing ‘delivery’. It’s another of those words that betrays no values, no morals, no end goal. And that, perhaps is because he has none of those, beyond the ‘business as usual’ of neoliberal economics.

This was always the danger: that we elected (with little choice) a Government who quite clearly had zero idea of what a good society looked like, except that its economy should grow.

Starmer’s belief that ‘delivery’ of whatever is delivered will be seen as meaningful in itself ignores the very clear signals around us all: that we desperately need a bolster against very different values spreading like herpes across the country and world.

And this refusal of progressives to fight on values - and especially on economic injustice - is why this is happening. Starmer is deliberately avoiding the difficulties of overt ideology, of values, or big words, sticking with the covert kind of ‘common sense’ values and ideology (neoliberal business as usual), and focused on technocratic ‘stuff’.

Long forgotten now is the incompetence of the Tories - and indeed, nobody cares. As demonstrated by Reform’s ongoing success despite their local Council disasters, and with the incompetent administration in the US, people could not care less about competence. In fact, its effects may even be sadisitically valuable to people. The damage of state incompetence feeds into the ‘burn it all down’ demands which go hand in hand with right wing hatred.

Starmer, and the rest of us, need to understand: the fight is over values. Without that, left wing parties are doomed to irrelevance, electoral defeat, and indeed, to complicity in the rise of the Right. As Howard Zinn put it, ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train.’ You’re on it, or you’re off it.

Weekly internet nonsense

Finally some good news! I absolutely love this. So many empty Debenhams branches have left a real scar in town centres. (And my mum is bereft…) I can ride a skateboard you know. I mean, a few metres. I wasn’t an athletic child.

It’s a cheap gag and I’m totally here for it. Have to confess I got caught up in the excitement over the weekend…. (Wink wink.)

This guy is my spirit animal.

This series of AI videos gets better and better.

And finally:

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The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! What made sense to you? And what didn’t? (Be nice.)

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week of Barely Civil Society. I hope you’re all getting some kind of break over the summer. I’m off for two weeks at the end of September, just in time to miss the restart of the consultancy market. I’m good at this, see?

As for the personal bit this week. Well, after my dental surgery, things are mostly healing except for a terrible side effect: it hurts when I laugh. Those of you who know me will know I’m a terrible giggler, so every time I have a meeting with people I like, I’m in bloody agony. So if you see me popping two ibuprofen when we’re speaking, it’s not you.

Quick plug: Meanwhile I’m really enjoying my work at the moment. More learning and development, running the next year of the leadership programme run by a grantmaker for small charity leaders. Working with one of the bigger CVSs on developing a new strategy and a change programme. And continuing community regeneration work in Bermondsey, plus with another community centre in North London. More evaluation coming up! I love it all. Let me know if you’d like a chat about any help I can give you. I’ve got space from October. Check out my day job website.

How often do you want to hear from me?

I’m aware that the length of these posts might make their frequency excessive (for your sanity and mine). Can you answer this poll to help me get it right?

This week….

We’re looking at changing words in the charity sector again. There are links here with wider debates happening on Substack, for example in the work of US philanthropy expert and UK fundraising diva , whose updated briefing on charity closures is coming in September. You might also want to follow the absurdly named whose ‘Good Apocalypse’ blog touches on many of the things I go on about here, and much more. (This isn’t a joke, he really is also called Alex Evans and it’s frankly confusing when we communicate.)

And of course, there is a wider debate opening up in the face of crisis in the nonprofit world on both sides of the Atlantic. This changing and developing discussion is happening between those looking, as Jason puts it, to reform, and those looking to essentially rebuild as is. Those highly protective/ conservative voices seem to me to be increasingly on the defensive - probably a good sign. There is also something of a generational shift happening, I think.

The big essay: In our own words

I recently began a learning session with a new group of charity leaders by asking them to talk about a time when they saw something powerful happen for somebody their charity/ nonprofit helped. I wanted to hear about a moment when they had thought to themselves: ‘Wow. That’s what it’s about.’ I warned them: this is not a test for a commissioner. The minute I heard hushed pairs of voices turn into a sales pitch about positive outcomes, I bellowed a reminder: "Tell me what happened for you. What happened for the people you helped. Why it mattered. In your own words.”

I’ll give you some of the kind of things people talked about.

“They ate with us…” “We sang together…” “We felt something magic” “it’s about being there” “people knowing you care” …“friendship” ….“journey” …“family”.

There were big ideas. Words we’re discouraged from using. “We gave someone hope”. “They felt loved”. “Nobody cared before.” Every one of these was something ‘felt’, by the way.

The stories they told were inspiring - coming from organisations supporting older people, often towards end of life, the ‘outcomes’ were often not as we might want. Somebody had finally arranged and planned a visit from recently reconnected loved ones abroad. Sadly, this person’s condition had worsened and they had died before the practical solution came. But even the idea had given them ‘hope’. Somebody had cancer and their health worsened - but reconnected to those around them, they felt part of a community. And then there were the moments of exuberance, spontanaiety and joy: I mean, you know, 300 people came to a community party and danced together.1

As they told these stories, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. And I noted, happily, how clearly connected these very senior people felt to their work and what mattered to them. The reason I asked the group the question I did, is because alienation from values is known to be one of the things that reliably predicts burnout for people in the caring professions. The Sisyphean task of what we do becomes meaningless drudgery – an assault on the body and emotions – when we lose the power to make sense of it.

I think a lot of the problem we are experiencing as a workforce in the charity sector is ‘alienation’: from our labour itself, and from the things we create. Things like love, hope, care have to be taken away from us and transformed in some way into the domain of the people holding the power and money. We lose ownership of our labour and our organisations. And we lose the very words that help us make sense of what we do and why.

After the discussion, I turned to my colleagues and reflected immediately: '“Doesn’t it seem sad somehow that all of the things people ‘reported on’ then and there are things that it would be very hard to imagine ‘capturing’ in our professional discourse?” At best, somebody would come in, listen encouragingly to these stories and then say, “Lovely. Anyway, let’s turn those into proper metrics.” Out comes the set square and spreadsheet.

Most likely these stories might appear in a few ‘case studies’ rendered as bloodless as possible and appended, to give it some colour. And don’t forget the odd picture of children with finger paint, or old people looking at computers.

Why is that, I asked? ‘They don’t fit in a spreadsheet’, somebody responded. This was intended as a flippant aside, but they had actually hit the nail on the head. In most situations, there would literally be no way to transmit these experiences to power: they would not fit in the spreadsheet or application form. Every part of the discourse had already been planned and set up to ensure that those things cannot be comprehended or even ‘captured’ as we say these days. (What does that word tell us about power?)

Of course, a colleague - rightly - immediately pointed out that with the right support from an impact expert, these things could be captured and measured. It would even be possible, with the right level of expertise, to turn these outcomes into things with financial values attached.2

All true. All often necessary. And all part of the problem.

Some years ago, we were once trying to persuade people to frame their ‘professional’ language in the discourse of instrumentalism and industry, metrics and measurement. Now, we have spent so long learning that we have to ‘speak spreadsheet’, that some of us can barely speak any other way.

Big words are coming back

For some time now, the biggest words we were allowed were things like ‘impact’. ‘Change’. ‘Transformation’. ‘Value’. ‘Positive Outcomes.’ ‘Innovation’.

But recently, I’ve started to see the return of some other words. ‘Community.’ ‘Hope.’ ‘Care.’ Even, whisper it, ‘Love’.

Innovations consultancy Good Innovation’s report exploring Radical Hope. Jason Lewis drawing people back to the power of ‘the gift’. Manifestos about ‘care’. Me going on about love and freedom.

Because aren’t these words foolishly abstract? ‘Define community!’ they will shriek. Too big to be meaningless? ‘You can’t measure love!’ ‘That’s all very nice, but how to define them? Let’s be professional.’3

You see, I don’t think that’s a problem. We need ‘big’, ‘grand’, ambitious words. And we’ve been very comfortable some of them. Again: ‘Change’. ‘Impact’. ‘Value’. Add ‘social’ on the front, so people can see you’re not just a hedge fund. We’ve got used to talking in very abstract concepts. Abstraction is not the problem.

Words like ‘impact;’ have very limited content: they’re just descriptions of elements in processes. They’re placeholders for something. These are instrumental concepts.

‘Impact’ could be what cancer has on your family. ‘Change’ could be the removal of the welfare state. Sometimes we qualify these big words with words like ‘good’ or ‘positive’. Again, no moral or ethical content. ‘Improved mental wellbeing’ - okay. But in what way? Why?

But words like love, hope, care, freedom, community, all have a profoundly moral and ethical content. They speak of values. When someone says they care passionately about ‘impact’ or ‘social change’, I don’t think they do. You might say they believe those are instrumentally valuable - but they are not the goal. I think we’ve been en couraged to end our conceptions of our work at the level of instrumental value, not values, or indeed, the thing we are working towards.4

The power (and perils) of translation

I had some good conversations this week with two different charitable funders. We talked about the difficulties with words, concepts, and the need to fit ourselves into frameworks.

And yet there is an inescapable reality that the funders and I agreed on - we are often trying to make it possible for the organisations we fund to speak that language. As both pointed out to me, they know that many of the charities they support are having to make their case to health commissioners, local authorities, or corporate foundations, or even the less enlightened trusts (they think it’s the other way round). They’re right to do it. This is how power works.

The work many of us are doing - especially as consultants, or ‘impact specialists’ or whatever, is a translation service. We’re offering to speak discourse on people’s behalf, or to give them the discursive skills of their own, to speak to power. This is especially the case when we work with care-focused charities, and with community-based, perhaps smaller organisations. We’re offering access to the language of dominant ‘discourses’, and to the concepts through which the powerful conceive of, and manage, the world.

So when we have pushed our own charities, or the charities of others, in this direction, I think there have been several different rationales. One is that we are constantly told that charities are so diffuse and diverse that nothing but the highest levels of instrumental concepts could do the job of linking them: the ‘impact’ or ‘social change’ sectors, for example.

But I also think there has been some canny political manoeuvring here. The sheer level of ideological bend we’ve seen in the sector over the last few years has meant we have needed to sell ourselves in a way that sterilises what we do of any specific ethical or value-based content. This is part of the process of trying to shift descriptions of what charities/ nonprofits do into a service mentality where we provide ‘impact’ or ‘value’ which is then to be put to any use decided by the holder of the money. There is a danger here that our actual goals then become instrumental, rather than ends in themselves. These are technocratic terms which are open to any interpretation - or perhaps, any service which might be commissioned.

[Note here: some have taken to using the ‘For impact’ sector as a term. No shade here: as the fab Felicia Willow points out, ‘For impact’ is designed to be different from ‘For profit’. Makes a lot of sense. She also threatened to do me over when I criticised it in a previous post, so I’m being careful.]

Once translated they become so eminently transportable because they have been neutralised, one might almost say “neutered,” stripped of context and value. We’ve drained the words we use to describe our work of ethical content, in order to make ourselves more commissionable. If we obscure the end goal, we make it flexible enough that we can sell those processes to power, whatever their own particular interest or ideology. The discourse is sufficiently bloodless and content-free that we avoid commitment to specific battles.

Analysis of instruments and process goals like ‘change’ don’t tell us what ends these things are to be put to. This is a product of instrumental reason. Horkheimer sets this out in ‘The End of Reason’:

“Its features can be summarized as the optimum adaptation of means to ends, thinking as an energy-saving operation. It is a pragmatic instrument oriented to expediency, cold and sober.” (Max Horkheimer, The End of Reason, 1947)

As Marcuse puts it in his own work on instrumental reason, it may be instrumental towards a goal, but what is the goal? What is the instrument being used in aid of?

“In this reality, objectivity has neither a telos in itself nor is it structured towards a telos.” (Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964).

Telos means ‘end goal’. What both are saying is that such high levels of instrumental ‘reason’ and rationality don’t tell you anything at all about the end they are put to. They go further: that there is always a danger that the structures and shapes of instrumental reason themselves will start to shape what you do, and can end up with goals of their own, even if they are invisible. For example, we might talk about the ‘objectivity’ of impact measurement by numerical, and usually financial, value. But how is this without ideology? The very ‘rational’ process of judging that way has an end embedded - the logic of the market, and the values of neoliberal financial calculation.

Discourse is power: Foucault and Spivak

At this point, let’s be clear: this is not a critique of people slogging their guts out helping charities measure their impact - I count them among my most valued colleagues. But we also need to be self-aware that this is a professional service we offer within an industry, not a way of reaching an absolute objective truth. And there is always a danger that our translations change nothing of the actual dynamics of power in knowledge. What we’re offering is access to a language, to a discourse - and discourse, as Foucault showed, is power. Now let’s be clear, ‘discourse’ isn’t about ‘words’ alone. It’s about all the ways of ‘talking about,’ conceptualising, and framing our knowledge, or the subjects of it. Think about medical ‘discourse’ or religious ‘discourse’. If I tell you that your colon is possessed by demons, or that the Holy Trinity is a hermaphroditic, conjoined triplet, I’ve got my discourses mixed up. I’m also likely to be removed from the room. That, indeed, is what happens when you step outside the dominant discourse. Pretty quickly, they will shut you out, or call the police. You can’t speak, or even think that way here. Move along. (Meanwhile, don’t worry: your colon is not possessed by demons; that’s just what working in a charity does to your digestive system.)

A graph is a just as much part of a discourse as a word. And the whole concept of ‘measurement’ or ‘social impact’ is part of a discourse - ways of speaking that denote what we can discuss, and how we can even think about things.

