Boycott the NSPCC

Too much theory and not enough practice. Those were the words used this week by a lifelong shire Tory to describe what has become of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She meant that the two societies have become unhealthily politicised. The people who now run them believe it is not enough to do solid, unglamorous work to alleviate cruelty to children and to animals. They think they can only show they are serious, and can only appear on television and get their names in the newspapers, if they become lobby groups run along the lines of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the days when the world lived in the shadow of death by nuclear war.

The NSPCC and the RSPCA used, like the monarch, to be above politics. They were organisations which anyone from a Tory to a Trotskyite who cared about children and animals could support.