A quoi sert l'argent des lobbies politiques ?

Dans un papier bien informé, le journaliste Jamie Doward prend un malin plaisir dans les colonnes du quotidien de gauche britannique The Guardian à révéler les liens étroits entretenus par l'ex-ministre de la Défense Liam Fox avec un réseau de clubs et de fondations nord-américains.

Le journaliste explique bien les mouvements de fonds entre les associations conservatrices états-uniennes, bien financées par des dons généreux d'entreprises et de millionnaires, vers des organisations britanniques partageant les mêmes objectifs mais manquant de financement.

C'est la grande force des groupes d'influence politiques aux Etats-Unis, un financement généreux de la part de personnalités et d'entreprises à un niveau inconnu en Europe. Voici quelques mois, un responsable d'association américaine cherchant à réformer certains aspects de la vie publique dans son pays m'a raconté qu'il envisageait un procès contre un organisme public. Dès que la nouvelle fut rendue publique auprès de ses soutiens, il reçut le jour même un appel lui proposant un don de 250000 dollars. De quoi faire rêver de ce côté-ci de l'Atlantique les responsables de Contribuables associés ou de l'Institut pour la justice.

Liam Fox and wife Jesme (right) with former prime minister Baroness Thatcher at his 50th birthday party in London.

Liam Fox's Atlantic Bridge linked top Tories and Tea Party activists
Officially it was a charity; in fact, Fox's thinktank was a meeting place for the movers and shakers of the right wing

Twenty US business leaders assembled in Pittsburgh in October 2006 to pay court to the coming man of British politics. They could have been forgiven for thinking Liam Fox, with his neatly parted hair and clipped Scottish accent, resembled the GP he had once been, rather than a potential Tory leader.

But, although few of the business leaders knew much about the shadow defence secretary, they were familiar with his charity, the Atlantic Bridge. This was the organisation whose patron, Lady Thatcher, was lionised in the US for her support of the free market and American military airbases on British soil. It was the organisation whose members in 2004 were ushered into the White House to be briefed by Karl Rove, George W Bush's special counsel. And it was the organisation whose cocktail parties in the Carlton Club in London and Charlie Palmer's steakhouse in Washington were high points of the transatlantic social calendar.

Shortly after addressing the business leaders at Pittsburgh's Duquesne Club – "the finest city club in the country"– Fox explained that the Atlantic Bridge promoted the special relationship between the UK and the US by creating "a network of individual people who can know one another". He declared: "We are trying to bring people together who have common interests and to recognise that in an ever more globalised economy, we will all be called upon to defend those common interests."

Last week those interests came back to haunt not just Fox, whose fall on Friday rocked David Cameron's coalition government, but also many Tory members of the cabinet, whose extensive links to the Atlantic Bridge are now under scrutiny. The irony is that it took a furore around Fox's friendship with a relatively minor player in the saga – a lobbyist, Adam Werritty – to make these links apparent.

Admittedly, senior Tory cabinet ministers had been scrambling to distance themselves from the Atlantic Bridge long before the scandal brought Fox down. The organisation's website – and that of its sister charity across the Atlantic – has been dismantled. But old caches of the site reveal that, while shadow ministers, George Osborne, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling and William Hague were all on its advisory council alongside Fox, its UK chairman. All four stood down as awkward questions over its political activities, which contravened charity laws, resulted in the organisation being wound up.

But the links to the cabinet do not end there. Cara Usher-Smith, the director of business development at Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice, was a former director of the Atlantic Bridge. David Cameron's press secretary, Gabby Bertin, admitted last week that she was paid £25,000 by the US drug giant Pfizer when working as the "sole employee" of the charity. Other senior Tories, notably Michael Ancram and Michael Howard, attended its receptions. Sir John Major gave a keynote speech at one of its US fundraisers. Its formidable connections to leading Tories were eclipsed only by its links to senior members of the US Republican party. The Republican senator for Arizona and Senate minority whip, Jon Kyl, and Jim DeMint, a Republican senator for South Carolina and a leading light in the Tea Party movement, were two powerful American members of its advisory council.

To outsiders, the charity may have appeared to be little more than a social club, keen to throw a party in New York to promote Hague's book on William Wilberforce or hold a dinner for 14 in parliament's Club Room – an apparent breach of parliamentary rules. But the group's members were deeply serious in their beliefs, and Fox was more than happy to promote his neoconservative leanings when abroad.

In a speech to Atlantic Bridge members in New York in November 2002, Fox warned "the natural desire to avoid conflict has been reinforced by an innate pacificism in many sections of western society, especially in continental Europe". He told his audience: "For too many, peace has come to mean simply the absence of war. We cannot allow that corrosive view to go unchallenged."

Fox also used the speech to criticise the NHS, which he said had "responded to a funding increase of almost 11% with only a 2% increase in activity".

He was preaching to the converted. The Atlantic Bridge's addresses and conferences were all about promoting market liberalisation. A typical theme of one conference, held in both Los Angeles and Pittsburgh in July 2006, was entitled "Killing the Golden Goose – How Regulation and Legislation are Damaging Wealth Creation". An earlier address in 2003 asked: "How Much Health Care Can We Afford?"

Members of the Galen Institute, a thinktank which promotes "freemarket ideas in health", attended its conferences while the failed bank Lehman Brothers, sponsored at least one event, as did the powerful neocon thinktank the Heritage Foundation.

But in 2007 the Atlantic Bridge's relationship with big business entered a new realm, one that threatens to pose uncomfortable questions for Cameron and his party. The organisation signed a special partnership with the American Legislative Council (Alec), whose motto is "Limited government, free markets, federalism".

Overseen by Catherine Bray, a former adviser to the climate-change sceptic Roger Helmer, a Tory MEP, the project focused on "providing an arena for young conservative leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to build close personal and professional relationships".