This touches on another idea - ‘epistemic violence’. This is critical theorist Gayatri Spivak’s term, from her 1988 essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’. ‘Epistemes’ are particular framings or domains of knowledge (hence ‘epistemology’ - the study of types of knowledge and what can be known). Her ideas about epistemic violence build on, and in some ways challenge, Foucault’s ideas about ‘subjugated knowledge’ - ways of ‘knowing’ that are ‘subjugated’ by dominant discourses. Spivak pushes Foucault further. She argues that even attempts to ‘give voice’ to the oppressed can just end up reinforcing the structures that silence them. When people with power say they speak for others, they tend to overwrite the very voices they mean to centre. The result is what she calls a kind of ‘epistemic’ violence – a sort of erasure of knowledges, and ways of speaking or understanding that don’t fit the dominant frame.5

Getting the resources we need to achieve our goals relies heavily on our ability to speak the language of the dominant forces of our society, especially financially. So again, the point is, those who focus on ‘impact’ measurement (and I include myself in this) are in many ways translators. Our role is to find a way for values and terminologies indigenous to the charity sector to be translated into the language of the dominant discourses of instrumental reason. But the fact that translation is necessary tells a lot about who is in charge, and what really matters. I’d be pretty clear about the fact that there is a dividing line here: plenty of people are translators with the best of intentions, who recognise and are fully self-aware in the process. But there are some who tend to simply continue, replicate, and often benefit from, the imbalance of power. They truly believe they are uncovering the ‘truth’ in a more ‘objective’ voice. Many simply believe that their offer to ‘translate’ for charities and the experiences of the people they work with is a kindness to those who could never be trusted to speak for themselves.6

What I would say is: when I prompt even elevated, managerially ‘distant’ CEOs in charities to talk about the difference they made ‘in their own words’, it’s rare that they choose the language of impact and outcome. And alongside the work of directly participatory methods, I think much has to be done with the discourses we use.7

Catching feelings

Back to what I think is changing and, I think, rightly. Alongside ever increasing drives toward instrumentalised, alienated and industrialised, managerialist concepts of our work, I’m seeing a counter-movement emerging, one that is shifting discourse from process and technocratic terms to value-based terminologies. Part of reclaiming charity - or care, caritas, etc - is owning the cultural, ethical and morally loaded, intangible abstracts we recognise through language. My sense of a return to these words is being driven by hearing what we hear every day from the people we work with, through our own capacity for empathy, and from our own life experiences.

Somebody at the back there just rolled their eyes. We’ll have words later, but let me address this right now. You’re asking, aren’t we just being sentimental? Well, it’s interesting that we’ve come to eschew ‘sentiment’ - otherwise known as having emotions - in the ways we talk about our work in ‘professional’ settings. That seems unhealthy to me, and far from helpful (and indeed, there is research that suggests it may be damaging to mental health - more another time). And the kind of words we use, just because they seem emotive or connected to how we feel are not necessarily any less full of true meaning, less related to ‘objective’ reality, or even any less scientifically ‘demonstrable’ than those we accept in other words we draw from the bloodless neoliberal tradition. Nor are they less ‘realistic’. I’ve hugely enjoyed this article by John Keane on ‘Hopes for Civil Society’ recently.

“Hope is a four-letter word that is often trivialized […] . It is an attitude of people who desire a future outcome that they believe to be possible, which is why it should not be confused with optimism or its opposite, pessimism. Hope lives in the land between absolute certainty and absolute impossibility. Hope is not belief in miracles. It is not rainbows of the mind. It is not acting cheerfully in grim circumstances. Hope has a pragmatic quality. It is prudent, realistic, and active. Hope comes wrapped in possibility, not probability. Hope is both a noun and a verb, but it has no historical guarantees of success. It requires engagement with a possibility that is considered likely, and in this way, hope can be contagious: self-reinforcing because it breeds confidence and courage to overcome obstacles. Hope is generative of the outcomes it wants.”

John Keane, ‘Hopes for Civil Society’, 2020.

What we are not doing is replacing ‘objectivity’ or ‘reason’ with nonsense. This is not an anti-scientific argument. As Horkheimer put it,

“If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate – in short, the emancipation from fear – then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service we can render.”

- Horkheimer, ‘Eclipse of Reason" (1947)

These words are no less real, even if they may be more ‘subjective’ than the language of calculation. And they are absolutely focused on the real world.

So, more and more people are starting to use those ‘big’, ambitious, loaded words. They’re starting to focus on words with ethical and ideological content. It’s brave because it makes clear what they believe. And it’s brave because those goals are foreign to not just the dominant discourse, but the power relations and ideology it serves. And they may be considerably less easy to integrate for those who hold the pursestrings, or access to the corridors of power.

But the new (old) words, it seems to me, are moving us towards something important. When we talk in instrumental language - 'impact', 'change', 'outcomes' - we're stuck thinking about our work in purely consequentialist terms. We judge everything by its measurable results. But words like love, hope, care, community - they don't work that way. They're not means to ends. They suggest that some things are worth doing simply because they're right - not because we can prove they'll lead somewhere else that might be more useful. This is what philosophers call a shift from ‘consequentialist’ to ‘deontological’ ethics. We're moving away from the utilitarian, instrumental kind of ethics we have been taught to follow, and instead towards something culturally much different - older but newer. Deontic, or categorical ethics.

We’re saying, we care for people because caring matters, not because it produces 'positive outcomes.' We build community because community is an end in itself - not because it saves money or increases population health (these may be very positive side-effects). Community is the goal. A move towards categorical or deontic ethics means that we are saying: we do this because it is right. Not because we imagine it will be instrumentally useful for a specific goal.

Conclusions: speak for yourself

These battles are not about science, progress or even evidence. They engage models of epistemology, sure, but within those are questions of values and morality. They’re about models of ethics. And big words like hope and love are radical now. Because the logics of neoliberalism have made us believe that all things must be a calculation of impact or ‘value’ - not values. The best way to calculate is to make numerical. And the best common denominator, in this field, is financial value. The extremes of this are in Effective Altruism and various forms of philanthrocapitalism. But these techniques are fundamental to the modern state, which, in turn, took them from the approaches we now call neoliberal economics. It is sometimes hard for people to understand that even 30 years ago, we did not think this way. And that we do so now is not progress.

I think that is very hard to hear these days: we have been so conditioned to believe that only calculations can decide the ‘good’. And we are threatened and silenced/ disciplined with accusations of sentimentality, and warned not to step outside the bounds of what Mark Fisher called ‘capitalist realism’ - where the capitalist discourse of measurement, calculation, and of course, the end goal of private profit and fiscal conservatism, denotes absolute reality. Anything else is foolish, sentimental, infantile, and simply unrealistic.

I want to urge everybody in charities, whenever possible, to speak in your own words. The words you have been given are not yours. They’re designed to take you further away from what you do, and to render the care we give to people in our society a matter of bloodless calculation. Speak in your own words. They are just as real as the discourses offered by industry. And let’s be realistic: speak the language of power when you must. We can’t afford to stand on principle to the extent we cease to exist.

This has not been yet another article in the longstanding research wars of qualitative versus quantitative research or measurement, or about identifying appropriate tools to examine reality in any particular case. This is about a rebalancing of discourse I see happening in the charity world which is giving me hope for a change in our sector and wider society. It sits alongside an ongoing need to speak in languages understood by power and wealth. But alongside that there is a growing tendency for us to return, in our public debate, to ways of speaking, and concepts, that I would call much more ‘indigenous’, culturally and practically, to the work most of us do.

While pragmatically enabling translation into languages of power, we also need to be willing to resist and disrupt them.

General shitshow updates

You may have heard recently a few assertions of charity grandees that ‘it’s always been like this’.

But Esmee Fairbairn, one of the largest foundations in the UK, has seen the same number of charities on their books close in the last year as they did in the previous five. Mostly medium sized - exactly the kind of issues Jo, Sarah-Jane Pickering, Mike Zywina, and I (and many others) have been raising.

Meanwhile, 240 charities have signed an open letter to the Scottish First Minister warning of ‘apocalypse’ in the care sector as a result of what is happening to charities.

From the Glasgow Herald:

A group of 200 charities has written to Scottish First Minister John Swinney to warn that more than 60% of social care charities risk imminent closure.

They add: “Our organisations face increasing levels of demand which simply cannot be met within available public funds. Services and support are facing severe funding cuts. Many organisations are scaling back services significantly; others are looking at the possibility of closure. The sector, and the people it supports, have been pushed to breaking point.”

A recent poll of “not-for-profit providers” found that “67% said they were budgeting this year on the basis of reaching financial balance through reserves … Of these, 91% reported that they will no longer be a going concern within four years”.’

Survivors’ Trust have written an open letter with 70 other charities for survivors of sexual violence warning services face closure.

“Our services between them work with thousands of survivors, all of whom have needed specialist care and support to help them come to terms with their experiences and begin to rebuild their lives. We want to keep supporting them, and we also want to keep supporting government to achieve its ambitions and make a meaningful impact on the currently appalling rates of sexual violence and abuse, as well as the lack of justice. However, without an urgent guarantee of support, there will be no specialist sexual violence services left to support survivors, or the Government, in their mission to end VAWG.” [Quick note: many men and boys also experience sexaul violence.]

This doesn’t mean ‘it’s over’ for charities. It doesn’t mean there is no chance for survival. The Lazarus-like revivals I have seen over the last six months have astounded me - they always do. But more and more will be staying right there in the cave, beyond all miracles.

It’s vital to be aware this is happening, call it out, and perhaps start to demand it doesn’t keep happening over and over. Something people aren’t noting is that the cuts to charities are likely to have a much more serious effect on public services than they did even in 2010 - because successive Governments have both slashed and burned public services, and passed them off on the cheap to charities who make up the shortfall from philanthropy.

Meanwhile, we’re covenanting and begging for a voice - is it time to just start shouting a bit? Demands from individual areas of specialism are important where they address a specific fund. But collective noise is likely to shift the Overton window for the sector itself - slowly and over time.

This week’s best social media nonsense

Some use of AI is art.

See you all in a couple of weeks-ish. Have fun.

- Alex

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Welcome to another week of Barely Civil Society, one week later than intended due to a family wedding in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere in Norfolk. Seriously, what? What is it with straight people and weddings? Can we all please agree that a registry office in Zone 1 is the perfect venue, and then we can be home in time for bed with cat and the new series of Slow Horses at 9pm. Or 8.45 if I’m in a bad mood.

Having alienated 80% of my readers, let us continue.

Introduction

This week we take a look at part two (maybe three if you count the intermezzo of the queer civil society week) of my epic on charity as an ethic, and particularly, how that relates to socialism and desires we have for lasting systemic change. All this talk about ‘systems change’ never seems to consider the the actual ‘systems change’ that might make a difference. Perhaps this is because it seems unthinkable that we might have a remotely socialist Government even with a massive Labour majority. That shows how much the Overton window has shifted in 40, even 20 years. It also of course speaks to the politicised policing of charities and their permission to speak about ‘politics’.

In the meantime, it seems to me that we need to connect up charity with some kind of real political and economic change for the future. If you think this is ludicrous, you might want to stop reading third sector newsletters and get out a bit, where plenty of normal people see this as pretty obvious stuff: 43% of the UK population wanted some form of socialism as of 2023, rising to more than half in the 18-34 age bracket.1 You might also want to stop reading, because this just isn’t for you.

Beyond Charity.

Part two: Why charity needs socialism - which needs charity.

I've talked a lot recently about charities/ civil society/ nonprofits and socialism - with more to come. I've mentioned the deep sense of distrust that many on the left have for charities. Very often leftists still equate charity with almsgiving (donating material goods or money to unfortunates), geared towards sidestepping any fundamental redistribition of wealth, or putting the means of production (wealth being one in itself) into the hands of the whole of society. In this, they suggest a covert repression of the poor. Marx and Engels were scathing about charity, and for good reason, given their historical context.

They saw it as innately reformist and piecemeal. Worse, they saw it as a way of the bourgeoisie continuing itself and of reducing poverty - but by 'removing the disruptive or revolutionary elements'.

I’ve made many arguments here about the uses of ‘philanthropy’ for this very purpose. And indeed, I don’t disagree that this is exactly the kind of approach taken in theory by most modern discourse about charity in the mainstream. And yet, weirdly, I hear extremely different perspectives every day from people actually working in charities themselves. They see, and decry, its inadequacy. And yet, they also see the innate value in the things that charity is good at.

Marx and Engels were far from alone. More unorthodox socialists were equally critical. Oscar Wilde, writing 24 years after Marx’s Das Kapital, spoke scathingly of charitable do-gooders.

"They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair."

— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

But what were Marx, Engels, and Wilde actually critiquing?

History: expanding definitions of charity

Clearly, what is considered 'charity' has expanded legally, and that indeed, mirrors and (perhaps also helps drive) the whingeing of funders, charities themselves, and the public alike that there are 'too many charities'. But the point is: when some kind of welfare state took over (for around 50 years) the support of the poor, and what we now consider basic public services like health and education (which of course remain supplemented by 'charities' like private health and schooling), there was room for wider public benefit to flourish.

Civil society, and the notion of contributing to a better world for all, by many different means, became possible, both legally and practically.

In 1891, the year Wilde was writing, the law on what was considered ‘charitable’ changed to become broader. Lord Macnaghten’s 1891 act (Mortmain and Charitable Uses) sets out charitable purposes as:

1. The relief of poverty

   • The elderly and the young

2. The advancement of education

   • (Incl. The nurturing of public taste in aesthetics, music and the arts etc.)

3. The advancement of religion

4. Other purposes beneficial to the community

   • Animals and their welfare

   • Public works and economic projects

   • Leisure and recreation in the interests of social welfare

That fourth one is known to this day as the 'fourth head' - a catch all that opens up wider social benefit. It has continued to expand. And this expansion became possible because of a fundamental shift in what charity could be, broadening out from the highly restricted three previous ‘heads’ very much focused on the role of almsgiving and support of the deserving poor.

Fast forward more than a century. By the Charities Acts 2006 and 2011, with case law changes becoming codified, there were now 13 categories, and the ‘catch-all’ fourth head remained. The fact that these latter changes were made during the reign of New Labour, who were broadly very supportive of civil society in support of the ‘Third Way’ also occurs in a time of comparative plenty, and when, despite setting the coordinates for a further marketised and highly neoliberal state that we are still struggling with today, there remained some belief that a properly funded (and respected), civil society could bolster a functioning, supportive, happier society, rather than simply plugging the gaps of a shrinking welfare state.

Overall, the most fundamental changes that happened to charity and our conception of it have been made as the need for almsgiving as an informal practice has reduced. The development of the welfare state and a form of some kind of socialism opened up possibilities: it made it possible for charity to come closer to civil society. At the same time, as governments in recent years have steered towards the neoliberal iceberg of austerity that even economists as mainstream as the IMF know leads to permanent cycles of decline, civil society has been pushed out of its wider role in society, back towards almsgiving, and monastic support for the meek.

This transformation reveals something crucial about the relationship between charity and socialism.

