Charities are swapping altruism for activism

Charity no longer begins at home. It starts with a thunderous denunciation of western sins, promotes an excoriation of this country’s past and then advocates the dismantling of white privilege – all paid for by you. Welcome to the charity industrial complex, the money-guzzling, taxpayer-subsidised assault on common sense that has turned the impulse to generous altruism into a licence for radical activism.

Just this week, Oxfam released a report damning poor governance in India. The guilty parties are not those in power today, but our imperial forebears: the report claims the British empire drained $64.82 trillion from India. Never mind that this figure is based on long-standing dubious statistics which have been debunked by historians such as Tirthankar Roy and the late Zareer Masani – Oxfam says it’s time for ‘urgent action’.

The solution, naturally, is reparations from western nations. The report proposes starting with a commitment to an annual $5 trillion payment (which also covers ‘climate debt’). But the report doubts that any figure can ever be enough: ‘There are questions about whether true reparations can be delivered in a system based on white supremacy.’ So it helpfully suggests nothing less than a full commitment from the ‘Global North’ to dismantle its ‘dominance of the global economy in all forms’. Exactly how these countries are meant to stump up the annual fee if they’ve also pledged themselves to penury doesn’t appear to have crossed the mind of the authors. 

As absurd as is it, this type of political activism masquerading as charity has sadly become typical of Oxfam. Its CEO is Halima Begum, who sought to become a Labour parliamentary candidate under Jeremy Corbyn and told the Guardian this month that she sees her mission as one of ‘solidarity, not charity’.