Alec is one of the most powerful lobbying organisations in the US. Funded by the likes of Exxon Mobil, tobacco giant Philip Morris and the National Rifle Association, it holds conventions where legislators mingle with lobbyists. According to the Centre for Media and Democracy, a liberal, non-profit, American-based media research group, it uses these events to wine and dine state legislators and present them with pre-drafted bills drawn up on behalf of its members.

Alec boasts: "Each year, close to 1,000 bills, based at least in part on Alec model legislation, are introduced in the states. Of these, an average of 20% become law." One of its biggest supporters is the Koch Foundation, whose founders, the oil barons Charles G Koch and David H Koch, have funnelled about $55m to climate-denial front groups, according to Greenpeace, and are generous donors to the Tea Party movement.

Alec's involvement with Fox's charity coincided with a large increase in funds to the US arm of his organisation. Accounts show that by 2009 the Atlantic Bridge was bringing in $280,508, more than double the $133,926 it was receiving in 2007.

The huge rise in income, which dwarfed that of its UK sister organisation, coincided with a significant expansion in the charity's advisers and directors. By 2009 Werritty, whom the US accounts list as the (unpaid) UK executive director of the Atlantic Bridge, found himself reporting to a new chief executive officer, Amanda Bowman, the former New York director for the Centre for Security Policy, the neocon think-tank that opposed the planned Park 51 Muslim community centre close to the site of Ground Zero.

Further administrative firepower came with the appointment of an impressive group of well-connected lawyers and lobbyists whose clients operate at the heart of the military-industrial complex. Scott Syfert, a lawyer with Moore & Van Allen, which has represented military, chemical and energy interests, became executive chairman of its executive council. Frank Fahrenkopf, president of the American Gaming Association, which represents casino operators, also joined the council, as did Michael Hintze, an Australian billionaire hedge fund manager who has donated more than £1m to the Tories and whose firm, CQS, has invested in firms with defence contracts. John Falk, a US lobbyist whose company, Firecreek, represents the Kestral Group, one of Pakistan's largest defence firms, joined its board of directors. So did Michael Fullerton, a former US department of homeland security adviser now working for Kestral. Randall Popelka, whose Capitol Bridge lobbying firm represents defence interests, joined as its US executive director.

As the Atlantic Bridge boasted on its website: "We have created a network of like-minded people – in politics, business, academia and journalism." It is hard to escape the conclusion that in the space of five years the Atlantic Bridge went from a small, Tory-leaning charity, dispensing freedom medals in the name of Thatcher, to an influential networking club linking most of the cabinet to powerful business interests, neocons and Tea Party enthusiasts. For Cameron, who preaches the gospel of "compassionate Conservatism", the revelation is embarrassing.

Given the elevated circles he was now moving in, it was hardly surprising that Werritty exploited his new contacts. By 2009 a powerful lobby group, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom), was covering the cost of Werritty's trip to an important security seminar in Israel. The trip was arranged by Bicom's former deputy chairman, Michael Lewis, who donated to Atlantic Bridge and to Fox's Tory leadership campaign in 2005. Bicom's former communications director, Lee Petar, who runs a lobbying firm, Tetra Strategy, put Werritty in touch with the Dubai businessman, Harvey Boulter, whose meeting with Fox triggered the initial furore that triggered his demise.

Werritty's links to another businessman may also attract interest. It has emerged that an obscure company called Pargav financed his trips. Pargav was partly funded by Tamares Real Estate, an investment company owned by Poju Zabludowicz, chairman of Bicom. It was also funded by the Good Governance Group (G3), a private investigations company staffed by former MI6 officers and founded by Andries Pienaar, a South African who once worked for the security giant Kroll.

The Observer has established that Pienaar has extensive interests in the defence sector. G3 boasts the defence contractor BAE Systems as a client, and its sister company, investment firm C5 Capital, of which Pienaar is a director, focuses on the security sector, seeking investment in "niche sectors that mitigate risk and protect assets and lives – such as cyber security, biometrics, detection and communications". C5 is known to have been interested in buying cyber security firms which had contracts with MI5.

Pienaar played a key role in establishing the Sri Lanka Development Trust, whose address was listed at G3's headquarters, and which paid for several of Fox's trips abroad. "We agreed to help Dr Fox because of our longstanding interest and involvement in conflict resolution and reconstruction," the Good Governance Group said in a statement.

Ultimately, Fox paid the price for blurring the lines between his political and personal life. But the warning signs had been there for some time. Eyebrows were raised two years ago when he appointed a former US army captain, Luke Coffey, as his special adviser. Coffey is a member of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs, a thinktank that promotes US national security and is staffed largely by ex-CIA agents.

The appointment spoke volumes about Fox's thinking. The Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott observed: "We are allies of America, but we are not the 51st state."

Fox disagreed.

Fundraising : il faut dire la vérité aux donateurs

De retour de Somalie, Unni Karunakara, le patron de Médecins sans frontières, a fait des déclarations dans la presse qui méritent d'être soulignées car enfin une association caritative parle vrai en ce qui concerne les promesses faites aux donateurs.