The historical context: charity as almsgiving

Let's remind ourselves of what charity's growth in England has looked like: essentially, beginning with the almsgiving of the poor usually through the church, later solidified by law, in which Tithes were used both for the upkeep of the monasteries, and for distribution to the poor. Alongside hospitals, much of this took the form of giving out food or small amounts of money to take the edge of the very worst poverty, for those who could not work. Later, this became the duty of states, albeit heavily influenced by the Church, with increasing levels of provision, and legislation, from the Elizabethan Poor laws onwards. Throughout this period, there were both the giving of sums of money, and the running of community hospitals. Later, the development of education and schools gained pace. More complex and developed societies, and larger economies with wider spreads of wealth and reduced monarchical and ecclesiastical control gave birth to the bourgeois civil society towards the 18th century. Here there was a broader notion of public-minded private endeavour focused on influence and discussion, as well as demand for social change, alongside continuing and increasingly organised private 'charitable' practices. But those aspects of social change that reformers spoke of would not have been seen as in connected to ‘charity’ itself until much later. At the end of the nineteenth century, with the growth of workers rights, the birth of the labour movement, and further moves towards basic social welfare, the purposes of charity were able to expand.2

The great transformation: when the welfare state changed everything

Further changes followed after the introduction of the welfare state. Charities went through a period of self-questioning: what were they there for now, if socialism and the state were now responsible for so many of their original purposes? But when we developed the welfare state, we didn't suddenly find there was no need for 'charity'.3 Remember that the archiects of the welfare state, like Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan, were people who had worked in poorer communities, based in charities, particularly settlements. They saw the ineffectivness of the localised and voluntaristic delivery of support for what we would now call ‘the vulnerable’ in charities - education; social care of the elderly and the young; help with health; redistribution of monies to help with living costs.

But in the new era, most of these organisations found renewed purpose and potential. They focused on wider issues: social cohesion and building community. They offered opportunities for education beyond formal schooling; leisure, arts, mutual support groups, and all the other kinds of things we have come to recognise as ‘charity’ in the modern Anglosphere.

They were also suddenly able to provide love and support and care on a non-industrial scale in communities. We should also remember that one of the problems with the industrialised healthcare and social care that the welfare state produced is a level of alienation. Massive hospital wards, massive schools, anonymous care, reduced community, increased dependence and reduced autonomy. These things are as much an issue with industrialisation as they are with capitalism or communism/ socialism. So ‘care’ in charities as practiced since the birth of the welfare state has offered an alternative to this, and put back some of what industrial level socialised care took out.

Why socialism needs charity

So, when Wilde, Marx, and other formative critics of charity were writing in the late 19th century, they were writing about something very different from charity as we would recognise it now. (Or at least, as we recognised it before 2010. As food banks and homeless shelters have grown again, we have seen a revival of private charity and almsgiving meeting basic social functions.) As states shrink during times of economic adversity (ie. when profits start to fall and the money needs to come out of poor people), we will tend to see pressures on both state and 'charity' to rebalance the 'biting point' of the gears.

Now let’s be clear: whether social democracy of the post-war consensus type is socialism at all is a complex question. Certainly, its goal of redistribution moved us in that direction, even if simple redistribution by progressive taxation is only a very weak form. Nationalisation of industries is closer to the socialist principle of socialising (holding in common) the ‘means of production’ (land, wealth, labour, material resources, knowledge, so many other things). But no matter what, the idea of holding resources in common, and distributing the products according to need rather than market alone, was a core part of the Keynesian approach, imperfect as it was. (Loads of Marxists have just printed out the picture of me from Linkedin and started throwing potatoes at it - sorry chaps - and I bet you are indeed mostly chaps.)4 As a socialist democracy with fairer distribution moves closer to reality, and as people’s basic needs are met, society is able to spend more time focusing on needs beyond food and shelter. And that, it is often forgotten, is the goal of socialism: human flourishing beyond basic need. And it is forgotten not just by those who present the goals of socialism as puritanical potato-bothering, but also by socialists of a certain type themselves.

Now, setting aside this sense of anxiety about the lack of focus on the human in socialisms of various types is part of a history if its development. Especially in the latter half of the twentieth century (but present from the start), there have been concerns about what some (in my view, wrongly) called ‘really existing’ socialism or communism. For example, post-war Marxists rapidly began to recognise the realities of Soviet communism and its horrific destruction of human lives.5

But in the work of Marxist humanists like Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, and, influenced by them, in work of New Left thinkers in the late 60s,6 there was a deep distrust for the dehumanisation and subjugation of individuals, foregrounded by Leninist-Stalinist and Maoist forms of ‘collectivization’. In this, many started to stress the notion of the essential human, a focus on freedom and flourishing, and indeed, the power of, and capacity for, transformative love in societies. One of my favourite thinkers of the time is Erich Fromm:

“Marx's concept of socialism follows from his concept of man. It should be clear by now that according to this concept, socialism is not a society of regimented, automatized individuals, regardless of whether there is equality of income or not, and regardless of whether they are well-fed and well-clad. It is not a society in which the individual is subordinated to the state, to the machine, to the bureaucracy. Even if the state as an "abstract capitalist" were the employer, even if "the entire social capital were united in the hands either of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation," [89] this would not be socialism. In fact, as Marx says quite clearly in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "communism as such is not the aim of human development." What, then, is the aim?

Quite clearly the aim of socialism is man. It is to create a form of production and an organization of society in which man can overcome alienation from his product, from his work, from his fellow man, from himself and from nature; in which he can return to himself and grasp the world with his own powers, thus becoming one with the world. Socialism for Marx was, as Paul Tillich put it, "a resistance movement against the destruction of love in social reality."

He’s quoting here Paul Tillich, a socialist theologian. As I’ve said before, I’m not religious, even if I’m completely down with Jesus, and completely not down with an unfortunately very large proportion of his followers. But the overlap between Christian ethics and socialism is hardly difficult to see, unless you are the majority of Amercians, and indeed, the ‘caritas’ of charity is born of a Christian concept and formulation.7

But read that again: “A resistance movement against the destruction of love in social reality.” I know what that sounds like to me.

Sometimes that resistance may have to be about sharing food or material resources - and outside of an existing system, by private individuals getting together to do so. (Not just charities: unions, for example.) I hope that most often it is not. It is very ineffective. Much more effective would be to change our society in some more fundamental ways to ensure that this is unnecessary. Much more effective to work together to make sure that everybody has what they need. And then to work towards flourishing beyond that.

Interestingly, at this stage we come back to the flourishing that Wilde, who so hated charity as it was then, foregrounds. Wilde’s version of socialism grates on the ears of many, understandably, by its foregrounding of what he calls ‘individualism’ - the idea being that once socialism meets our basic needs, it allows us all to spend our time becoming what and who we want to be. This is very Wildean: a self-made personality, who saw living life as a sort of work of art.

Wilde’s queerness also comes through very strongly (and this essay has played a central role in gay liberation thinking for generations). He is sceptical of the (traditional) family because of its tendency to turn love into transactions and contracts, and into partnerships based on domination. This is common with many feminist thinkers, among them many Marxist feminists, and as Wilde himself points out, is also one powerful reading of Jesus’s teachings about family.8

But of course, for us to become who and what we want to be, would always be a matter of doing so together. That would be through voluntary association of course - and indeed, Wilde was also enamoured of anarchism (not the bombs part, he notes), and the notion of free associations of human beings to allow us to flourish together. We develop into who we want to be best with each other - but unshackled by the bounds of absolute need. This is what Wilde’s socialism is about, and it is very different from individualism as capitalism sees it (competition, social Darwinism, the logic of the market).

Now let’s take a step back for a minute. Does this sound familiar? Going beyond the absolute needs, and developing a flourishing of human individuals - of what is ‘beautiful’. What Wilde also calls ‘real living’ rather than ‘existence’ - by free association between people in society, unfettered by desperate hunger or homelessness. Wilde is also influenced by the work of Pyotr Kropotkin, whom he called a ‘shining white Christ’:

“It is in order to obtain for all of us joys that are now reserved to a few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of developing everyone’s intellectual capacities, that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.”

- Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

Let’s be clear: in the squint-eyed view of the Protestant work ethic common among those who live off our labour, ‘leisure’ is something derogated as a pursuit of the lazy, feckless, and morally weak. But leisure in its wider conception: what we do with our time beyond meeting our basic needs - is as important to truly fulfilling human life as any of Kropotkin or Jesus’s ‘bread’. We can choose to spend our ‘leisure’ making more money for rich people (thisn is what exloiation of labour for profit is), or to drive the general flourishing of the human and humans. In recent years, we’ve seen the further development of these ideas that we may recognise as types of ‘post-scarcity’ utopian socialism. For example, Aaron Bastani’s ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ explores technological developments as ways to develop greater distribition of leisure and resources beyond ‘need’ - and recognises that capitalism as it is currently configured needs scarcity to survive.9

I do also find it interesting that charities, like some of these heterodox socialisms, could be seen to go beyond the cultural baggage of macho, puritanical, denial that you find in some versions of socialist discourse. The levelling that always used to make us seem like no-fun pariahs isn't without some element of accuracy. Queer activists often complained of Marxists that they seemed like they just couldn't stand the idea of fun. That sour-faced macho puritanism you used to see in Socialist worker meetings. If we spent more time working in community centres, we might at least feel a little glimmer of what a better world looks like.10

Beyond ‘socialism’ and beyond ‘charity’

What all this tells us is that any omodern anti-charity leftists are citing a version of charity which did precisely what the state ought to do. So many of the arguments relate only to that. They don't relate to the flourishing of civil society which, to be clear, has flourished most of all since the establishment of the welfare state. That flourishing and diversity is decreasing now, as the welfare state retracts and it becomes again replaced by food banks and homeless shelters. This is not a fundamental feature of charity practice or civil society - in a socialist society, that flourishing becomes all the more possible. But the more economic socialism retreats, the more charity picks up the slack through the existing traditions of voluntaristic almsgiving. What else is there?

The point is that charity needs socialism, but socialism also needs charity. And indeed, I see them as part of the same ethic, and the same emancipatory trajectory. This is an alternative to seeking to match move-for-move the intellectual frameworks of an increasingly unhappy society driven by capitalist realism.

I talked before about charity as an ethic: caritas, the practice of love. If we are to be clerarer about what we want from charity, it’s important we are a bit clearer about what we should think of when we say the word. That way, we won’t need to stop using it (another possibility), or constantly fight with those who want to return it to almsgiving or monastic hospitals, or those who see it as a poor substitute for socialism.

• Don't think of charity as redistribution. It is not good at that. We need to stop claiming it is. We need to argue and campaign for real redistribution.

• Do think of charity as practices of care in society.

• Don't think of charity as meeting basic needs. But also, don't think of it as only 'nice to have'. Without social connections and mutual care we become ill, sad, and wither away. Connection and care are needs. But food, shelter and clothing should not be our job.

• Do think of charity as society coming together to provide love and care in a way that binds us together. This is even more vital in the face of an industrial capitalism that degrades social relationships and makes us suspicious and judgmental of need.

• Do think of charity as a way of human beings organising to care for each other and build connections.

• Don't think of charity as a degrading, one-sided exchange. This is a mythology created by the people who don't want to help other people.

• Don’t think of charity as a poor man’s socialism. I think it is part of socialism, but can only truly flourish when the other parts of socialism - covering basic economic need - are put into practice. In the meantime, we would be remiss not to do our best to meet those needs as best we can, when we have to.

What I want to end with is the idea that charity - even as it stands, could be a figuration of a better, socialist, future.

The Vision: Charity as advanced socialist practice

Every time we are forced to meet people’s basic needs, we’re taken away from this kind of flourishing post socialism that we would be best at. We are a terrible social substitute for full socialism and an absolutely vital driver of the kind of deep, transformed social relationships that form the end goal of socialism itself. Indeed, perhaps we are the type of socialism that can only exist fully at a later stage. Think of us as an advanced, non-authoritarian, post-scarcity socialism that is, perhaps, before its time.

If we see socialism and charity as somehow related in this way, it also means we can start to understand processes like progressive taxation, common ownership of wealth, and the production of welfare, health and social care, as part of these practices of love, care and freedom. (I guarantee that you did not expect somebody to tell you today that taxation is a practice of love, care and freedom.) What charities can teach us about is the continuing importance of voluntaristic association, of community, and of love in socialism. Of the importance of more than enough, of excess, of flourishing and burgeoning. They remind us that a socialism which doesn't recognise the value of freedom and decentralised agency and power will always be a failure of the kind of principles socialism ought to demand. Charities are a reminder that socialists don't have to be miserable. And don't have to begin and end with the state, or with material redistribution.

What I’m trying to do in these pages is to trace an alternative intellectual history of charity and civil society. I think this has been there, but until now, rarely if ever oexplored. It’s an intellectual history of charity that is queer, socialist, anarchist, and humanist, and is told from the perspective of those fighting for a more equitable society - not just working in an industry. You may ask: am I simply making an intellectual history of charity in my own image? Well, to an extent - all histories are stories shaped by the narrator. But at the very least, as I hope I demonstrated in my post about queer civil society, charity has also made me.

Am I being utopian? You bet your sweet bippy I am. What I need is a dose of capitalist realism, right? In the world of charity, or the ‘nonprofit’, I think we need to expand what Robin DG Kelley calls our 'political imaginary'. What can we dare to imagine? What do we allow ourselves to dream? Kelley, a scholar of Black emancipation, reminds us that we cannot forget to dream. And that the size of our dreams will delimit the amount of change we strive for - and achieve.

We are easily bamboozled and gaslit into believing that, for example, the very kind of social democracy we had 40 years ago, and indeed, which still exists in other places, is unimaginable. And that, within what we call the charity or nonprofit 'sector' or industry, the best we can imagine is more money from trusts and foundations, or cynical wealthy philanthropists, or some government contracts to deliver social care on the cheap. And that the ‘deep thought’ we get comes from centre-right think tanks and schools of charity 'effectiveness' selling us courses and frameworks, or justifying us (but never themselves) by our financial efficiency. Or ideas of entirely selfish 'altruism', which use the simplistic and scientifically illiterate models of neoliberalism to reduce our society, and our imaginative scope, to financial calculations.

I also want to be clear that I’m not just being sentimental - that being all too often a bedfellow of ‘charity’ both in discourse and practice. Sentiment and emotion are important - but ‘sentimentality’ uses emotion to obscure reality, not to experience, or understand it. There is much more to this than a mystical notion of universal love, or simply doing things that give us a warm glow. This is not a refutation of Marx’s materialism and a replacement of economic reality with warm fuzzies - or worst of all, with Tory paternalistic noblesse oblige and the idea that man cannot live on bread alone. (He can’t, but he also can’t live without it.)

At the same time, we might want to ask ourselves why, for both some unreconstructed Marxists and neoliberals, ‘feelings’ are so easy to laugh off and cast aside - perhaps to replaced by hardcore impact data driving utilitarian goals. What does this tell us about our dominant culture, that our emotionally-led impulses are to be resisted and mocked? I am talking about making very ‘real’ changes to the lives and living standards of actual human beings. But that includes bingo, and climbing frames, and movie clubs, and somebody telling you that you matter when you feel like you don’t. If you think we should be ‘above’ that, that’s on you. Another thing charity does well is feeling. And that is seen as its weakness. I’ll leave you to ponder that and what it says about those who make these judgments.

