Although surveys have shown a decline in trust in charities, they also indicate more positive aspects. For example, the Charity Commission’s biennial trust survey, referred to above, showed in 2018 that 58% of respondents felt that charities played an ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ role in society and were more trusted than social services departments, companies, banks, MPs and newspapers.39 A survey in 2017 by nfpSynergy found that 65% of respondents trusted information from charities ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’; only a friend or family member was trusted more at 72%, while the figure for the BBC was 57%, the government 30% and politicians 15%.40
Despite the hardening of political attitudes, the government also still sees and encourages a role for charities in the delivery of overseas aid, the provision of some public services and action on social problems. The media and politicians also continue to rely on charities for analysis and information that underpins national debate on vital subjects. During the general elections of 2017 and 2019, for example, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a charity, acted as a reliable and impartial information bank on the national economy. Wide publicity is given to charities’ research and campaigning on subjects ranging from wildlife preservation to the shrinkage of services for vulnerable young people. The World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2018, for example, which found that wildlife populations had fallen by 60% in the previous 40 years, was widely covered in the media; so was research by the children’s charity Barnardo’s, working with the all-party parliamentary group on school exclusion, which found that a third of local authorities had no more space in pupil-referral units for children excluded from school, putting them at risk of involvement in drugs and crime.41, 42
By 2020, charities had been under the cosh in one way or another for the best part of a decade. The level of salaries, the Cup Trust, high-pressure fundraising, Kids Company, Oxfam and the RNIB have been directly in the spotlight. Campaigning by charities has been a notable focus of criticism, particularly by some Conservative MPs. For more than a century, charity campaigns have played a part in important changes in the law and improvements in social conditions that few people would now argue against. These range from the abolition of the slave trade to universal franchise and the proper protection of children or animals, some of which will be examined later in this book. But campaigning and change, by their very nature, involve controversy and dispute, and the next chapter takes a closer look at the arguments.
‘Stick to your knitting’: the curbs on campaigning
In 2013 Gwythian Prins, a member of the board of the Charity Commission for England and Wales, made a remark during an interview that became a catchphrase and a talking point in the voluntary sector.1 Sitting in the impressive drawing room of the Athenaeum Club in London’s Pall Mall, he argued that some charities were getting too deeply involved in campaigning. “The weather has changed on this front,” said Prins, a historian and specialist in defence affairs. “The public expects charities to stick to their knitting, to use an old-fashioned phrase.”
The remark signalled a renewed focus by the regulator, supported by some politicians, on the vexed question of whether charities should be allowed to campaign or get involved in politics – a question that has been controversial since Victorian times. Prins’s clear implication was that charities should stay out of politics and confine themselves to the relief of distress. The contrasting view is that charities have always tried to eliminate the causes of distress – that William Wilberforce, for example, didn’t achieve the abolition of slavery by providing soup kitchens for slaves. The late Stephen Lloyd, an influential charity lawyer, argued in 2014 that charities are ‘necessarily and inevitably’ caught up in politics:2
If politics are not concerned with poverty, injustice, climate change, the distribution of wealth, human rights and education, what are they for? And since these, and many other issues, are the essence of charitable purposes, it is inevitable that charities will engage with contentious political issues. It goes with the patch.
This chapter examines how the boundary between charities and politics has moved back and forth in modern times as political attitudes have fluctuated and the law has been developed and reinterpreted. In the second decade of the 21st century the pendulum swung towards a tighter regime, and many charities featured later in this book – especially those involved in the kinds of causes mentioned by Lloyd – have learned to tread carefully to stay out of trouble.
The history of charity campaigning
The simple relief of need was the principal function of charities in mediaeval times, when monasteries and the Church provided almshouses, hospitals and schools. These were financed by donations from a population that saw charitable works as a way of securing salvation in the next world. Charitable institutions became more secular after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII: the rising mercantile classes and the new gentry created by the redistribution of Church property discovered that ‘they could create institutions of social change and reformation with their own wealth and charity’.3 This flowering of charity lasted until after the Civil War of 1642–51 and included the establishment of many schools, four great London hospitals and charities for the poor and destitute that were often administered by parishes or guilds.
In the 18th century, however, there was a shift in the nature of charity because of concern that private bequests deprived families of their inheritance and were poorly administered.4 In the middle years of the century, ‘associational’ charities flourished – charities that raised money from the public, using the tools of the emergent popular press, in order to tackle social problems such as abandoned children and prostitution. Examples were the Foundling Hospital, set up by the sea captain Thomas Coram in 1739 and still in existence as the children’s charity Coram, and the Marine Society (now the Marine Society and Sea Cadets), founded in 1756 to train destitute boys as sailors. Nearly 1,400 charitable schools were founded in England and Wales between 1710 and 1800, many by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the Sunday school movement.5
Towards the end of that century, however, the Industrial Revolution was gathering pace and campaigning as we would recognise it today, directed mainly at the government and legislators, began to take shape. The gradual but momentous social changes resulting from the Revolution led in the 19th century to mass poverty and ill‑health among workers in the mills and factories of the Midlands and north of England. Charitable organisations responded as well as they could, but better communications, developments in political thought and revolution in France and America also prompted more people to think it was possible and right to address the causes of social distress as well as the symptoms.
Social reformers and philanthropists, often motivated by religious feeling and supported by churches, led the way and succeeded in pushing through many of the social reforms that we now take for granted. These include the abolition of slavery, better conditions in factories and mines, the protection of children and animals, universal adult suffrage, penal reform, education for all, the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalisation of abortion and homosexuality. The successful 21st-century campaigns to ban foxhunting and smoking in public places follow in this tradition and feature in later chapters.
In some cases the vehicle of the reformers was a charity; in others, the means were friendly societies, co‑operatives or simply unincorporated associations. Bodies that were not charities did not benefit from the advantages – or suffer from the