Curieusement dans la dépêche de l'AFP, il n'est pas du tout question de ce point  précis :

Somalie: le terrain le plus difficile pour les humanitaires

De Boris BACHORZ (AFP) – 21 août 2011 

NAIROBI — La Somalie, avec sa guerre civile et la multiplication des centres de pouvoir, est le pays le plus difficile au monde pour les humanitaires, contraints de travailler à l'aveuglette face aux conséquences d'une sécheresse historique, estime le président international de Médecins sans frontières, Unni Karunakara.
MSF est une des rares organisations à ne pas avoir quitté la Somalie depuis le début de la guerre civile en 1991, et à travailler aujourd'hui dans certaines régions du sud et du centre contrôlées par les islamistes shebab.
"Mais même avec les réseaux dont nous disposons, nous avons de graves difficultés pour accéder aux régions à problème, et pour mener les estimations indépendantes absolument essentielles pour distribuer de l'aide", souligne le Dr Karunakara. "Aujourd'hui, nous travaillons à la marge" du problème, estime-t-il.
La Somalie "est pour moi le pays le plus difficile" où opérer. "Nous travaillons en Afghanistan, en Irak, mais nous n'avons pas besoin de gardes armés dans ces pays", relève le président international de MSF, de retour d'une visite en Somalie, à Mogadiscio et à Galkayo.
"En Côte d'Ivoire, où il y avait une guerre, il nous a fallu 36 heures pour mener notre première opération. Ici (en Somalie), même obtenir une voiture fait l'objet de négociations".
La sécheresse en Somalie, consécutive à plusieurs saisons sèches, touche 3,7 millions de personnes soit la moitié de la population selon les Nations Unies.
La famine qui en découle sévit essentiellement dans des régions contrôlées par les shebab, où MSF maintient plusieurs programmes d'aide médicale, notamment à Dinsor et à Mareere. "Mais même là, notre accès est très limité", reconnaît le Dr Karunakara.
Les régions officiellement contrôlées par le gouvernement sont, souvent, également difficilement accessibles, ajoute-t-il.
"On parle beaucoup de lever de l'argent et d'amener de l'aide à Mogadiscio. Mais le vrai défi est de savoir comment amener la nourriture du port vers les gens qui en ont besoin", estime le Dr Karunakara.
Du centre et du sud du pays, la crise humanitaire s'est transportée à Mogadiscio, avec l'arrivée de 100.000 personnes fuyant la sécheresse.
"risque d'épidémie élevé"
"Le risque d'épidémie est élevé en raison du surpeuplement et de l'accès très réduit" à des sanitaires et à des points d'eau. MSF a entamé dans la capitale somalienne une campagne de vaccination contre la rougeole, avec 3.000 enfants vaccinés à ce jour, et doit ouvrir la semaine prochaine un centre de prévention du choléra.
"Nous voyons déjà beaucoup de cas d'infections de la peau, des yeux, des poumons, des diarrhées aiguës. Tout ceci est le signe d'une très mauvaise situation hygiénique", s'inquiète le médecin.
Le retrait des shebab de Mogadiscio le 6 août n'a pas radicalement amélioré la situation. "Il y a un vide du pouvoir" dans les quartiers qu'ils ont abandonnés, obligeant les organisations humanitaires à négocier avec quiconque y dispose d'un réel pouvoir, dit le patron de MSF.
"En ce moment nous interviewons 200 personnes pour des postes d'infirmières. Mais chaque embauche doit être discutée avec les chefs de clans, qui vont dire ensuite qui peut être embauché ou pas", relève le Dr Karunakara.
Le patron de MSF rêverait de davantage de visibilité quant à l'ampleur de la crise. Les contrôles effectués par ses équipes suggèrent un taux de malnutrition sévère de près de 30% chez les enfants de moins de cinq ans, mais il souligne qu'"il ne s'agit pas de données scientifiques".
"Nous évitons de donner des chiffres globaux, car de tels chiffres ne signifient rien", estime-t-il, appelant de ses voeux "un accès beaucoup plus ouvert aux régions touchées par la sécheresse, afin que nous puissions y mener de vraies estimations".

En revanche, dans  ce papier de Tracy McVeigh dans les colonnes du Guardian, le journaliste se fait bel et bien l'écho des propos de Unni Karunakara que tous les fundraisers devraient conserver à l'esprit : ne pas faire des promesses qui sont sans rapport avec la réalité.

Charity president says aid groups are misleading the public on Somalia

Médecins Sans Frontières executive says charities must admit that much of the country can't be helped 

The head of an international medical charity has called on aid agencies to stop presenting a misleading picture of the famine in Somalia and admit that helping the worst-affected people is almost impossible.

The international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Dr Unni Karunakara, returned from Somalia last week and said that, even though there was chronic malnutrition and drought across east Africa, hardly any agencies were able to work inside war-torn Somalia, where the picture was "profoundly distressing". He condemned other organisations and the media for "glossing over" the reality in order to convince people that simply giving money for food was the answer.

According to Karunakara, agencies have been able to provide medical and nutritional care for tens of thousands in camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, which have been receiving huge numbers of refugees from Somalia. But trying to access those in the "epicentre" of the disaster has been slow and difficult. "We may have to live with the reality that we may never be able to reach the communities most in need of help," he said.

Karunakara said that the use of phrases such as "famine in the Horn of Africa" or "worst drought in 60 years" obscured the "man-made" factors that had created the crisis and wrongly implied that the solution was simply to find the money to ship enough food to the region.

He described Mogadishu, the Somali capital, as dotted with plastic sheets supported by twigs, sheltering groups of weak and starving people who had walked in from the worst-affected areas in southern and central Somalia. "I met a woman who had left her home with her husband and seven children to walk to Mogadishu and had arrived after five days with only four children," he said.

"MSF is constantly being forced to make tough choices in deploying or expanding our activities, in sticking to our principles of neutrality with the daily realities of people going without healthcare, without food. Our staff face being shot. But glossing over the man-made causes of hunger and starvation in the region and the great difficulties in addressing them will not help resolve the crisis. Aid agencies are being impeded in the area.

"MSF has been working in Somalia for 20 years, and we know that if we are struggling then others will not be able to work at all. The reality on the ground is that there are serious difficulties that affect our abilities to respond to need."