The cultural hegemony (that is, the dominating influence over ideas and beliefs) asserted by the establishment in the nonprofit industry (you know the people, the organisations, the institutions) is a barrier to us coming away from broken social practices. It ideologically props up and justifies an overstretched charity industry built in the mirror image of the very neoliberal economic system which is fundamentally inimical to our own purported goals.

This is all the more reason that in charitable theory and practice, we need to focus on an ethic, of freedom and care and love, the ethic of a deeply humanistic socialism. Not one degraded by its historical associations with the powerful controlling the weak. But instead, empowered by a vision of solidarity and love that makes its own practices. This change, from industry to ethic, will not come from think tanks, philanthropists, and corporate training programmes. It will only come from the people who live it, breathe it, and do it.

What does that mean practically? Well, practically it starts with this: talking. thinking and dreaming. Refusing to shut up when the latest six-figure-salaried third sector mouthpiece tells us it’s always like this, and can’t be any other way. We start by taking our view outside of an industry, to start to see what we can add - and where we overlap - with global structures and struggles against a capitalist society that sees people as profit centres. And yes, in the meantime, we can improve funding application forms, make sure we stay political and speak out against injustice, be strategic, and try not to go under or have a breakdown. I do this shit every day too - what else do you expect me to say? (I’m just tired of saying it.) The point is to think about the future you want in 50 years, not just the next financial year.

What I’m trying to do in these pages is to trace an alternative intellectual history of charity and civil society, and draw from that a different vision of charity, I’m inviting you to reclaim charity from a conservatism in discourse and ideas, from the Torygraph self-congratulations of the wealthy, and from its industrial arrangements, which fail to do justice to its potential.

We discussed in part one of this post how people have come to hate the word ‘charity’ so much (because of its negative associations) that they have started to come up with all sorts of alternatives. I want to propose a new one. How about 'socialism'? 'I work in socialism' is definitely a sentence I would find easier to say at parties.

‘Oh, that must be so rewarding, they will say.’ “Not yet,” I’ll tell them. “But it will be.”

Thanks!

Finally, a big thank you to Prof Erin Mackie for her always insightful and diligent editorial help. If anyone ever wants a good editor, get in touch and I’ll connect you.

And finally

I was talking to some colleagues this week (The Ungrateful) about whether it is time for a new generation of leaders in the charity sector. These are not going to come from infrastructure or funders. They’re going to come from people who do things. An army of bingo-callers, ping-pong table wranglers, and knackered CEOs who know their way around a blocked bog like nobody’s business. Or people burning out on fundraising for the bog brush.

Until next time….

See you in two-ish weeks for more fun and frolics. I’m going to try and track down some Paul Tillich, who is new to me.

And I might go and see the fantastic new Superman again.

No, not this w*nker.

Oh, and….

In the early 90s, Alexei Sayle, who is a bit of a comedy hero of mine, had the funniest TV sketch show I’ve ever seen to this day. It was called ‘Alexei Sayle’s Stuff.’ Check it out on YouTube. Meanwhile, we also share interests in Marxist theory...

And this one’s for Lauren Williams, who enjoyed Mr Thunderpaws last month as much as I did.

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The introductory preamble

Some general diarising this week, followed by a discussion of just how many charities/ non-profits we should have.

1. The funny personal bit, with the usual diaristic nonsense.

2. Suspicion and scorn: where does charity distrust come from? We look at why charities are so often considered to be parasitic and wasteful.

3. The long read: Are there too many charities? Since there is a contraction of the sector happening, some say there were just too many charities anyway. Why are there so many? Why do people keep setting up new ones? Which ones should receive financial support? And how should we decide?

The funny personal bit

Alas, this week is still not part two of ‘Beyond Charity’ as I promised. Failed again. But it’s not just me at least. I’ve been reading Michel Foucault’s lectures from 1979 at the College de France. He’s presenting his ongoing, developing research, and every week he says ‘In next week’s lecture, I will cover…’ The editor keeps writing in the footnotes, ‘Again, he did not keep this promise.’ Research is funny like that. It’s always a new can of worms.

At the moment, my floor (including the bedroom, where Michel Foucault is my second bedmate) looks like somebody has burgled a library - and then disappointedly discovered it’s just books and walked off mid-job. They would probably be just as disappointed as the people who burgled one of my clients last week. General advice to burglars: don’t burgle charities. Not for moral reasons, just because they don’t have anything worth nicking.

I’ve also been archiving and indexing old Barely Civil Society articles based on the subjects they cover. A few more focused greatest hits relevant to my more general noodlings today are included below.

Podcast pontifications

This week I talked to the fabulous Felicia Willow, the Mary Poppins of the Charity Sector, on the Benefact podcast, about class in charities. I was fairly measured until the end when I think maybe I went full Lenin. It was meant to be a soundbite but it sounded more like a war cry. Maybe it was.

Also, is ‘arse’ swearing? Asking for a friend.

Anyway look for it around September.

I should also be doing a podcast with a sector periodical in a couple of months about the growth of freelancing/ consultancy. I want to be very careful with that not to promote the uberisation of professional people in charities as something to be welcomed. At the same time, freelancers do a great job; and for some organisations, and people, it really works. But class comes into that too, as does gender. (I’ve written about this before here: Uberisation of the charity sector.)

One of the things I will talk about is how charity workers say they hate consultants because they believe they are just ‘in it for the money’. Hilarious.

Felicia asked me to introduce myself which is always my worst fear and weirdly always takes me by surprise. Inspired by the Mary Poppins branding, I said I was basically the charity sector Batman. By day, a mild-mannered charity consultant, and by night, the masked avenger righting third sector wrongs, fighting injustice, and calling out the powerful mostly by making mischief in social media and writing extended essays about critical theory on Substack. So, Batman, but 1) not a millionaire playboy 2) I can’t drive, Batmobile or otherwise and 3) I forgot the mask, and now my career is tanked. Also, 4) Batman doesn’t write a blog, and if he did, I suspect it would be a lot more right-wing.

However, in that latter fact, he is unlike Superman, subject of a masterpiece new movie, which I dragged my husband to see last weekend. I get extremely emotional about Superman. For all my Marxian table-banging and sardonic rage, I am really a big old softy, with a genuine belief in truth, justice and squirrels in capes (see it and you will understand). You can read more of my non-charity related thoughts on Superman here.

And now, onto the grown up stuff….

Suspicion and scorn: where does charity distrust come from?

But it’s always interesting when I have to make small talk with normal people who don’t necessarily want to talk about nonprofits, socialism, or superheroes.

This week, I went for a blood test, and the nurse asked me what work I did. When I said I worked for charities, she immediately said 'Well, I hope they are spending their money wisely. I think they waste it.' I had a really strong sense that she thought were a load of bloodsuckers, which is rich coming from a phlebotomist.

I read surveys saying public trust in charities is ‘high’ when it’s 6.5 out of 10 for trustworthiness. I mean, maybe that’s high compared to estate agents, but…. it’s not great is it? I don’t think I know anybody outside of my immediate friend or work group who doesn’t distrust them on some level. My elderly relatives think they’re lying chancers and thieves, despite the fact that they spend most of their life at various support groups, dances, and organised trips to garden centres.

The thing is, when people don’t trust us, or see our value, that then means that nobody is willing to stand up for us. But how can you spend hours a week at, say, a Parkinson’s support group and still think charities are a waste of time?

The Charity Commission has a lot to answer for here, as do the right wing press. I’ve talked about the Charity Commission’s role in this quite a lot: they take credit for high trust in charities when in fact they are actively stoking distrust. (Some more thoughts on the Charity Commission here: How the Charity Commission Talks to the Public and here: How to fix the Charity Commission.) This has worsened greatly over the last fifteen years with the Tory government’s demonisation of civil society as a whole. (See 14 years of incitement: civil society burns, and the right runs riot.)

[STOP PRESS: The Civil Society Covenant has been launched by Labour, 17th July 2025.]

But it’s also important to note that distrust of charities has a long history in England.1 I suspect this goes all the way back to concerns about priests and monasteries misusing money for almsgiving to supplement their own lifestyles. In the 14th C, for example, the church was losing respect because of its perceived worldliness - people saw fat and greedy priests (in fact, check out the Canterbury Tales on this one). Tithe money was partly meant to be used for the poor, but many churches just kept it for themselves. Henry V took action against this in the 1414 act, because people were dying for lack of care while the church took the money instead. This is when the first reforms were set up and inspections began.

At the same time, for centuries, trustees and regulators of charity have been even more careful about what happens to rich people’s money. An early concern was that the legacies of the wealthy, left to churches on the understanding that their souls would be prayed for, got what they’d paid for. (Imagine! All that property left to the priesthood, and I’m stuck in purgatory.) Nowadays, the Charity Commission, the press, and Fundraising Regulator often talk about protecting ‘the public’. But it’s very hard not to feel that much of the regulation - despite the public rhetoric - is primarily about protecting the money of the wealthy. Restricted funding is a direct result of those earliest historical agreements.

Both narratives also of course reinforce the idea that charities are greedy if they ask for too much, which again is of special concern to wealthy, particularly in times of neoliberal state rollback. That way lies taxation, and indeed, a danger that we might all start asking why charities have to solve all these intractable problems, born of grotesque inequality, with a tombola.

That’s partly why I tend to suggest that fundraisers are ‘dangerous’, not to ‘the people’, but to power and wealth: they draw attention to the wealthy, and know where the bodies (or treasure) is buried. Every time they make an ask, there is a danger that people will realise just how many resources are sucked out of our economy. Better to claim instead that charities, and all who are not profit-driven enterprises, are simply spongeing off ‘the rest of us’. (More on this here: Fundraisers are dangerous.)

Anyway, I told the phlebotomist all the charities I know are super careful, and that they were really struggling. At that point, she said she knew that and really appreciated them. So what do you say about that?

‘Conflicted’, I think. And probably about a 6.5 out of ten. It’s very hard for people to parse the negative messages they receive from politivally-motivated antagonists, despite their own largely positive personal experiences.

The long read: Are there just too many charities?

We’re all aware now - I hope - of a real crash being upon us in the UK’s nonprofit sector. If you haven’t been keeping up, take a look at my latest Linkedin post on this, or at the work of Jo Jeffery, also on Substack.

Recently, during the UK’s Small Charity Week, I asked what people thought about the idea of there just being ‘too many charities’. Because some say this crunch is just a ‘market correction’. And I’ve heard that said more and more, either by charities frustrated at the level of competition, grantmakers frustrated by the number of asks, or by baffled others looking on and unable to believe there is ‘really a charity for that’. The common suggestion is that they can’t all be ‘real’ or ‘needed’ or equally ‘deserving’. Some are creayting a narrative that this is a matter of a bloated industry, a drain on the public purse, and a nuisance for overscubscribed donors, particularly trusts and foundations and public funders.

But too many charities for whom? First, we might ask why a flourishing range of ways that people in our society have decided to try and do nice things for each other is a problem. It is a problem for an industry reacting to massive economic shocks and social disruption, and the ripples from a disastrously mismanaged economy, sure. And it is a problem in an unequal society where we have decided to concentrate wealth and resources in the hands of the meanest, greediest mofos. But why is it the fault of charities? There is a tendency for the holders of money to describe charities – overtly or covertly – as somehow demanding too much.

It's worth pushing back – because the sheer variety of charities reflects something valuable in and of itself. Multiplicitous, messy, multifaceted interests, viewpoints, activities, and actions are part of what civil society is. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. And that is fundamental to a functioning democracy. As Nick Addington from the William Grant Foundation put it recently, one of the most profound and important facets of a liberal democracy is a thriving, diverse civil society. (I would add, even more so in a social democracy - where we could focus beyond meeting basic human needs.)

There’s a recurring fantasy – especially among those who hold the funds, like governments and major grantmakers – that all these charities could just merge, become more efficient, and stop being so awkward and numerous. Now look, some charity businesses probably should merge – that’s a question of finances, structures, and markets. It’s also sometimes a question of fragmentation and a refusal to work strategically. But that’s not the same as deciding what we should want in our society.

We shouldn’t let the scarcity of resources – or the preferences of funders – set the limits of what’s seen as valid or worthwhile. That takes us right back to the idea of who ‘deserves’ a charity in the first place. Yes, as Paul Streets says, all funding is ultimately rationing. But we don’t have to decide the shape of civil society around that – even if we have to make strategic decisions within it.

‘Too many charities’ for an industry or economy is not the same as too many charites for our society. Balancing those is tricky - but the distinction is important.

Why do people keep setting them up?

There is a realistic question though: why do people keep setting up new charities when there are perfectly good others doing ‘similar’ work? Why do community leaders keep setting up charities? I can’t deny that I’ve seen this happen over and over again.

There are good reasons. One is that an apparent duplication for a national observer is a profound difference in culture and community for another. Another is the value of different approaches - and sometimes different opinions and ideas.

But I also think a very common reason is because active citizens need to feel they're ‘doing’ something and it has official recognition. The problem is that the formal structures of our ‘charities’ often make it hard for anyone to really participate in civil society unless they do something completely new for themselves. We’re actually extremely exclusive in charities as institutions. Volunteering is a 'role' you apply for, is usually decided entirely by an organisation, and you'll be counting paper clips or directing traffic. Or, if you’re a ‘professional’ you might be lucky enough to do free consultancy or sit in Bored Meetings. Or, there may be a terribly paid job you won't get. I’ve heard people say this: people setting up food banks because existing charities won’t. People setting up their own activities for children because they have a new idea - and don’t want to just ‘volunteer’ to do crowd control at a youth club.

If we thought much more flexibly about how civil society, charities and active citizens relate to each other, and especially about our broken models of 'volunteering' which disempower communities and hoard power in organisations, we might avoid this problem more often. More and more, established charities need to ask - how can we help those who want to do something and have agency and autonomy? (It won't always work, but we don't do it enough...)

There's a really interesting blog recently I saw where Jason Lewis was talking about how 'philanthropy’ (particularly related to political giving, much more common in the US) has impoverished the political imagination in communities by making everything about giving, rather than connecting and creating and acting.... I think that’s true about volunteering too. And I think, since we give people no sense of leadership in much of our formal ‘charity’ work or volunteering, people choose to set up their own stuff. My own goal in the places I’ve run has often been to actually make organisations actively court, support, and nurture people to do their own thing. If you do that, the need for a whole new charity, or large amounts of overhead and effort, tends to greatly decrease for all but the most ambitious, and the positive impact is very significant.

