Archives - The Self Perpetuating Charity

I originally wrote this post eleven years ago for a different platform. How time flies.

The message remains the same though, as does the problem. In fact, as we have many more charities 'funded' by taxpayers money, if anything, the problem has got worse

 

Would you agree? 

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Thirty eight years ago, Bob Geldof and a group of popular musicians formed the group Band Aid. Their aim was to raise money for millions of people in Ethiopia who were starving to death due to horrendous famine conditions.

Raising more than $144million dollars, their efforts were hugely successful.

In 2009, Midge Ure returned to Ethiopia to find a country once again on the brink of starvation and famine.

The situation today is little different, with some war thrown in for good measure

Last year we tidied our mess of a back garden for the first time and planted some flowers in the soil. Nothing grew. The soil was completely dead with no nutrients left. This year I am having a little more success as we replaced a lot of the soil with fresh and added a liberal amount of fertiliser.

When you are attempting to grow food for your family in an arid country with no suitable soil and very little rain, you can't just buy new growbags. The fact is, most attempts at growing in such a region are doomed to failure.

That's why Ethiopia is suffering almost constant famine. The only answer, to those who cannot perceive cause and effect, is to raise money and bring in food to the people.

Let's assume an area where many people live but the conditions are so harsh that nothing will grow. Aid agencies then bring in vast quantities of food and distribute it to the people. Others may live in outlying areas where growing is possible but very difficult to do. They will now be tempted to give up the back breaking work of toiling in un-productive fields and move to the central area where life is still harsh but at least the food is being provided for you.

As life starts to improve a little in this area, because people now have food to eat, will others from even further afield cast away the tools of harsh labour and come to claim their portion of the freebies?

The aid agency better stay put and keep the free food flowing, otherwise, if they leave, all they will leave behind them is an even heavier populated area that still has no means whatsoever of producing any food of it's own.

We have all heard the saying about teaching a man to fish (Not the one where he sits in a boat getting pissed all day), but what we really need to teach the man is that in an area where there is no fish, he needs to move on.

Closer to home we seem to see a lot of adverts on the telly asking us to give x pounds a month to help a homeless person.

My mother spent a lot of years working with homeless children, and to me, the arid desert analogy above fits here too.

Many people run away from home because they believe they can make something better for themselves on their own. Many are young and have no real concept of what it is going to be like living in a cardboard city in London.

Step up the charity. Help the Homeless for example will campaign for money to help the large numbers of homeless people living on the streets of London (or anywhere).

They will open soup kitchens to feed people; they will open hostels for people to live. A vast charity infrastructure eventually unfolds to take care of the growing numbers of homeless and the numbers continue to grow because more and more people run away from home and find that they will be looked after by others.

There will always be a minority of people who leave home for the streets because life at home is unbearable, through violence, abuse etc. The majority however, don't really have it so bad that they need to throw their entire lives away because of it. Most could wait a few years then get a job and move into a bedsit.

Because of the endless charities, people like these will find themselves living in a hostel with little or no chance of employment and will probably spend a great portion of their lives in that situation.

What would have happened if, before the charities emerged, the government just bulldozed cardboard city and told everyone to go home?

How many people would have said bugger this and gone back to their lives, waited a couple of years, got a job and moved into a bedsit?

There are now more homeless charities than ever, yet homelessness continues to rise. (According to a charity)

Homeless charities took something that is very harsh, sleeping rough, and took the edge off it by providing food and shelter. People who would previously have not opted to run away from home and face those conditions may now deem it to be acceptable under the circumstances and join the statistics.

Today, Save the Children are telling us that the rising cost of UK childcare is pricing poor families out of work.

How could that possibly be? How can the price of a particular commodity, stop somebody from holding down a job?

Remember the poor farmers I talked about earlier? The one who gave up the farms to get free food from the relief areas?

It costs an average of £177 per week for a full-time nursery position for a child under two in the UK. [........] it can be impossible to find a job that brings in enough money to cover the childcare bill as well as their living costs.

So they don't. They choose benefits.
These are people who have first made the decision to start a family and then considered how much it costs.

That quote in full:

It costs an average of £177 per week for a full-time nursery position for a child under two in the UK. For families living in severe poverty, with an annual income below £12,000 (£230 a week), it can be impossible to find a job that brings in enough money to cover the childcare bill as well as their living costs.

We started this post by discussing severe poverty; famine stricken Ethiopia.

Back in blighty, severe poverty has a whole different meaning. £12,000 per year is severe poverty. Not being able to pay someone else to look after the child you chose to have, that's severe poverty.

What happens when you can actually convince people living in this country on a low wage that they are severely poor?

Step up the self perpetuating charity.

Aim: Convince people that if they are on a low wage that can't cover all their expenses, that their situation is not down to their life choices but it's actually the fault of others and others will pay your way.

When this becomes apparent to all, how many people will strive to improve their lot in life. How many will go to night school? How many will start low paid jobs and work hard for experience and promotion. How many will say, "We can't afford children just yet, but maybe one day"?

Very few I imagine.

They will turn to Save the Children and say, "Yes we are in the same boat. What can you do for us?"

 

The self perpetuating charity will be created to address a need that exists at the time, but the existence of the chrity will increase the need, not diminish it. After a time, like Save the Children, they become multi million pound businesses, with staff and management who now rely on wages from the charity, to pay their own way. Solving the problem is probably the last thing they want

 

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And to add to the original post:

 

And since the last Labour Government decided it was a good idea to fund charities with taxpayer money, we have an abundance of charities that were set up to tackle a problem that didn't even exist before the charity. These are arguably worse than the self perpetuating type, who did at least originally have a reason

• Anti-Smoking / obesity / booze / salt / sugar - millions of pounds in taxpayers money to tell other people how to live their lives. People who did not ask for help and are doing no harm to anyone else

• Ant-racsim - Convincing a certain demographic that they are oppressed and the charity is there to help, when racism had largely become a thing of the past. Trapping people in a cycle of victimhood and resentment
  

• Trans rights - Creating a new group of people and incorrectly stating they do not have the same rights as everyone else in society. Denying mental health issues, so people become victims rather than getting the treatment they desperately need
  

The above are not even charities. They create victims and divide a society that was previously tolerant, in order to make money and gain kudos for themselves. They destroy lives. These are the bottom feeder charities

This is why charities very rarely get any money from me. I occasionally give cat food to the local crazy cat lady, and buy the odd nik nak from the local old people shops in town

Anywhere else, you don't know where your money is going, but can probably be sure it's nowhere good

 

Disclaimer at the time of posting. I get that homelessness is a lot more complex than I have made out, particulary where mental health issues are concerned. I've simply broken it down to it's easiest form and excluded the more complex aspects, for the purposes of not waffling on (not sure I achieved that)