He said charities needed to start treating the public "like adults". He went on: "There is a con, there is an unrealistic expectation being peddled that you give your £50 and suddenly those people are going to have food to eat. Well, no. We need that £50, yes; we will spend it with integrity. But people need to understand the reality of the challenges in delivering that aid. We don't have the right to hide it from people; we have a responsibility to engage the public with the truth."

Chronic malnutrition, said Karunakara, is not new in east Africa and needs long-term action. "The Somali people have been living in a country at war, with no government, for 20 years, with several long periods of hardship, of famine and drought. This harvest failure is just what has tipped them over the edge this time, a catastrophe made worse," he said.

A brutal war between the transitional government, which is backed by western nations and supported by African Union troops, and armed Islamist opposition groups, notably al-Shabaab, is ongoing in Somalia. Fierce clan loyalties keep independent international assistance away from many communities, meaning that Somalis are trapped between various forces, depriving them of food and healthcare for political reasons.

"We face constant difficult challenges over simple things like a new nurse or getting a car," said Karunakara. "When we need to be saving lives with a fully fledged medical response, we constantly need to be communicating with both sides in a war, reminding them what humanitarian aid is. One needs only to look at how few charities are working in Somalia."

Ian Bray, a spokesman for Oxfam, said it was unhelpful for aid agencies to be seen to be arguing with each other.

"We're being honest with donors and we have always been honest," said Bray. "A drought is a natural occurrence; a famine is man-made. We don't go around to people saying we have a magic wand, give us £5 and we will make Africa feed itself. We do say give us £5 and we won't use it to give you a history of Somalia, but we will use our expertise to save lives. This is what the bargain is we make with our donors. If you support us, we will do our level best to alleviate the distress for those people in most dire need."

Des avortistes pas en phase avec la société

Dans le Guardian, la journaliste Polly Curtis se fait l'écho de l'inquiétude des organisations avortistes britanniques face à la perspective d'un changement de législation.

Les associations de gauche qui militent pour la banalisation de l'avortement se heurtent à une difficulté considérable, il est très difficile de « vendre » un avortement au public habituel des donateurs.

Leur action d'influence ne peut s'appuyer sur une action de masse par le biais du marketing direct car elle risque fort de perdre beaucoup d'argent.

La solution consiste à faire des actions d'influence auprès de pourvoyeurs de fonds publics ou para-publics.

C'est la recette à laquelle fait appel, par exemple, SOS Racisme.

Toutefois, cet échec à entrer en empathie avec la population est révélatrice du fait que ces associations proposent des politiques qui ne sont pas aussi en phase avec ce que pensent les citoyens que les grands médias (comme le Guardian) le prétendent.

A titre de comparaison théorique, je suis frappé par le fait que l'Œuvre des orphelins de la Police recueille à elle seule 15,5 millions d'euros du public pour seulement 0,1 million d'argent public.

Le budget de l'Œuvre des orphelins de la Police.

En d'autres termes, on pourrait avancer que cette association est bien plus représentative de la France que SOS Racisme dont le budget d'un peu plus de 1 million d'euros est pour l'essentiel payé par de l'argent public et par Pierre Bergé.

Abortion law reform plans criticised by women's groups 
Charities and health bodies call on equalities minister to intervene and protect rights of women to get impartial advice
A coalition of women's groups has written to the equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, urging her to intervene in the row over backbenchers' attempts to reform abortion protocols. They say the proposals could delay abortions and allow anti-abortion groups to counsel women.

Featherstone is being asked to seek a guarantee within government that the current system won't change, ahead of a potential vote that could overhaul the existing counselling services for women seeking to terminate a pregnancy

The signatories to the letter include the Fawcett Society, the Women's Health Equalities Consortium, the Medical Women's Federation and the National Assembly of Women as well as the trade union Unison.

It will pile pressure on the Liberal Democrat minister, who has faced criticisms that she has failed to intervene on other coalition policies that Labour claims adversely affected women.

"Preventing abortion providers from offering decision-making support opens the door for organisations opposed in principle to abortion to become formally involved in counselling women on their pregnancy options," the letter says. "Previous governments have always acted on evidence and taken guidance from expert medical professionals. There is no evidence of a need for change in this area and no support from professional clinical organisations for such change."

The intervention comes amid wranglings in government over how to handle an amendment that could be selected when the health bill returns to the Commons next week, which would mean all women seeking abortions would be offered counselling independent of the abortion provider, in a move that could strip charities that provide the services of their current role. It is being proposed by the Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries and Labour's Frank Field and backed by a campaign with links to anti-abortion groups.

On Sunday, the Department of Health said that it would go ahead with plans to introduce independent counselling and consult on how it would work, in a move that was interpreted as caving into the campaign.

After an intervention from No 10 and furious Lib Dems, the government announced it will not support the amendment – though MPs will still get a free vote – with David Cameron and DoH ministers voting against. It also reworded its position on the plans, saying it would consult on the "best" counselling options for women but that the outcome was not a foregone conclusion.

Anne Milton, the public health minister, wrote to coalition MPs yesterday to clarify the government's position and confirm that the health ministers would vote against it.

On Thursday, the Right to Know campaign, which is supporting Dorries's and Field's campaign and is backed by some known anti-abortionists, responded robustly to the government's opposition to the plan. It published a poll of MPs conducted in April, prior to the row over the implications of the move, which found that some 92% backed the statement. "A woman should have a right to impartial advice when considering having an abortion, from a source that has no commercial interest in her decision."

A spokeswoman for the campaign said: "The widespread support for the objectives of this campaign is unsurprising.  It is important that conflicts of interest are removed from the provision of abortion counseling.

 "We want to see women considering abortion provided with the space to think through their decision. This is not a party political issue. The welfare of women is at stake here.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow equalities minister, said the changing position had left the issue mired in confusion. "There is now complete confusion and chaos in government on abortion. This is what happens when David Cameron pursues short-term headlines without thinking the issues through," she said.