The other thing we don’t talk about is that, at one point, there were more people around to ‘do’ the social, community, care work we now call the domain of charity. Once we started making everybody work an industrial week and then ensured all women and all men must be equally ‘economically productive’ we took away the opportunity for people to be socially productive…. Much of what we do now as paid charities is stuff that people would have done as part of their wider lives in the past (eg through churches, families. Unions, friendships).2 Civil society as a key part of democracy really took off in the 18th century, and participation was solely available to the wealthy middle classes who had control over their own labour and wealth. We might ask how much has changed. So in the current model, this is certainly why people want - need - to get paid for their work. When we say ‘not all charities can be funded’, we may be looking at the wrong end of the telescope. This is yet another reason that things like universal basic income, or even minimum income (which is essentially Universal credit but enough to survive on) could be socially as well as economically transformative.

Finally, perhaps choosing to set up your own charity enterprise is partly a justification: that I feel what I’m doing as a matter of social and public good is not valid or valuable unless it is ‘real’. We’re taught that economic productivity is the only ‘real’ source of pride. We are human capital, units of enterprise. We are only valued for the price of our labour. If that labour is not paid or recognised at least with some real legal status, it’s just a hobby. The leisure classes were of course the original ‘volunteers’ - they could have a hobby. Others could not afford one - and were not afforded the social dignity of ‘work’ unless they did so for the profit of a master.

Fragmentation and strategic grantmaking

Despite the calls for more charities to merge, we’ve seen an increasing fragmentation of grants into causes and interventions. Over the years we’ve seen the falling away of community anchor organisations (community centres and the like). They are the ones who have tended to provide a good deal of support for a wide range of needs in their local areas, and if anything, they are often sort of ‘pre-merged’, meeting mulrtiple needs with ‘services’ and projects. They have often worked with local people who might want to set up some kind of initiative themselves, and they often helped them to do so, without the crazy overwork of setting up a whole new charity. Funders who complain that there are far too many charities doing far too many things might think about whether they ought to be funding those kind of overarching ‘home’ institutions for social and community support instead.

What concerns me is that there is a fragmentation occurring, which has to do with the constant demand to focus, ration, define singular and simplifying objectives. That is becoming ever more concerning and likely as strategic grantmaking now has an almost total sway over UK civil society. ‘Strategic grantmaking’ is in theory the opposite of ‘responsive grantmaking’. In Strategic grantmaking, the funder acts essentially like a commissioner or procurer of services to meet the needs and services they have prioritised. Responsive grantmaking relies on what they receive as requests, and makes decisions more flexibly based on the idea that the ‘market’ (or ecosystem) will tell them what it needs. There is much to be said for either, and a mixed economy of both types has long worked. But a move towards strategic grantmaking is almost inevitable, especially when requests become overwhelming. Rationing is the order of the day, and in those cases, you think ‘strategically’ to control more directly where the resources go.

What this means, however, is that the majority of funding starts to focus on solving whatever particular and specific issue they have chosen: the best through consultation or needs assessment; the worst through what they’ve seen in the paper or their own idiotic prejudices. I was discussing this with arts fundraiser Kate Lockhart the other day: we focus so much on fixing a particular ‘social ill’ or supporting a particular category of the ‘deserving poor’ (asylum seekers, youth and women suffering domestic violence are current focuses in many funders - older people, substance misuse, community anchors are the major losers), that we forget how overlapping the key issues are. Poor housing, loneliness and socialisation, lack of advice or good information, lack of access to state support, disconnection, trauma and mental illness, a divided and unloving society…. Many of these things are overlapping and cross-cutting. Choosing by group and demographic is troubling and does seem to return to the idea of a revolving platform of the deserving poor.

And of course, grantmakers can then show trustees Big Line Go Up when they are measuring across the portfolio to be sure they are ‘making a difference’. That, I think, is actually the biggest driver of this: neoliberal models of statecraft infecting the sector through trusteeships. It mirrors governmental techniques for scale, which works against the key strengths of the more holistic history and habitus of civil society. In this, it’s as ever linked to a broader historical and political movement - returning to my current bedmate Foucault: this is the domain of what he calls ‘govermentality’.

There is also a danger that more fixes and interventions grow up for these few issues, while those for other issues waste away. When you choose a new issue, there’s nothing there to support it. At that point, you need to set up more new charities. Meanwhile, you also find that there are no systems, places, or connecting fabrics left between them - just a series of groups with a need for interventions. That tends not to work. (See my thoughts here on what I call ‘interventionitis’ Why headlines don’t make for good social policy and ‘Show us your widgets’.)

What this all leads to in the end is likely to be fragmentation, and indeed, more charities doing a few very specific, unconnected things. What I wonder is whether this kind of strategic grantmaking - focusing on highly specific out groups and causes - will simply distort the ‘market’, and remove the connective tissue of our communities. It may also lead to a loss of multi-faceted organisations who could support all of these things.

As a secondary impact, I also worry that this will increase the fragmentation of our societies: there are plenty of things we all need, and all have in common. I think sometimes we forget this, and the structures we create for help tend to obscure it. That way also lies the kind of fantasy divisions that Reform and the far right manipulate: refugees in the Ritz, trans people in your bog, and ‘the rest of us’ struggling to make ends meet or find somewhere for a slash. These people aren’t right, or indeed, smart, but they’re also fed complete nonsense and are very very angry. Often quite rightly. (On this, see my previous article ‘It’s not just about DEI.’)

Difficult decisions - and technocratic solutions

Overall, we see a strange demand for there to be fewer charities, an increasing fragmentation into ever smaller interventions, and the likely extinction of multifaceted organisations who would otherwise cover multiple bases, without the overheads of multiple different charities. If a consolidation is needed, my money would be going to the latter types of organisations and approaches.

People are all making difficult decisions. The crunch in the sector is leading to a lot more top-down thinking - a sort of war-footing where rationing is leading to a highly centralised and technocratic approach. This is an understandable response to the situation, but it is very much shaped by long-prevailing neoliberal ideas about how to deal with the ‘state’, and the management of populations. These are in some ways anathema to the strengths of civil society and embedded charities.

Because more and more I fear the ‘chairty sector’ is no longer part of civil society. More and more, charities are being turned into a substitute for a properly managed state, directed by private wealth, or privatised government contracts, run along the lines of, and though the techniques of ‘modern’ government of populations. The danger is that this is less democratic, less socialised, and less truly voluntaristic than ever before. It’s no surprise that much of the discourse, debate, policy and practice around ‘philanthropy’ come from the originating home of neoliberal statecraft: the US. A place, also, where there is almost no socialised health and social care.

Anyway, I’m going to ‘do a Michel Foucault’ now, and promise to return to this ‘in a future lecture’.

Maybe.

And finally…

Board meetings:

Instagram post of the week. (Sound on.) Mister Thunderpaws.

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Hello, and welcome to a quick interstitial between part one and two of a longer piece on charity as an ethic. Related nonetheless.

This week’s BCS is personal and political. But the point for me is that politics is always personal. My originating community, and my connection to a historical and ethical lineage, comes through in everything I do in my work, just as much as my socialism. You’ll see why.

The not massively funny personal bit

This weekend is Pride in London. I stopped going to Pride some years ago when it became hen party for London and a parade for brands. But it has a personal as well as political/ identity significance for me. I met my partner 30 years ago this year at the very first Pride Scotland. A friend manoeuvred it so we were holding up either end of the banner for the university’s LGBT society. Our eyes met, our arms rapidly tired (those things are heavy), and that was the beginning of thirty years. There is a lesson to this folks: be careful what you get roped into when you’re campaigning.

To say that was a different world is an understatement. When you watch TV shows like It’s a Sin (which is set a few years earlier), you have to remember that Scotland was not London - in fact, nowhere else was London. When I arrived in Edinburgh, the gay bars had been closed by the Council. Fake licencing complaints were used to persecute a minority back into the closet. The gay scene had been swept away, and of course, had only previously barely been tolerated - homosexual ‘acts’ were only legalised in Scotland in 1980, 11 years later than England. The bars that were left were very different from the lively and wild scene of London or even Manchester. Leaving a bar meant the bouncer going out into the street to check both ways to see where the gangs were, and telling you ‘NOW!’ when they weren’t looking. From that moment on, you were on your own.

The lively and powerful AIDS activist scene in London didn’t exist either. This successfully drove queer lives back underground and made it tougher to organise. Don’t get me wrong: there were activists, and there was community care - but this was a highly conservative society with a deeply puritanical hatred of LGBT people. Pushing against that in an atmosphere of the shame and the silence of the closet make that much harder. Those bars, clubs, and cafes that managed to stil flourish in major cities allowed a kind of love and community power to be mobilised more explicitly. What remained was not exactly undergound, but quiet, cowed, closeted. As we know in our charities - communities need public social spaces to thrive. Scotsaid and others did great work, and the heath authority did vital stuff. But whereas AIDS in some ways led to the flourishing of queer activism and community in urban centres like London, New York, and so on, in a place like Edinburgh it was much harder. What did happen is all the more impressive for it.

When I arrived in Edinburgh, knowing it was centre of theatre and arts, I expected a thriving queer scene like I’d seen on ‘Out on Tuesday’ the LGBT TV programme (which was so boring I would have got married to a woman just to never have to watch it again). Instead I found a place decimated by AIDS and anti-queer violence, enlivened once a year by three weeks of festival. Believe me, it was better than where I’d come from. But there was no question that this was a dark place and a dark time. But early stirrings in 1994 eventually led to Pride Scotland in 1995.

When the first march happened, it was still actually scary. I remember the weird mixture of anxiety and excitement. We truly had no idea what would happen. Fundamentalists handed out 'Chick tracts’ about hell and paedophiles; the support of the police was not a given; religious groups announced on the news that they were praying for rain to wash away the parade, and in the place of the gawking straight folks hanging around the edges, were shadowy gangs waiting to find those of us separated from the pack. I’m not making this up.

We were all excited and anxious. But we were also together. Our friend who later died of AIDS at the age of 18 a year later (yes, people still died of AIDS in 1994 FFS) had his first and only Pride. It was a day of milestones. That day, I met some of the first gay friends I had met since turning up to university. My tribe had always been there, but there was previously just no way to know it. The sense of there being a real place, a real community, and that we were real people - and a movement - was life changing. After that moment, Edinburgh seemed to come out of the closet. New bars opened. Groups felt more possible. It really did feel like we had claimed a bit of space. I guess it was… pride. I imagine there’s something of that feeling in Budapest last weekend. I hope so.

What people forget about ‘pride’ is where the idea came from and why that word matters. I heard a young Black straight couple in Catford talking about why gay people felt they were better than everyone and were ‘proud’ of being gay, when they weren’t saying they were proud of being straight.

First of all, I so wanted to tell them that the idea was drawn from US Black culture - ‘sing it loud, I’m Black, I’m proud’, as the chant went. Black people were made to feel second class, aware of their own marked, lesser status - especially in a society where apartheid was still an officially sanctioned reality until 1964. Taking back Blackness and making it a matter of beauty and celebration was a refusal of the dominant ideology of Jim Crow America: separate but not equal.

As for LGBT people: if you’re queer, you grow up ashamed. You know that every relationship in your life is at risk, and indeed, in the case of romantic ones, is a risk in itself. That your family and community could reject you if they knew this terrible secret. As you become aware of your sexuality, you know it is wrong and shameful; it affects how you learn about yourself in the world. There is a book called ‘The Velvet Rage’ which explores this,1 and I remember Will Young talking about it movingly. It is a very queer experience to grow up with this sense of a deep secret that if it is revealed could kill you, quite literally, then and now in many parts of the world. So ‘pride’ is a refusal of shame. It’s also a refusal of enforced secrecy, which is a fundamental way of keeping us excluded. By refusing to stay closeted, we forced society to accept us. We were not a dirty secret. As the Queer Nation chant went, ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it. We’re here, we’re queer., we’re fabulous.’

Do we still need Pride in the UK?

As for Pride today, if we ever imagine it’s no longer necessary, let’s bear this in mind.

• In England & Wales, there were 24,102 hate crimes based on sexual orientation in the year to March 2023.

• There were an additional 4,732 transgender hate crime incidents

• Gay and bisexual men remain among the most frequent targets of anti-LGBT hate crimes.

• LGBT people still feel pressured to be ‘less gay’ in work environments because they feel it will count against them

• Three in ten LGBT people (29%) avoid certain streets because they don’t feel safe. For trans people, it’s 44%.

• 44% of LGBTQ people say they don’t feel comfortable holding their partner’s hand in public.

Over the last few months, the behaviour of the EHRC over trans people and their right to use bathrooms has verged on outright warfare on trans people. Their approach had already been called out by the ILGA (International Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association) in 2024, as had the vile hatemongering of the Tory Government. The ILGA also noted that the ‘UN Independent Expert on SOGI (IE SOGI) expressed deep concern about the growing toxic and hostile environment that LGBT and particularly trans people face in the UK, attributing much of the hate to politicians and the media.’ We’re still a target for hatred - and that includes from the state, even in a supposedly liberal democracy in the UK.

Don’t forget about the old folks

Something we need to remember is that a lot of LGBT people, those over 50 especially, are estranged from our biological families. We don’t have kids we can rely on later in life. The very idea of adopting kids was unthinkable until much later than people imagine (even if we wanted to). Remember this also means no grandkids or great grandkids of our own. I know this seems obvious, but people often have multiple, not just one generation, of kids they can rely on. Or indeed, for many of us, prejudice and suspicion has long cut us off from other people’s kids. As recently as 2008 I remember being watched very closely around a teenage male relative at, would you believe, my father’s funeral. Those accepting families? Those adopted kids? Not really for us.

Many of us found ourselves ostracised, or had to remove ourselves, from families and communities and friendships that wouldn’t accept us. Indeed, often situations were overtly abusive. Our loved ones were our chief persecutors. In the US, there’s a growing body of research showing what should be blindingly obvious - that older LGBTQ people are finding themselves much lonelier and less connected than non-LGBTQ people. This is not by choice. This is because of structural factors, and discrimination over the course of generations. Much as I’m about to sing the praises of queer community in history, it can be far over-egged. We don’t all live on Barbary Lane - many of us, especially once we’re too old for what remains of the ‘scene’ become very isolated even from our ‘found families’, if we were lucky enough ever to find them.

Sadly, last year, Opening Doors, the only UK charity dedicated to supporting LGBTQ older people, closed down due to lack of funding, despite many efforts to save it. Some of the trusts and foundations who had previously supported it even pulled their funding once they realised that it was in trouble. New funds being put into LGBT youth work are to absolutely be welcomed - but older LGBTQ people have a lifetime of prejudice, trauma, and exclusion to deal with. Housing, care, and health are all sectors vastly impacted by anti-queer prejudice.

And finally, something to bear in mind: I’ve talked about this with Linkedin pal Kevin Taylor-McKnight, as indeed I have with many other LGBTQ friends. Much as things get better, we’re all the product of our past and our experiences. It’s no bed of roses being LGBTQ now - but it’s even more of an issue for those of us who still carry around in our heads and hearts a world when it was so much worse.

