Charities must be robust when they are campaigning, even when they are threatened with court action by the government, MP Wes Streeting said at an event at the Labour Party Conference this week.
The MP for Ilford North was responding to a question from the audience at Acevo’s fringe event on elitism in charities on how charities can effectively campaign when there is so much pressure to stop them doing so, including from the Lobbying Act and other sources.
Streeting said: “What do you do if you are a charity and you are speaking out against the government and they are threatening to take you to court? Well, you do what the National Union of Students did at the last General Election.”
He mentioned the campaign by the NUS in 2015 which saw them produce billboards at train stations which had a picture of the Liberal Democrats logo printed on an image of two fists, with the words “liar liar”. He said this was to represent “the smack in the face which the students got” over tuition fee increases.
Streeting, who had held the role of president of the NUS from 2008 to 2010, said that the organisation had thought that “actually there are loads of Lib Dem and Tory politicians who had broken their promises, and we are going to hold them to account”.
He continued: “It said ‘we are a charity and we are going to run this through our non-charitable campaigning vehicle and if you don’t like it, I dare you to take us to court’.
"I do think that charities on the campaigning front have to be robust. I would love to see a Tory government take Barnardo’s to court, or Save the Children, or Greenpeace, because I know which side the public will be on.”
‘If they are going to take charities to court then bring it on’
Siobhan Endean, national officer for equalities in Unite the union, agreed with Streeting and said Unite had taken a similar approach.
She said: “I think there is something really sinister about what this government is doing to silence any opposition. We’ve had it within the trade union movement, as well as within the charity sector, and I think it is something we need to address.
"The way Unite has addressed this is it has said ‘if you put us out with the law for standing up for working people, we will operate outside of the law because we will not be silenced. If they are going to take charities to court then bring it on’.”
Neal Lawson, chair of pressure group Compass, was also sitting on the panel alongside Streeting and Endean. He suggested that if a charity is struggling to achieve a goal and are limited because “the Charity Commission won’t allow it", that he always thinks “well stop being a charity then”.
He said: “If you can’t meet your goals in those legal constraints, then you are clearly set up in the wrong kind of way. So move beyond it.”