Darinka Aleksic, co-ordinator of the Abortion Rights UK campaign, said: "We need to be clear, these amendments are an attack on women's reproductive rights. If implemented they will limit, rather than expand, the availability of impartial advice and information to women facing unplanned pregnancy. Their aim is to restrict and deter women from accessing abortion services."

Evan Harris, vice-chair of the Liberal Democrat federal policy committee and pro-choice campaigner, said: "Previous governments in this sensitive area have always acted only on the basis of the best advice from expert medical organisations and I will strongly urge the government not to disturb or propose disturbing the existing arrangements for providing unbiased advice until this has demonstrated that there is a problem and persuaded the Royal Colleges or BMA of the case."

Les malheurs du Labour seront-ils résolus par le fundraising ?

Dans cet article du Guardian les journalistes Polly Curtis et James Ball dévoilent les conséquences pour les travaillistes britanniques d'un changement de la loi électorale britannique sur les dons aux partis politiques. Un choc pour le parti de gauche qui s'est longtemps reposé sur les versements effectués par les syndicats et quelques grosses fortunes. Les travaillistes vont devoir se réinventer et, pourquoi pas, tenter une solution nouvelle pour eux : le fundraising.

Labour could be ruined by proposed cap on political donations

Annual limit on funding would affect all major parties, with Labour facing a potential deficit of £13.5m


Labour could face financial ruin under plans being developed to cap the biggest donations to political parties, a Guardian analysis shows.

The independent standards watchdog is said to have agreed to recommend a new limit on donations, introducing an annual cap with figures ranging from £50,000 to £10,000 being considered. Such a move, in an attempt to clean up political funding, would end the six- and seven-figure donations to the Labour party from its union sponsors, as well as the Tories' reliance on the richest city financiers.

An analysis of five and a half years' worth of donations to the parties reveals the move would most dramatically affect Labour's funding base. If the £50,000 limit had been in place over the period, Labour's donations would have been reduced by 72%, the Conservatives' by 37% and the Liberal Democrats' by 25%.

A source close to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which has been reviewing the party funding system and is due to report in October, said it was trying to find a way to impose a cap without bankrupting any one party.

Some committee members are arguing for more public funding for political parties, but most believe this is not achievable in the current economic climate. The debate now appears to rest on whether union money should be treated as single large donations or as multiple small donations from individual members' affiliation fees, and whether those affiliation fees should automatically go to Labour.

Union members could be given the option to donate their fee to another party in what would be the most radical shakeup of Labour's relationship with the unions in a generation, which would be fiercely opposed by union leaders.

"The thing we are going to have to decide is whether to bite the bullet and suggest public funding," the source said.

The committee, chaired by Sir Christopher Kelly, is due to meet on Thursday to decide the core issues. Nick Clegg, who is responsible for political reform, has promised to start cross-party talks on funding reform after the committee reports.

There is deep suspicion in Labour that senior ministers want to use the reforms to destabilise the financial foundations of the party. A spokesman said: "We would expect the Conservatives to stick to their promise that they will recognise that this issue needs to be resolved through cross-party consensus.

"We value the link with the trade union movement and any attempt to rewrite our constitution and deprive Labour of millions of working people's voices would leave politics a poorer place."

A Conservative spokeswoman said: "If the purpose of a cap is to deal with the perception that money can buy influence then it must apply equally to individuals, companies and trade unions, from whom the Labour party receives 85% of funding and who get extensive policy concessions in return."

A Liberal Democrat spokesman insisted that the coalition would not impose a deal on the parties. "The history of party funding reform is littered with corpses. You have to do it in consultation with the other parties," the spokesman said.

The analysis also reveals the impact a potential cap of £50,000 would have on all the political parties' already fragile balance sheets. Party accounts show that the Conservatives' extravagant spending at the last election – outspending Labour by two to one – and restructuring of their pension liabilities left them temporarily more in deficit last year, with a shortfall of £6.2m in 2010, which would jump by around £13m to £19.6m had their donations been capped at £50,000.

Despite its lower spending, the potential impact of the changes on Labour finances would be more severe, with more than £16m of funding disappearing from party coffers, transforming a surplus last year of £3.2m into a £13.5m deficit.

The Liberal Democrats' deficit of £335,000 expands to £1.9m. Labour separately has outstanding debts of nearly £10m, the Tories £2.6m and the Liberal Democrats £411,000.

Previous negotiations over funding failed in 2007 with the parties unable to agree a cap. Those were chaired by Sir Hayden Phillips, a former civil servant.

Phillips said the problem of the party funding system was "chronic". He urged the parties to make changes before the next scandal emerged.

But he warned that the hurdles facing reform have grown, because of the perceived closer links of the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, to the unions and because the economic climate makes it harder to justify public funding.

"When I produced my report and negotiated with the parties, public funding wasn't a big bone of contention. I think there would be much more reluctance now even though I still believe it is the right solution. The political party system is essential to democracy. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to provide a stake in the way parties are is funded."

Quand l'argent des donateurs disparaît

Une image qui fait pleurer et remplir les enveloppes retour.

Que devient l'argent versé par des donateurs quand surviennent de grands désastres ?

Est-ce la même chose offrir des dons pour les Japonais victimes du tsunami que pour les Haïtiens ?

Il est des questions auxquelles il vaut mieux ne pas répondre sinon on risque de mettre à mal un juteux pan du « charity business » qui engraisse toute une foule qui fait carrière dans l'humanitaire et enrichit les agences qui conçoivent leurs campagnes.

Car au fond des choses, l'argent versé par les donateurs sert avant tout aux donateurs à s'acheter une bonne conscience, aux humanitaires à vivre dans le monde virtuel qui est le leur et aux agences à faire bosser leurs équipes.