Right: on to the main event.

Queering Civil Society

Last week, I looked at why ‘charity’ has become something of a dirty word. What I came to in the end was that we’ve turned charity into an industry and not an ethic. An ethic is a moral practice. If we see charity as an ethic, it comes to take in much beyond a specific industry. It goes far beyond being a legal vehicle or a collection of organisations. It becomes a way of life and a way of human beings relating to each other.

Some see this as a religious thing - faith, hope and charity. But myself, I see it as a Foucault thing. I see it as what he called a ‘practice of freedom’. Practices of freedom - the development of an ‘ethic’ as Foucault sees it - are based on reflection. And they are based on living and discovering a moral and ethical code through that practice. He takes it away from rigid moral codes given to us by, say, certain religious texts, but towards us all learning and doing - together - what we believe is right. This is not individual, it is social. For Foucault in his life, this was done through community: his burgeoning connections to the San Francisco gay scene, and the gay liberation movement. He saw queer people in the seventies starting to build their own notion of how to love and live together, and what mattered to them. Found families, new ways of doing relationships, love beyond the boundaries of a nuclear hetero family, and new ways of having fun (whatever anybody thought) were all to play for.

When AIDS decimated the gay community, and took Foucault, those practices of freedom were key to our survival.

Our families abandoned us. Society shunned us and some called for us to be sent into quarantine and death camps. Many claimed that our deaths were punishment for daring to love. You can imagine how we might want to create our own ethic and practice of freedom given the moralities aimed at us. We chose community. We chose love. We chose solidarity and kindness in death and life. We also chose not to just be quiet. As radical democratic activist and organising group ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) came to teach us: Silence = Death.2

Our informal groupings became those kinds of radical democratic organisations, as well as rag tag groups who acted both in solidarity and on their own account. We centralised when we needed to, and did our own thing when it made sense.

We developed buddying. We shared lifesaving drugs however we could. Lesbians, feminists, trans people, fought for us, with us, and alongside us. (In case you don’t know, lesbians were first in line helping their gay brothers when AIDS hit. That’s why the ‘L’ comes first in LGBT. Not just because we’re scared of them and they’re handy with a pool cue.) In US urban centres at least, Black, Latinx and racially minoritised groups, queer and non-queer fought with us, and we fought for them. AIDS also ravaged their communities and allowed them to be cast aside by white Christian America. Sex workers and drug users too. These were grand coalitions of the marginalised: people who knew what it was like to be excluded, and were therefore radically inclusive, as they discovered what they shared, and built social practices around it.

We fought together to change the world, and we did. We harnessed the power of love and care and charity. Eventually we changed the world so much that some of us - but sadly nowhere near all - began to be accepted. We fought to gain the right to be loved and cared for not just by society as a whole, but by our own families and wider communities. These practices of love, care, and freedom set us free and created a new kind of world. That changed very specific legislations. We married if we chose to. We adopted if we wanted to. We could be ourselves. We joined with others in struggles to make the world better for all of us.

It wasn’t all a bed of roses

I don’t want to claim perfection. This is, for me, a personal foundational myth of my involvement in any kind of politics, campaigning, and charity. But I’ve studied enough about this over the years to know the faultlines here: queer organising and activism from communities rapidly hardened into much needed institutions which brought their own problems. Fundraising sometimes seemed to become an end in itself. Some argued that the growth of some of the largest LGBT AIDS charities actually undermined community participation by being turned into ‘giving factories’.

Elite capture was more apparent in the AIDS charity ‘industry’ than perhaps any other domain I’ve seen. There were many complaints that white gay men stole all the thunder of other affected groups - a very complex question I don’t have time for here. But ACT-UP in particular, for all its constant fissiparous, radically democratic and fragile allegiances, did an incredible job of bringing together activists from across the spectrum. And part of the problem is that the highly visible A-list Hollywood-style AIDS fundraising took all the media, despite the reality that it was everyday queer people of all stripes (include the majority of gay men) who forged incredibly cross-cutting alliances.

On the other side of things, ACT UP staged die-ins in front of the White House and displayed the body of a dead activist. It wasn’t all Elizabeth Taylor on the red carpet. And as time went on, we needed the schmoozy Ian McKellens as well as the shouty Peter Tatchells. We needed the radical as well as the more incremental types of campaigning; and the local and community-based care, alongside the nationalised, state-driven.

Stonewall, National AIDS Trust, Terrence Higgins Trust, all hail from this period and did amazing work. As institutions developed, and charities and trusts became (then-) solid and well-funded fixtures, this brought with it the danger of tamping down the radical fire of activism. As the public sector took on some of the work, or contracted it back out to civil society, the ideological drivers of mainstream society were taken on by many as the price for funding.3 In fundraising from the public, there were questions about whether to fund the ‘deserving’ or the ‘undeserving’. I still remember, even in the mid- 2000s, a local authority policy director telling me we should use the AIDS grant for ‘innocent’ victims like children. That was why our own fundraising was so vital. Things like the Red Hot AIDS charity harnessed the entertainment industry, both for money, but also importantly, for the power of the media to change minds.4

So there are many possible critiques, and nothing is perfect. Burying any of these criticisms is unhelpful, but so is focusing only on failures. All of these issues mirror the kinds of issues we find in civil society now: building coalitions; where our money comes from and how that affects what we do; the power of foundations and their accountability; some being left out by the changing whims of society’s generosity, and the shifting priorities of the state; the relationships between community activism and organising and formal charitable institutions; the relationships between activism, campaigning and care. And indeed, how much we want civil society to take on, and how much the state should take on. This question is central, not least given the delays in access to AIDS treatments in the UK, and ongoing horrific inequality of access to healthcare in the US. Nothing is simple. Everything is difficult. Everything is a negotiation.

For the future

We all learn about ourselves and our picture of the world we want to see through foundational myths, individual and social, and this is mine. It’s one I wished I had been a more direct part of than I was able to, and perhaps that’s partly why I now have civil society as my focus in work, and in writing. It’s not entirely unintentional that I presented this with some breathless story time awe - I want you to feel how I feel. I hope you have your own myth.

Much as I understand that some of my pictures of that time and movement are nostalgic, they are also utopian and very much future-focused. The only thing still to play for is tomorrow. Nothing is final, and fixes aren’t enough. We need to stay inspired and fight for that future we all deserve.

If you look at the start of this story and trace it to where we are now, I think you can see some sense of what might be possible in many other things. When my partner and I stood on Prince’s Street in 1995 and asked each other (in the context of a current news story) ‘Do you think they will ever equalise the age of consent?’, another friend said, ‘Yes, of course. And we’ll be able to get married. And we’re going to adopt children too.’ We thought he was out of his gay old gourd. But he was right, we were wrong. I know these advances have not benefited all equally, but that is a reason to continue to be inspired by them, not to discount them.

And it is with no small amount of anxiety that I note how easily these things can be taken away from all of us.

A real civil society

So, what I wanted to show, developing on from last week’s post, is a picture of a triumphant, real-world civil society. Organising and fighting together. Loving and caring for each other. Getting voices right there into the wider democratic debate, by whatever means necessary, and demanding change in society. Playing together and having fun. All of this across boundaries and against toxic mainstream ideologies. I think this can help us clarify and expand our definition of the work we do in the ‘charity’ sector - and civil society as a whole.

None of it is easy, and there are countless faultines as we go, but we need an ethic of care and love, and a drive towards freedom. With that must come a radical passion, and a fiery fury that refuses to rest at piecemeal change. As ACT-UP taught us, a bit of rage can be very powerful.

‘The Ballad of Tommy and Joey….’ by Carter Vail

Trusts cannot be trusted

Speaking of rage:

“After 16 years, last week the Aberdeen Group plc terminated its Financial Fairness Trust without notice and sacked the CEO, Mubin Haq, the chair David Norgrove and all the trustees. The company says it plans to move in a different direction.”

Aberdeen Group has just abruptly shut down its Financial Fairness Trust, cutting off the funding it gave for social inequality research and dismissing its board without notice. Aberdeen Group plc (formerly known as ‘abrdn plc’) is a UK‑based investment and asset‑management company headquartered in Edinburgh. Listed on the London Stock Exchange and part of the FTSE 250, it manages around £511 billion in assets (as of 2024) and serves a wide range of clients, from retail investors via Interactive Investor, to financial advisers and institutional investors, offering investment funds, wealth management, and financial-planning solutions.

Sometimes there has been a naive belief that this was a sign that big finance could support progressive change.5 This was especially held up as an example because they tended to support progressive research with a special focus on financial inequality. But…. guess what.

Again, the move reveals how quickly corporate commitments evaporate under pressure or the whims of the controllers - especially with changing tides from across the Atlantic which are enabling and encouraging the dropping of ‘do-gooding’ signals. As Toynbee argues, this is a stark reminder that capitalism is never a reliable ally in tackling injustice.

This is what it’s important to remember: they were always only signals.

After a good discussion with someone this week about class in the charity sector, in advance of a forthcoming podcast on the subject, this is pretty much a slam dunk example.

The problem is, talking about ‘inequality’ in our society treats it like some naturally occurring disease, as opposed to a system, a structure and an active political regime. That’s why we need to call it what is is - capitalism. And class. So while they were happy to fund work on inequality, what got it in the end was something much more fundamental, which is what leads to that inequality: the power of the ruling classes, and their absolute control of wealth and resources.

Remember: trusts cannot be trusted. This shows where the power is, however much lovely data we get on a snazzy website, or special groups are set up to promote their work. As delightful as some of the people may be who run them, many of the people and organisations who fund some of these trusts are among the scummiest human beings on the planet. Those who own the resources are always in charge. Don’t be drawn in.

I loved what Mike Zywina said on LinkedIn, referring to Abrdn’s naming practices: ‘fck cptlsm’.

In two weeks…

Join us again for Part two of Beyond Charity….

And finally…

If you want cheering up, follow Zohran Mamdani on Instagram.

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Hello, and welcome to this week’s Barely Civil Society, where we’re trying to pull our heads out of funding and misery and think about what the point of this all is.

The funny personal bit

I’m trying very hard to be funny this week, but I have a bad cold, which is, irritatingly, not COVID. This means I lose, because my partner had COVID a couple of weeks ago, still has the cough, and I was hoping to get him back for the sleep deprivation. I’ll find a way.

Meanwhile, we’re approaching World War III, which is nice, and honestly I can’t think of what to say about that except that yesterday an instagram post was telling me to hoard iodine tablets and water. If I wanted a return to the eighties, I would have gone for Findus Crispy Pancakes and Tom Baker Doctor Who. Instead we get the threat of nuclear armageddon, and I have literally seen white dog shit again recently. What’s that about?

Is ‘charity’ a dirty word?

Is charity now a dirty word? This small charity week, we ask why everybody is so desperate to stop saying it.

People increasingly don’t like the calling things ‘charities’ – even for people who spend their days running and supporting them. What would be better? ‘For impact organisations’? ‘Philanthropy’? ‘Social enterprise’ or ‘social business’? Anything but ‘charities.’

And this leads in to other questions about what we mean by this term. I asked people recently whether they really wanted our charities to cease to exist - a fashionable statement these days. And aren’t there too many of those awful grubby little things always pestering funders and the state for handouts?

As several people said, it comes down to definitions. But the point for me is not to find the ‘correct’ definition. Yes, it partly depends on whether we’re talking about an abstract or concrete noun. Or about institutions, or practices. We’ll get to that. But over the course of this piece, I want to contest and explore some of those definitions and concepts, and the names some would prefer to replace the that bad word with. Because it very much depends on our own principles, ideology, and place in the power structure.

If you’re looking here for a policy debate on legal structure, you will be disappointed. Of course, charity is also a legal structure, and yes, it’s a messy one – from CICs to giant government contractors, it covers a huge range of organisations. But I’m not here to talk legal form. I’m talking about charity as an ethic – and that’s something far more important.

Over the next three issues, I want to do something ambitious: I want to suggest a recentring vision of what charity is at its core – and to suggest why the concept could be more powerful than ever, and more necessary.

Left and right: everybody hates ‘charity’

So, nobody wants to be called a charity. It’s seen as degraded and degrading. As powerfully stinky and unsexy. As déclassé, démodé, and eminently defundable. And let’s be clear - there has been a long campaign from both ends of the political spectrum to runs down the word and associated practices. The left don’t like it because they see it as the antithesis of people sharing in a society on equal terms - and they (rightly I think) distrust its focus on voluntarism as the opposite of socialism.1 And the right don’t like it because they associate it with ‘handouts’- that can look worryingly like a precursor to tax.

Certainly, Marxists of various stripes are right that ‘charity’ as a practice is no substitute for socialism. But I also don’t think it’s helpful for us to believe that we are simply doing the capitalist devil’s work by doing what we do - at least, in terms of the everyday work that charity workers do.

Replace charity with ‘philanthropy’?

Philanthropists much prefer the term ‘philanthropy’. Some ‘philanthropy’ advocates tell us ‘charity’ is a bad word because ‘charity’ implies reliance and lack of dignity. This take is especially popular in centre-right and neo-liberal discourse, but it does appear in left wing discourse too. But if it does mean that, it’s because the economic right have created that myth themselves. That argument has then been incredibly influential, and the ideological switcheroo of it is remarkable: - ‘I don’t want to share because it degrades you.’ Hmmmm. The thing is, one suspects that those on the right only like the idea of self-reliance because they so dislike social responsibility. They just don’t want to be relied on - for taxes for example. Their desire to develop self-reliance in others is not out of some remarkable altruism of a higher or more effective version - it’s often just old-fashioned selfishness.

So many of this view dream of a world of individuals who have no responsibilites to each other and never need each other. And most importantly of all, never need them. The myth of the rugged individual for whom there is eventually no such thing as society is the goal that lurks underneath this. For many in the ‘philanthropy’ space who advocate ‘teaching a man to fish,’ the expressed goal is often to end the need for ‘charity’ - but they fantasise about a world where nobody needs anybody. And if anybody still does, post-’intervention’ - they only have themselves to blame.

Philanthropy, then, dislikes giving ‘handouts’, and purports to retain people’s dignity by giving in a smarter way – usually by some kind of economic stimulus/ teach-man-fish-ism. ‘Philanthropy’ as a word is dignified and future-focused, while ‘charity’ is undignified, temporary, and ill-considered.

