The Judge RANTS!
Date: 03/06/25
Charity Ends At Home
One tries, even in the face of that total breakdown of any sense of social solidarity which has been the hallmark of the Neoliberal Age, to do one's best to help others. But there are times when any such effort appears either to be totally fruitless or to be thwarted by the dominant ideology and its willing assistants.
I have contributed to a number of charities down the years. I had Direct Debits for two which I had set up after being visited by bright young people who through their pleasing personalities convinced me that their respective causes - pet welfare in one case, hearing-impaired children in the other - were worth giving a small amount of my wealth to on a regular basis.
This worked well enough until I stopped working nearly five years ago with its concomitant sharp reduction in my overall income, whereupon I cancelled the payments to both with a sense of regret.
After a similar visit, I started buying raffle tickets for another (very well known) organisation which helps people suffering from the various forms of a serious illness. I was happy to do so, even though my attempts at dropping The Big One (£10 000) came to nought, literally.
However, just after the start of this year, the charity in question (which I'm not going to name here) announced that it had made over a quarter of its workforce redundant, that it was running down its helpline, was withdrawing its backing for welfare advice programmes, and was going completely to close its hardship grants operations after one hundred years.
Well, in these straitened times, I suppose it happens.
But a few weeks later, that self-same charity started to advertise for a number of executive positions, with salaries ranging from over £63 000 to over £110 000 per year, said posts being adorned with such useful descriptions as 'total reward manager' and 'director of strategy and transformation'.
I suppose that this is merely typical of the age, where the financialisation of just about everything is manifested by the corporatisation of supposedly altruistic organisations. Do you remember when charities had 'patrons' and 'chairmen/women' rather than CEOs, CFOs, COOs and - for all we can tell - C3POs? In those days, one could be fairly certain - even in the light of the occasional entrepreneurial book-fiddling - that those involved in such organisations were dedicated to making the lives of humans and animals better in some tangible way.
No more, alas. The so-called 'third sector', at a time when the need for their services is higher than it has been in three-quarters of a century due to the deliberate withdrawal of the State from providing anything more than sub-basic support for those in need, has become merely another area of the national life which seems to exist to provide support only to the spreadsheet-reading classes at enormous expense.
Such conduct is not merely rebarbative, it is utterly counter-productive. Would you wish to give your occasional spare groat to an organisation which employs a 'head of product' on £88 500 per annum?
I know I don't. And so - and again with much regret - the latest book of raffle tickets has gone into the recycling sack, so that at least some positive use may be made of them.
Henceforth, I hope to make whatever contributions I can to local humanitarian causes as and when my Gold-Plated Bureaucrat Pension (© Daily Mail) permits, but I'm sad about such a change being necessary. But, then what the hell do they expect?