Quant à ce qui se passe quand les fonds qui passent à travers toutes les mailles du filet arrivent finalement dans un coin perdu du Tiers-Monde, il vaut mieux ne pas savoir.

En le criant trop fort, on risque de désespérer le café de Flore.

No tarp relief for Haiti's homeless

Individual Americans donated a total of $1.4bn after the 2010 earthquake, yet 600,000 Haitians are still living in tents. Why?
Mark Weisbrot in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 August 2011 18.32 BST

Haiti, in August 2011, awaiting tropical storm Emily, threatening further misery for the 600,000 earthquake survivors living in displacement camps. Photograph: AP
At a sprawling internally displaced persons (IDP) camp of battered tents and tarps, in the Barbancourt neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, a confrontation was underway. A landlord, who claimed ownership over land on which some 75 families had been living since the earthquake, was very angry. A crowd of hundreds had gathered and a man in his thirties said that the landlord had beaten him and destroyed his tent.

"These people have been here for 19 months and I want them out of here!" the landlord shouted. He was yelling in English now because a group of activists had arrived, including the actor and human rights campaigner Danny Glover. They were defending the camp residents, but the landlord wasn't having it.

Meanwhile, a group of heavily armed troops from Minustah – the UN military force that has occupied the country for the past seven years – came on the scene. They were tense and sweating in the morning heat, and as the confrontation continued and the crowd spilled into the street, another contingent of troops arrived, bringing the total to about 15.

Finally, a well-known human rights lawyer, Mario Joseph of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), showed up. He explained to the landlord – in another heated argument – that there was a legal and judicial process for evictions, and that as a matter of law, people could not be evicted without a court decision. The standoff came to an end, for the moment, as residents returned to the camp to avoid being locked out and possibly losing their possessions.

Nineteen months after the earthquake, almost 600,000 Haitian people are still living in camps, mostly under tents and tarps. Despite the billions of dollars of aid pledged by governments and donors since the earthquake, there are probably less than 50,000 that have been resettled. And for the 600,000 homeless, the strategy seems to be moving in the direction of evictions – without regard as to where they might end up.

"The government, in collaboration with international donors and some NGOs, is trying to pretend that there is no land," says Etant Dupain, an activist with the group Bri Kouri Novel Gaye (Noise Travels, News Spreads). His group is organising to stop the evictions, and he was present in the confrontation in Barbancourt on Saturday, where he tried to defuse the confrontation by talking to the landlord, whom he happened to know. "But there is land," Dupain said to the landlord. "They gave a big piece of land to Minustah, and this was cultivated land."

Indeed, this seems to be the heart of the problem: the international donors, led by the US, do not seem to care enough to resolve the problem by "building back better", as President Clinton promised after the earthquake. Or building much of anything, really. (Clinton heads up the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission – which, until recently, was called the Haiti Interim Reconstruction Commission; he is also the UN's special envoy to Haiti.)

A visit to another IDP camp called Corail, about 12 miles outside Port-au-Prince, makes this lack of commitment clear. About 10,000 people live in "transitional shelters", which are made of plywood and have a cement floor and corrugated steel roof. It's not exactly a house, but is a huge step-up from a tent or tarp, which floods in the rain and can be entered with a razor blade. The shelters are about 18sq m each and designed to last three to five years. Just across the fence, another 60,000 people are surviving in tents and tarps.

Building transitional housing would not be a long-term solution to the problem – people need to be resettled in permanent homes, and equally importantly, they need jobs – but transitional housing could be built for the entire IDP population at a cost of around $200m. This should be doable, considering that international donors have pledged $5.6bn since the earthquake (pdf).

But to do this, the government would have to acquire the necessary land. This is entirely constitutional, in many countries including the United States, and compensation could be provided to the landowners. Land ownership is, of course, very poorly documented in Haiti, but that is no excuse. The land could be acquired first and the owners compensated as their claims are settled. That is where the will is lacking, and the "international community" should bear most of the responsibility here, because in reality they are in charge.

Meanwhile, landowners – or those who claim to own the land which is occupied by about 1000 IDP camps – have stepped up their efforts at evictions, often through violence and coercion. Some have hired thugs with machetes and knives to destroy tents. In the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas, the mayor has ordered police to deploy, without a legal order to evict, destroying tents and using force to evict the residents – the majority of whom are women and children. With the compliance of NGOs, they have sometimes even cut off water supplies. In late May, a 63-year-old woman was killed when a security guard working for the landowner knocked her to the ground in the camp of Orphee Shada.

Some 94% of IDP camp residents have said they would leave if they could, according to a recent Intentions Survey from the International Organisation for Migration. They just have no place to go.

Half of all American households donated money to Haiti after the earthquake, for a total of $1.4bn in private donations; and the US Congress has appropriated more than $1bn in addition. Why can't this money be used to provide shelter for the victims of the earthquake, 19 months later?

Les « mères » de la place de Mai épinglées

Où sont passés les sous des mémés ?

Le quotidien de gauche britannique The Guardian publie ce matin un papier d'Annie Kelly sur le scandale qui frappe l'organisation qui a beaucoup fait pour dénoncer les excès de la répression militaire contre la guérrilla d'extrême-gauche durant les années soixante-dix en Argentine.

Annie Kelly ne s'est pas foulée et son enquête est superficielle. Il est fort probable qu'elle n'entend pas l'espagnol car elle ne donne aucun renseignement sur le contexte et sur le passé des escrocs. Heureusement, la presse argentine a fait son travail. Voir deux exemples plus bas.

Il est fort probable que nous n'en saurons pas davantage dans l'hémisphère nord sur cette affaire dans la mesure où les journalistes répugnent à mettre en lumière les scandales qui éclaboussent des organisations de gauche aussi emblématiques.