But look: the idea that ‘charity’ as it is practiced in most small charities simply gives silvery nothings to the poor does not describe what happens. Apart from food banks and those who give individual grants, very few people do this in ‘charity’ as it is practiced now. Again, this is a common objection from Marxists - but charity as soup kitchens or food banks describes a vanishingly small part of the work civil society and charities do in the modern world. Often, I think criticisms of charities as alsmgiving are railing against, at least until 15 years ago, a barely existing model. It’s also one which those on the frontlines who do continue it would be only too delighted to end. They don’t only because the alternative is letting people starve.

Underpinning this – whether people realise it as they repeat it or not - was another Andrew Carnegie-era myth designed to centre ‘philanthropy’ as something above and beyond the concerns and ken of mere mortals, where a better class of men decides how to ‘fix’ the poor once and for all. That ‘philanthropy’ is better than charity because it is properly thought out - with no handouts. You can’t trust poor people with money – if you could, they wouldn’t be poor.

We need to think about whose interests these renamings serve. Reconceptualising ‘charity’ as ‘philanthropy’ often just serves to reinforce the power of wealth and the ruling class. You’ll notice that nobody who runs an actual charity calls what they do ‘philanthropy.’ Even in the day-to-day world of ‘the sector’, it’s used as an industrial trademark for giving, not receiving – which means it is always used to describe actions that can only be undertaken by those who have, or manage, wealth, privilege and power. Even if people working in philanthropy don’t share these values, they still end up enforcing them. Like managers in a factory – you might not own the factory, but you’re still keeping the system running.

‘For impact’ organisations? Non-profit? Mission-led?

Another recent development is the desire to change the naming of charities to ‘for impact organisations’. This term also speaks about a vision of what the work is, and who should control it. It sounds technological and technocratic. It makes things sound like a science. It makes it sound like something best managed and designed and delivered by think tanks and corporate consultants.

It also puts all the emphasis on matters of measurement - for ‘impact’ and outcome which can be measured by people who’ve got a measurement framework (and no doubt a bridge) to sell you. Of course in the US, organisations have been designated as ‘non-profits’ - that does have the issue that it doesn’t describe what they ARE for. But swapping that with ‘for impact’ is no less opaque. What impact? Facebook has impact. Twitter has impact. Mussolini had impact. Most companies these days say they want to change the world. That’s a reason ‘mission-led organisations’ doesn’t work either. Every business has a mission, or at least it says it does. With all of these things, what we are really avoiding is talking about what we actually do. And I do find it interesting more broadly in ‘third sector’ discourse we spend almost no time talking about the actual work we do. Just endless talk about funding and measuring it and managing it.

So in this case, the power grab is by the ‘intellectual’ elite and the policy wonks. Their interests are largely in the technologies of state, and the power that comes from aligning themselves (and their work, and business of course) with Government, or larger, more programmatic and mass-scale approaches to ‘philanthropy.’ ‘For Impact’ claims ‘charity’ for technocracy – a different elite. This aligns well with the discourses of government and academia who see charities as delivery agents to plug gaps in the system they have designed to fail – and fund them to manage and analyse that. It also constantly leads to the denigration of work that improves day to day lives, especially of working class people: for example, bingo, knitting, youth clubs (unless it’s ‘preventing crime’ or ‘increasing employment), or kids doing drama together. ‘For impact’ redraws the lines of charity and what we can support, to focus solely on fixing the same issues that the state should fix. That in itself then transfers responsibility.

What about enterprise?

What about social enterprises? Or ‘social businesses’? [Oh, hey maybe we should all become B-corps! You know what the B stands for, right?] These are just rebrandings. Social enterprise in particular was an earlier way to try and shake off the notion that charity was sleepy, lazy, lacking dynamism, and unhelpfully inimical to the herculean efforts of the ‘entrepreneur’ – a near magical figure by the mid 2000s who could save the world better than any do-gooder. This was particularly powerful ideologically, because, much like the Carnegie-era philanthropy, it put the power to make decisions and solve problems in society in the hands of capitalism.

This era was particularly dominated in theory by the growth of Silicon Valley, and a rapidly changing economy where ‘start-ups’ and angel investors were changing everything and making significant changes to technology and society - many of them not great, but certainly profitable, as well as deeply destablising.

Often this was social enterprise as just ‘enterprise’ with a social branding – such as when NHS contracts were hived off at the start of the ConDem Government to ‘social enterprise’ CICs, or DWP contracts given to ‘social businesses’ like A4E (a for-profit company from the outset until its rapid demise because, oopsy, no profit). Others were clearly charities who wanted to rebrand and seem ‘up for it’ as my friend called it, rolling her eyes. They wanted to seem like they had the dynamism and supposedly magical touch of the new entrepreneurial class.

I will never forget my two weeks in the Westminster ‘Impact Hub’ where I briefly based the social enterprise I set up for a homelessness charity. Red trousers everywhere. Bluetooth headsets. People called Jonty, Ivo and Ophelia. They wanted to brand themselves with the virtue of social change and the dynamism of the entrepreneurial elite. Others were just charities desperately trying to get with the spirit of the times – a lot of young Black folks who wanted to make a change in their community, but didn’t want to be tarnished with the retrograde (and financially damaging) label of charity.

In the end, some of it was about legal form, business model, or even impact. But much of it was about signalling – and realigning charity with the mood music of silicon valley-era late capitalism

Should charities want to stop existing?

There’s a growing tendency for people in charities to rather angelically claim they want a world where their charity no longer needs to exist. I get that for some charities – but I worry about this being broadened out to all. It seems to me that this only works if you reduce charity to a very specific, patronising definition related to almsgiving. Or indeed, to ‘fixing’ problems.

One particular way of looking at this is to see charities as sticking plasters after state failure.But if we removed all state failure, would we really no longer want charity? Do we imagine a world without ‘need’? That starts to sound a lot again like part of the ‘philanthropy’ dream – that a clever enough programme will eradicate all human dependency.

Wants or needs?

Some people reframe it as saying charities should only meet ‘wants’, not ‘needs’. But that assumes a very binary view – that need is only food, shelter and clothing. What about culture? Relationships? Ways to learn how to love each other? Those are needs too – or at least, they matter. Human connection isn’t a luxury.

There’s a deeper ideological drive here. ‘Philanthropy’ and government both often insist that interventions follow a neat logic chain: input, resources, output. You fix something, then move on. I’ve seen this in regeneration work – stick in some money, fund a coordinator for two years, then it’s ‘done’. Resources are pulled, because supposedly there’s nothing more to do. Fixed! Except of course, it doesn’t work like that. Regeneration has to be constant. The same goes for people: six weeks of talking therapy and your depression is ‘cured’ according to the Warwick Edinburgh scale. Magic.

If you just see charity as a response to state failure, then the logic becomes: fix the state, and you won’t need charity. But that assumes all social problems are systems problems, and all systems problems can be ‘solved’. Once you believe that, you’re soon thinking of humanity as something to be fixed – efficiently, permanently – through the right programme or intervention. All you need is an ‘exit strategy'.

The thing is, continuity or ongoing nurture is unfashionable because it looks like dependence. That means cost. But charity, done well, encourages us to depend on each other. Yes, I want people to have more self-determination – but that’s not the same as ‘independence’. We live in a society. Charity, for me, is not a sticking plaster. It’s glue. It’s what holds us together.

Beyond ‘charities,’ toward ‘charity’

I’ve given you my sense of the history, power, and ideology that sits behind the discourse about namings. But I want us to raise our eyes even further above the technocratic, industrial and legal for a moment. When we’re arguing about whether ‘charity’ should exist or not – and whether we like the word – we are really arguing about what picture of the world we want, and the role human beings should take in it.

I think one of the key problems we find is that we think far too much about ‘charity’ as an industry, and a collection of institutions, and not an ethic. An ethic is a moral practice – a way of living and being in the world. If we see charity as an ethic, it comes to take in much beyond a specific industry. It goes far beyond being a legal vehicle or a collection of organisations. It becomes a way of life and a way of human beings relating to each other. My thinking here is influenced by French philosopher, historian and social critic, Michel Foucault.

The problem is that, instead, we are constantly being told to see charity as some kind of fixed institution – an organisation, a legal model, a particular act of ‘almsgiving’, or a historically specific model of social activity. What I want to move towards instead is seeing charity as an ethic – it was meant to be ‘caritas’ after all. My feeling is that the ‘ethic’ of charity in its various forms has a running thread throughout it – and one which people have often tried to capture for their own interests, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes simply because of the shape of thinking in the times. This has been pushed by those who want to fix, those who want ‘impact,’ those who want to control labour relations, or those who want to deny a socialised state. I worry how easily we have come to believe those spurious definitions and discourses in the ‘sector’ we have to inhabit.

Instead, I want to return us the idea that the ethic of charity - even as it stands, as an industry, as a practice, when done ‘right’ - is one of mutual aid, universal love, and a caring society. As well, as importantly, a world not driven by profit. A world where family is something we create, not just something we are born in. A move beyond scarcity to abundance, and from greed and inequality to fairness and equity. The institutions we put in place should be designed to achieve it. But they are not ‘charity’ itself.

Likewise, if we move away from a focus on charity as ‘almsgiving’ or even the ‘gift’, to charity as care - caritas - and love for others, there is no reason it can’t be continuous with a more fundamental change to a democratic socialism with all of the state support that should entail. Much as there were early concerns among UK charities about whether they should continue to exist after the rise of the welfare state, very soon they realised that not having to feed people or tend the wounded meant they had time to help people connect, thrive and flourish as humans. That, indeed, was something the state itself could not do very well at all.2

It seems to me that state welfare support has to sit alongside civil society and community/ ‘charity’ work as we recognise them now, in order for a truly democratic, communitarian, and fulfilling socialism to exist. As Emma Goldman probably didn’t actually say, ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.’ And I will see socialism as failing to reach its full promise if there aren’t community centres and lots of bunting.

The ethic of charity that I sketch here is no doubt something that requires socialism to be able to truly come to fruition. And I hope that wherever this kind of ethic appears in our deeply imperfect but vital everyday practices, this could be seen as sort of ghost from the future - of the kind of society we want to see.

In particular, I want to suggest that, rather than a dangerous diversion from economic social justice, we see it as a potential prefiguration of a kind of democratic, decentred, socialism that puts flourishing and abundance at its heart.

The charity ‘sector’ is indeed a poor substitute for socialism - but in many ways, I think we are its outriders.

Next week

In Foucault’s life, developing and discovering an ethic was done through community: his burgeoning connections to the San Francisco gay scene, and the gay liberation movement. He saw queer people in the seventies starting to build their own notion of how to live and love together, and what mattered to them. When AIDS decimated the gay community, and sadly took Foucault, those practices of freedom (as Simon Watney called them in his collected works) were key to our survival. Universal love and care developed into real organisations and practices and institutions that could make the ethic a reality.

So next week, in part two for London’s Pride, I’m going to talk about some ways of seeing that ethic in action. I’m going to look at ‘queering’ charity as a way of thinking about what the future could look like. This means focusing on some queer cultural ideas and history, which, for me at least, offer a look into a future of what an ethic of charity could be.

Bonus bits

Barely Civil Society is trying to create deeper debate in the UK charity sector.

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The not remotely funny personal bit

I’ve been weirdly superstitious and anxious about posting this today (Friday 13th) so fingers crossed this isn’t the day a philanthropist takes out a hit on me.

So I took a break from biweekly blogging while I went off to Gdansk. You may have seen my holiday snaps on LinkedIn. Yes, I know, why am I posting holiday snaps on LinkedIn?

And indeed why am I posting them here? And why on earth did I go to Gdansk?

Well, first, weird reason: in about 2000 I found a book in a charity shop in Brighton about Gdansk. It just looked magical and unexpected. At the time I was actually writing about the fall of communism, Gorbachev, and the rise of Putin and new authoritarians so it went on the back burner - but stayed on the list. We got round to it 25 years later.

Here comes the politics

But it goes beyond that. I’ve always liked travelling in Central and Eastern Europe. (For one thing, I love it when people actually throw the food at you in a cafe.) They’re fascinating because they’re a huge reminder of the volatility of history and how quickly things can change absolutely. It’s a reminder that whole political systems can stand and fall in a matter of a generation - twice. After the fall of the Wall we were all told of Fukuyama’s famous ‘End of History’. But that always seemed very odd: wasn’t the evidence right there in front of us of how quickly and absolutely things could change? If the wall could fall, that was always a sign that it could go up again.

That turbulent history is also of course a warning to all of us of what is never as far away as we think. As I looked at the World War II museum with its examination of the Hitler cult, posters of Mussolini, and indeed, evidence of the day to day dehumanisation of various groups (not just the holocaust: the sheer breadth of war atrocities is something we rarely discuss now), the parallels with changes in our own society were deeply disturbing.

For a Brit, looking at a truly world war - not the story of plucky little Blighty against the Hun, as if it started with the invasion of Poland - the idea of a whole world wracked by war, the slow pollution of authoritarianism, and the rise of imperial ambitions after a brief respite, was pretty sobering. Yes, we know these things and chatter about them in the Guardian. But we also sort of don’t. One thing I find remarkable is people’s unwillingness to consider the real possibility of potential military attacks directly on the UK - not to mention the cyberattacks, long since begun.

But there is hope in the Solidarity museum, whih commemorates the downfall of Soviet authoritarianism, and the tremendous mobilisation of the population to a single goal. Prior, sadly, to its replacement by hyper-capitalism and rampant inequality. As I left, the country elected another right-wing populist thug.

If nothing else, it’s all a reminder of how much can change in the span of, for example, my own lifetime. If this makes us fearful - and it should - it should also remind us that history is always to play for. Things can change. And we make that history - albeit not in ‘conditions of our own choosing’ as a certain beardy dude once said.

Growing philanthropy is a sign of societal failure

I had to take a deep, rather shaky breath when Civil Society published this story this week. In fact, I had already prepared a LinkedIn post warning that philanthropy infrastucture bodies were about to do a data-backed charm offensive. But here it was:

Government no longer largest source of grant income to charity sector, data reveals

Charitable foundations and donor-advised funds gave more in grants to charities than the government and National Lottery’s distributors for the first time last year, according to new data.

Estimated figures released today by 360Giving’s UKGrantmaking platform show that funding from trusts and foundations increased by 12% year-on-year to £8.2bn in 2023-24.1 (Civil Society)

So, lots of celebrating the increase in trust and foundation giving. A sign of growing generosity and increased collaboration. 360 Giving’s data is a key enabler of more 'impactful' giving. And philanthropy's growth is a reassuring development during a time of pressure on the sector.

Excuse me for a moment.

Polite round of applause for trust and foundations

Before I go any further, a polite round of applause for 360 Giving - fantastic site, can’t believe how technically impressive it is. And also a little clap for trusts and foundations. They do good work. Many of the professionalised ones are full of right-thinking people who want to help. They are doing so in a failing system. They are trying to help, and do.

