A new Institute for Economic Affairs report says charities which lobby government should not get access to unrestricted grants. David Ainsworth warns that while the idea is laughable, it reflects growing opinion in some quarters.  

One of my favourite books about journalism is The Truth, by the fantasy author and former journalist Terry Pratchett.

The book is set in Pratchett’s most famous creation: Ankh-Morpork, a silly city peopled by trolls and dwarves and vampires, on a silly world carried through space by four elephants on the back of a turtle. At first glance it appears to be nonsense, but it’s actually keenly observed political satire.

At one point in the book, the budding editor of Ankh-Morpork’s first paper runs into the city’s premier policeman, who tells him he shouldn’t be allowed to just write what he wanted. It might cause trouble.

If the police made the law there would be no trouble, Pratchett suggests, because every citizen would spend their whole lives sitting at home with their hands on the table where everyone can see them.

I feel similarly about The Sock Doctrine – the latest report from the Institute of Economic Affairs, which says (I paraphrase heavily) that if charities are allowed to say whatever they want, it might cause trouble.

The report says that some politicians currently fund charities so that those charities will then say what the politician wants to hear. Sometimes the charities will lobby, apparently independently, for a policy the politician wants to implement, but which lacks public support.

If Snowdon is right, this behaviour is a bit iffy, and he’s right to say we should try to put a stop to it.

I have two problems with the report, though. First, Snowdon spreads the net rather wide in his search for evidence, and he doesn’t seem to be too discerning about what he catches, either. Second, the solutions he proposes are far worse than the problem.

Snowdon argues that if someone receiving state funding is lobbying for a policy the government likes, it’s a coalition puppet. But if they campaign against the government, it’s because they were set up with funding, under the last Labour government, to act as a “shadow state” while the party was out of power. In short, you can’t win.

One organisation, Save the Children, he identifies as a member of both the pro- and anti-government camps – lobbying for a government agenda over foreign aid, while pursuing an opposition agenda by campaigning against poverty in the UK.

But while his argument is flimsy, his solution is worse: scrap all unrestricted grants and start-up funds for charities; require charities to declare all campaigning spend and public income; make it illegal for charities funded more than 50 per cent by government to campaign; make charity trustees personally repay government money spent on campaigning, and order the Charity Commission to muzzle charities more effectively.

It would be nice if we were able to laugh ruefully, shake our heads, put Snowdon down as a lone extremist, and get on with our day.

But there’s actually surprisingly widespread support for some of these proposals. They’re effectively the core editorial line of the Mail and they’re not considered too outlandish by the Telegraph, and there are quite a lot of readers of both who instinctively agree. MPs whose direct role is to scrutinise the Charity Commission, such as Robert Halfon and Priti Patel, have also supported these ideas.

They’re far from the mainstream, still, and I doubt that any of them are seriously likely to become law here. But one of them, at least, has already appeared on the statute book in Australia, so we can’t rule it out.

The trouble with all these ideas is that they might solve one problem but they’ll create far worse ones. They’re impractical, difficult to enforce, and would make it bloody hard for charities to ever say anything about anything. You could either provide services to your beneficiaries, or speak out when they suffered an injustice, but not both.

Charities, in effect, would be left sitting silently, with their hands on the table where everyone could see them.