L'autre scandale concernant des victimes en Argentine est resté à ce jour sans écho en Europe. Les victimes des terroristes d'extrême-gauche font l'objet d'un traitement discriminatoire scandaleux alors que leurs bourreaux bénéficient de prébendes et fréquentent les allées du pouvoir.

Pour en revenir sur le scandale, il illustre un des obstacles majeurs au fundraising en Argentine, le manque de sérieux dans l'utilisation des fonds.

Scandal hits Argentina's mothers of the disappeared

Mothers of Plaza de Mayo's former legal adviser accused over misuse of funds as presidential ally fears election backlash

Annie Kelly in Buenos Aires

For more than 30 years the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have been a symbol of courage against adversity and the enduring battle against injustice.

Faut pas pousser. C'est une vision unilatérale par une bobo qui débarque de la première classe de British Airways sans rien vouloir connaître du contexte. Attention, le reste du papier est de la même farine.

Clad in white headscarves, the Mothers first appeared during the dark days of the Argentine dictatorship, a group of ordinary women valiantly facing down a brutal military government as they silently marched in front of Argentina's national congress demanding information about their missing children.

But now the headscarf has slipped as the Mothers have become engulfed in a corruption scandal that has stunned Argentina and could threaten to destabilise President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her government, just five months before national elections.

Last week the group was forced to fire one of its most high-profile executives over alleged misuse of funds meant for government-backed social housing projects. Prosecutors accuse the group's former legal adviser Sergio Schoklender, his brother and more than a dozen others of fraud and money laundering and of siphoning off substantial chunks of public money into personal businesses. Media reports allege that while Schoklender earned the equivalent of £13,000 to help Argentina's poor, he acquired an 18-room mansion, a yacht and sports car. Schoklender denies any wrongdoing.

La presse argentine est moins révérentieuse.

Kirchner was reportedly furious when news of the scandal broke, particularly given her close association with the group. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo split into two factions in 1986, and the largest and most powerful group – headed by the 82-year-old Hebe de Bonafini – is a huge political ally and public relations tool of her administration.

Kirchner's late husband, the former president Néstor Kirchner, went to great lengths to establish close ties with Bonafini and the Mothers, an alliance continued by her government after she was elected in 2007.

Few political rallies are complete without a white headscarf appearing prominently next to the president, who has staked much of her public reputation on championing human rights.

Kirchner's government has also helped the Mothers transform themselves from an advocacy group into a powerful anti-poverty organisation.

Since Bonafini declared in 2006 that "there is no longer an enemy in the Casa Rosada [Argentina's seat of government]", the Kirchner cabinet has handed the Mothers more than 187m pesos (£28m) to complete thousands of social housing projects. Last week opposition politicians claimed that only 35% of these projects had so far been completed and that the Mothers and federal officials had shown a shocking failure of responsibility to the Argentine people.

Influential union leaders and the heads of other human rights groups including Las Abuelas, the group of grandmothers working to identify babies stolen from political prisoners during the dirty war of 1976 to 1983, have all called for Bonafini to be formally investigated.

Bonafini, who helped found the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo after the disappearance of her two sons and daughter-in-law, denies knowledge of any wrongdoing and has accused the Schoklender brothers of being "traitors and scammers".

"The Schoklenders are one thing and the Mothers are a completely different thing," she told Argentine national radio. "We personally carried on with the battle to vindicate our children … and no one is going to hurt our public image."

Government officials are struggling to contain the scandal and preserve the integrity of the group's reputation.

Argentina's foreign minister Héctor Timerman stated that any attack on Bonafini was inextricably an attack on the government itself.

As the scandal gathers pace, some analysts have suggested it could cause Kirchner to delay announcing whether she will run for re-election in October as her party frantically works to distance itself from the allegations.

Shaming the dictators

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo came together during Argentina's military dictatorship between 1976-83 when some 30,000 suspected people were "disappeared' in state-sponsored violence against suspected leftwing subversives. In 1977 mothers of some of the disappeared started to meet every Thursday outside congress in Buenos Aires to demand information about their missing children. With the return to civilian government in 1983, the Mothers resisted the decision to pardon "dirty war" officials and vowed to continue their fight for justice.

In Argentina the enduring memory of the Mother's bearing placards covered with the faces of their disappeared children has helped them become a powerful political and social force in the decades since the fall of the dictatorship. They are widely considered Argentina's moral compass as the country still struggles to atone for the crimes of the past. They have also become one of the world's most renowned and respected human rights organisations.

Voici la version des mères de Mai :



Voici ce que dit un journaliste réputé :

Pourquoi donner 20000 £ de manière anonyme ?

Dans le Guardian, un article qui rapporte le don anonyme à une association caritative de la somme de 20 000 £ en espèces.

Pour remercier ce mystérieux donateur, l'association n'a rien pu faire d'autre que d'accrocher une banderole avec le mot « merci » au-dessus de la porte de leurs bureaux.

La campagne de presse de l'association pour rendre public ce don est aussi une manière indirecte de remercier ce donateur et d'encourager d'autres à suivre son exemple.