Trusts and foundations have faced unusually public criticism this year, much of it from freelancers who, untethered to institutions, have been candid about failings in the sector. But in response, we’re seeing a wave of reputation management - but the narrative being pushed is a bit of a side-step. No one said that foundation funding had declined; what people have raised is the poor handling of funding shifts and the resulting disruption. Rather than engage with these critiques, some are presenting its growth alone as proof of success.2

But my concern is broader. I’m worried about how this may contribute to the narratives of generous philanthropy which are being used for political purposes.

Back to the news

Looking at that news again: do you find this reassuring? What does this tell us about the decline in state responsibility? What does it tell us about the significant falls in individual giving precipitated by the cost of living crisis, increasing inequality and inflation? Do we want to be America? Do you want to crowdfund your liver transplant?

What worries me is not really the giving: nobody wants to turn down money in this climate. What worries me is the story this will be used to tell. In reality, the details are complex: contract income from Governments is no doubt a different story . But I’m quite sure the happy narrative is being pushed to the Telegraph as we speak.

In a world where the voluntary sector was voluntary, I would see this as par for the course and perfectly okay (although I would still ask how that wealth had been amassed and how it was in the control of so few people). But the voluntary sector is not voluntary - much of it’s essentially coerced into action by the failings of our social welfare system and the gradual and ever increasing inequality caused by the fiscal system we have deliberately chosen since the 1980s. While the news can be touted as a triumph for philanthropy, we can also see this as an example of distraction from the deep inequality in our society. The cheerleaders of the system - culturally, not consciously for most - prop this up.

Overall, there is a constant danger in ‘philanthropy’ that we normalise and legitimise the rise of private power in our care for each other as something to be welcomed, or at least calmly absorbed. This is not progress: it’s a symptom of political and social retreat.

There have been several attempts recently to protect the legitimacy of philanthropy, and there is an ongoing push to demonstrate the great largesse of the wealthy. You may remember this from last issue:

But some of this is strategic. For example, much of the concern behyind the scenes is about avoiding regulation - you may have noticed (or not, given it’s extremely niche) there have recently been resurgences of questions about the introduction of minimum levels of giving from trusts, partly as a result of the discussions and concerns in the US over the use of foundations to hoard cash - or use it for purposes far less charitable than they first appear. As Cohen notes, there seems to be a rise in donor-advised funds - we might note, just as they come under scrutiny in the US for their often highly dubious status.3 Completely secretive, they are being widely used to funnel into ‘culture wars’ work - and no, not on the right side…. I’ve shown elsewhere trusts seeming to actively campaign against leaseholders’ rights, to preserve their charitable giving - but what else, and who else, does that protect and preserve?

You’ve also seen wider demands for wealth taxes across society. These kind of discussions are not as unconnected as they may seem - even if some of the biggest and oldest trusts and foundations are not connected directly to personal or private wealth any more: while those making the arguments may not directly connect them, they are part of the general debate and cultural discourse about the power of capital to use its wealth as it sees fit. They speak to the power of elites and class interests in our societies.

Our stories do not exist in isolation

Keir Starmer set out his stall on philanthropy and its role in saving us all before the election. Many, including me, were excited about him suddenly ‘listening’ to charities at the Pro-Bono Economics/ Lloyds Foundation summit. But the point is, he wasn’t just ‘listening’ to charities. He was wooing philanthropists. As I warned at the time, the danger was that philanthropy would yet again be used to subsidise - or enable - a shrinking state.

Let me remind you again of Iain Duncan’ Donuts’ Centre for Social (Victorian) Justice and their plans to ‘Supercharge philanthropy’, in a report published last year. The report featured a barnstorming foreword by 30 of the UK’s ‘top philanthropists’, with captains of industry and aristocracy telling us that they “stand ready to respond” to the challenges faced by the UK and to “propel the nation forward”. They harkened back to the proud history of “innovation being driven by philanthropic giving - from the great philanthropists of the Victorian age through to the present day”.

But the moment that the real driver was revealed was when they told us that ‘Philanthropy can do far more than the sum of its parts, taking risks and driving innovation in a way that taxpayers’ money cannot.’ This is breathtakingly unsubtle. At a time when we’re facing punitive cuts in the welfare state, gutting international development budgets, and have made substantial increases to taxation for working people (however indirect), it’s all the more important that such philanthropists make clear that they are only to happy to give voluntarily. All of our stories take place in the context of a wider ideological battle over how we fund the care our society needs.

So, well done to trusts for getting it out there. And again, congratulations on the data. But what it tells us - and what it may be used to say - is something to be treated with deep suspicion and a level of cynicism.

Acknowledgements

A big thank you to Liz Gadd for her LinkedIn post on the news story, and the ensuing comments which helped me think through the issues here. You’re exactly right: nobody is asking the right questions.

Bad systems do not mean bad people

As my recent biweekly arguments in the LinkedIn comments with someone I really respect keep emphasising, no part of my critique of philanthropy over the last few months has been about ‘bad people.’ (Nigel Farage is bad people. Oh and the philanthropy tech bros too - they are actual psychopaths. But, you know, a grants manager at, say, Esmee Fairbairn ain’t.) Systematic critiques of ideology just aren’t about that. The theoretical underpinnings of my arguments, for those interested, are Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, Mark Fisher, Althusser (unfashionable these days) and a lot of Frankfurt school - especially Marcuse. None of them argued that our society takes wrong turns because too many people are meanies, or there is a nefarious conspiracy to do over poor people. (But there are those too - and outright class war is becoming more obvious in politics…)

It’s a twofold thing: the first is that our society acts on the basis of our beliefs, shaped by ideology - the particular systems of right and wrong, common sense, unchallengeable truths, that we hold. We don’t come up with these ourselves - we’re given them. They’re not individual. They’re absolutely basic to how we see the world. Some of them are transmitted to us overtly - overt ideology (eg propaganda, religions etc) - and some covertly. When we say, ‘but of course everyone has to pull their own weight’, or ‘it’s better to teach a man to fish’, or ‘well they should have more money because they are cleverer or work harder’ maybe it’s overt, but more often it’s just covert. The shape of the world and how we see it has been shaped by all of the culture around us. Often that is shaped by economic systems of power.

Ability to shape those things and have them believed is one of the main sources of power for those who are in charge, economically or otherwise. And they will rigorously defend those ideas if you challenge. That’s why the ruling ideas are always those that support the ‘ruling class’ as Marx has it. It’s not brainwashing - that suggests we start with a brain that gets washed. Ideology really shapes our whole picture of the world. And you don’t need to be strapped to a chair. It’s in the stories you read, the things people say to you day to day in the street, the laws, practices and policies of everything around you. You’re ‘in’ it all the time. Louis Althusser talks about what he calls ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ - social institutions, laws, media, etc, that help keep us all in line. At the time the State was where it’s at - now the media, corporations, workplaces take a hugely more central role, and power is much more in non-state hands. But the point is, those ‘apparatuses’ help reinforced what we all believe and make sure we learn the right ways of thinking. Some overtly, and some very subtly. You might say philanthropy as a practice and an industry is a type of ISA - it’s a practice, an institution, that participates in public discourse, helps to shape and enforce laws spoken and unspoken, trains and selects its members, and influences the behaviour of society. One of its key ideological functions - throughout its history but especially since the industrial age - is to promulgate the idea that the wealthy are so generous that taking their cash or equalising our society is unnecessary. ISAs are institutions or technologies that tell the stories, and enforce or reinforce behaviours. You can see, therefore, why I’m so concerned about the narratives in the charity and philanthropy sector: stories are where ideology gets made and transmitted.

ISAs are pretty effective at circulating and policing ideas. But even better for the most powerful people in society is that usually we believe these things so deeply we will actually reinforce them on our own account. We repeat and circulate them. Tell each other the same stories. Teach them to our kids (or cats on my case). Laugh at people who question them or call them nutters or extremists. (Even when they’re just saying the stuff half of the people in the Guardian say….)

So how do we break out of this? Well, Antonio Gramsci argues that, yes, the ruling ideas are always trying to assert what he calls ‘cultural hegemony’ (dominant influence over our ideas); but things change. We’re able to challenge them in our society, because faultlines and cracks appear. The stories at certain points don’t make sense. They especially don’t make sense for those of us on the sharpest end of the ruling people’s power (although it is amazing how much people can tend not to see this - eg. Latino migrants voting for Trump.) No ideology is ever absolute because we’re a creative and chaotic species. Some of us will be noisy and unwilling to refuse to question. And events happen which force some groups in society to question some of the fundamentals: look at how quickly our ideas about work shifted during COVID. New ideas are produced. Slowly fractures and cracks show in dominant ideas and ideologies. There is always resistance in ideas - this is part of the ‘dialectic’ nature of our culture. In a way, ideas themselves, as hard as they are pushed, can’t help but produce their own faultlines and contradictions.

Some people will always find those cracks and stick a crowbar in them. others will be out there frantically dabbing with a tub of glue and a copy of the Torygraph under their arm.

You’ll tend to find that these dominant and recessive/ resistant ideologies fight it out over time. For example, in the US, the progressive ideas about immigration as a benefit to society, or the idea that they are a dangerous drain on society. We very clearly see people battling this out for dominance in the realm of ideas and through stories. At a certain point the battle for ideology stops being covert and becomes very overt. Some might say that is part of the trick to making change - that part of our job, if we want social change, is to try and find the faultlines and break them wide open. I think this needs to be done with the stories we tell. (Alan Sinfield, wrote about this.)

Making the covert overt - calling it out and showing the constructed nature of those pictures of the world, the assumptions and deep beliefs we have, is really important. That’s what I spend a lot of time doing here: explaining the assumption and ideas that are behind some of the shittier things in our sector. And how those ideas help those in charge - both within and without it.

How exactly you make that cultural change is a long, long story - and interestingly, Gramsci has been co-opted by the right wing and the MAGA crowd as a template for how to overthrow the ‘dominant’ ideas they don’t like. (Like migrants or trans people having the right to exist.) File this under ‘things I did not see coming’.

Alongside this, coming back to the sector, and the idea of whether the issue is bad people: one of the biggest issues you will tend to find is that the ruling ideas of the ruling classes tend to select people who will uphold them. This is what Owen Jones points out his ‘Establishment’ book: you only get into certain positions of authority as long as you have swallowed - or can swallow - the dominant stories. It doesn’t have to be 100%. And small, incremental changes can happen - that’s how we see positive developments, however slow and sad and piecemeal in trusts and ofoundations. But it’s very, very hard to get power within the hegemony and ‘establishment’ if you don’t share and circulate their ideas.

In most kinds of industry, everybody is just doing their job. Me too. I do see staff and trustees in the larger, more institutional foundations sometimes genuinely baffled by critiques of philanthropy: they will do this thing of listening to the critique with a faint smile, like a benevolent Aunt listening to a toddler tell them about Polemon, and then repeat the established story back to you VERY SLOWLY so you can understand. And then others see it very clearly. (There are a lot more philanthropy abolitionists in the industry than you would think, by the way, mostly on the DL.) Other very common approaches are listening and then immediately suggesting a minor policy change and saying they are being ‘action focused’ or realistic. Take care: an appeal to ‘realism’ is one of the best ways to reinforce ideology (just ask Mark Fisher).4

So, the structures and systems of thought we all inhabit still sit within a wider system of wealth concentration and private control over public good. Philanthropy plays a role in reinscribing that. Our professional identities can always insulate us from recognising it - and certainly prevent us from publicly acknowledging it. And I fear that when we point to - or perhaps only ever see - the ‘good guys’ of philanthropy, we play a similar role to those who say ‘not all men’. It draws us away from the systemic issues by making the problem seem to be a matter of occasional bad practice as opposed to the structures themselves.

Also, time and again I meet senior people in the industry who have just never been on the other side other desk. Truly, they have no idea what is happening out there in other foundations - and what we are seeing. Again, systems and structures protect themselves: this is how hegemony works, and how ideology reproduces itself. What you don’t or won’t see is just as important as what you do.

So look. Try to think harder. When you hear someone say something that sounds ridiculous or ‘extreme’ in terms of philanthropy or charity, ask yourself why it is ridiculous. Ask what the underlying belief is. And ask where that came from - and who does it help? And remember, our beliefs about the world, the language we use, and all of the systems we inhabit are constructed by **us**. That means we can change them. But it does need education, openness to change, and a willingness to challenge ourselves - and be challenged - if we are in positions of authority. The biggest trusts and foundations have got much better at this in the last couple of years in areas like race and gender. But they are LIGHT YEARS behind on class.

Anyway that was pretty much the first year lecture I used to do on ideology from 2006, but with charities chucked in. Good to keep your hand in.

Next week….

As the financials triumphantly reported show, there are bigger fish to fry. I am starting to worry that we are only holding trusts to account because we think there is more chance they will listen than the people we directly democratically elect. those of us with political concerns in the sector need to start turning our attention to inequality as a whole - much as this system is very much part of that. And if funders really care: they will spend less time congratulating themselves and more time making a public fuss about inequality. Take a leaf out of Trust for London’s book.

I’m branching back out to wider social justice for a while, and thinking more about the problems we’re trying solve in charities - not the problems we have to deal with in getting cash. I’ve been really inspired by my work with Southwark Law Centre, and by seeing the campaigning work of people like the Good Law project, and, I have to say, Oxfam - never thought I’d say that. Let’s focus on what the right kind of civil society can achieve.

Next issue unknown but I have a Pride special up my sleeve about trans toilets. Expect a bit more focus on the society and politics side of the tagline. Stick around if you think there are more interesting things than other people’s money. I also promise to be funnier but no less grumpy.

Also - why not drop me a line?

Sometimes it feels a bit like this just flies out there into the void - although to around 4000 people a month! What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

And finally…

I recently posted on LinkedIn about how I was changing my mind positively about CICs. I used to think they stopped you getting access to money if you were genuine, or were a useful cover for those who wanted to appear charitable when they weren’t.

My view has changed a lot because the flexibility they offer now means they can be more agile and political than charities. When charity regulation is so conservative, they may offer a way to have a greater social impact.

And then, like clockwork, here was a headline in Third Sector this week.

The problem with every model is the sharp actors and the dickheads.

It’s a reminder that, while there’s a lot of talk at the moment about ‘social impact organisations’ and trying to broaden out definitions from ‘charity’, we have been through all this before: the ‘social enterprise’ bubble was part of the Big Society push to privatise social welfare again. Let’s not just end up with a load of A4Es hoovering up funds for profit. Much as the high level of charity regulation prevents politics (at least, if they are left-wing), it also does go some way to preventing people who just want to feather their own nests.

Barely Civil Society is trying to create deeper debate in the UK charity sector.

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