Man hands £20,000 in envelope to Cancer Research charity shop

Staff at Glasgow branch unveil banner thanking mysterious benefactor who delivered donation and left without saying a word

A mystery man walked into a charity shop and handed in an envelope with a £20,000 donation inside, then left without saying a word, it emerged today. Staff unveiled a banner at the shop with the words "thank you" to send a message to the mystery benefactor. Workers said it was the biggest donation they had "ever seen" at the shop. Volunteer Alexandra Macmillan, 48, was handed the envelope while helping at the Glasgow Cancer Research UK shop.
Ms Macmillan, who has been volunteering at the shop in Sauchiehall Street for nine years, said: "It was quite busy in the shop, so I thought he was just another customer. He didn't say anything, just smiled and handed me an envelope. Before I could say anything to him he had turned around and walked away.
"I took the envelope into the back room and gave it to the manager. We occasionally receive donations here, so I was hoping it might be a cheque for as much as £100.
"When we opened it up and found a banker's draft for £20,000 inside we literally couldn't believe what we were seeing. We had to read it several times before we were really sure we had just been given so much money."
Staff want to get a message to the generous man.
Shop manager Michelle Fulton said: "The man wasn't one of our regular customers and we didn't get the chance to say thank you, so we're all hoping he sees this and knows just how incredibly grateful we are for such a generous gift.
"I have been working at this shop for 15 years now, and this is far and away the biggest donation we have ever received.
"Occasionally, we are given a nice designer dress, or a cheque for a couple of hundred pounds, but this was in a different league altogether."
The envelope was handed in around three weeks ago.
Glasgow-based cancer researcher Dr Liam Faller, from the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, said: "Cancer Research UK is entirely funded by the public, so donations like this are crucial to our work. We all want this mystery man to know that all the money he donated will be carefully invested in finding new ways to treat, diagnose and prevent cancer."
Other donations to the charity's shops from mystery people have included a copy of the first Beano annual, which was given to the St Andrews shop in Fife in April this year and a rare Hermès handbag, worth more than £1,500, which was handed in to the shop in Pitlochry, Perthshire, in October last year.
The Beano annual sold at auction for more than £4,000, a spokesman for Cancer Research UK said.

L'appel de la rue

Des grandes associations comme Greenpeace font appel à des fundraisers de rue. Des jeunes étudiants qui gagnent quelques sous en sollicitant les passants. Mais est-ce une bonne idée ? Dans les colonnes du Guardian, Paul MacInnes begs to differ. Cliquez sur le lien pour voir le film.

Why do people hate chuggers?
Chugging, or street fundraising, is hated by the general public, as well as local businesses and government. Paul MacInnes attempts to find out why

Voici quelques uns des commentaires laissés par les lecteurs :


I hate them because very little of the money actually goes to the charity in question. The chuggers are mostly employed by fundraising agencies, and their commission is often more than 90% of the money they collect.



I can't stand the insincere little toss bags. Getting paid to guilt trip money out of people all day, they make me sick. And what with their ridiculous techniques to try to ensnare you, jumping out at you, waving their arms about, or asking you stupid, obvious inane questions, or pathetically emotive ones. They should be treated as beggars and moved along. Cattle prodding is to good for them.


One chugger shouted after me in the street, along the lines of "do you know how many puppies will die if you don't sign up". I should have gone back and decked him...


Surely they're no more hated than anyone who tries to grab you in the street to sell you something? It's just the intrusive sales tactics, nothing to do with what they're actually selling. 
(And to be honest, I hate pushy sales people in shops almost as much, but I guess they've got a small amount of justification, as you're on their turf).



Why? Easy. They're paid £50-60 per day, maybe more. Just how many punters need to sign up before any of the money finds it's way to a good cause? 
It's nothing more than begging, using the usual emotional blackmail, but given a patina of respectability by the fluorescent gilets and recognisable charity badges. 
Also, some of the twerps who do this need to realise that people who don't have the time or inclination to listen to their spiel perhaps don't necessarily avoid giving their money or time to charity, so perhaps should drop the snarky 'thank you' parting shot. 
Lunch breaks are short, people are busy, and there are more effective ways to assist charities.



The sanctimonious explanation given by the chugger in the video as to why people hate them is a good example of how annoying they can be. Most of them seem polite enough as long as you acknowledge their request though I have run into a few annoying ones who try to keep pace with you along the street. There's also the fact that you normally have to run a 'gauntlet' of 3/4 of them spread out in a row along the footpath.



When asked by said Chugger 'Excuse me Sir/Mate/Luv , do you have a minute?' I l always reply 'Yes thank you" and cary on walking.


I'd love to see some statistics on the amount of charitable giving in the UK over recent years. 
My guess is that charitable giving has increased considerably with a big increase in internet giving.
I think the problem we have here, and this is an issue that annoys people, is that we have a charitable industry being created that as some posters already point out, raises major questions over where "your" money will go if you hand it over in the street. 
Does your cash go to the charity's offical purpose? Or go on "administration"? Or go on employing chuggers?
As both main parties are keen to expand the role of charities in the future, I think it will be interesting to see what happens with the number of chuggers appearing on the streets.


Its the business plan that bothers me, the agency keeping most of the money and making interest out of the rest for a financial year. Its incredibly parasitic and cynical, and I find the implication that the chuggers themselves are unpaid volunteers to be dishonest. 
I'm not concerned by tactics, as I give them a flat "no" before they even start - I see no point in being rude for no reason, so I don't blank them, but I'm also not going to waste my time and theirs with insincere apologies.
I'll happily chuck spare change into a bucket, but I'll never sign anything or give away details and I wouldn't commit to regular donations anyway in this or any other economic climate. They'd do better with a bucket.




At first they were kind of novel, and it was/ is, a way to learn summat about "good causes", and I have chatted to a few chuggers; but that was back in my carefree early 30s, when living in laid-back Brizzle. Now as a busy Londonner and a sometimes put-upon Dad, in my grumpy 40s, I just don't have the time as I'm running for the tube, or the inclination. And besides, not all causes are equal. I couldn't give a toss about mangy old moggies, but I do give to Oxfam and Amnesty, and it didn't take a chugger to sign me up to them.



Let me see? 
Could it be that they are everywhere and you can't safely leave the office for coffee/lunch/meeting without meeting one. 
Could it be the insincere flattery about hair/clothes/smile in vain attempt to get you stop. 
Could it be the multicoloured yet interchangeable tabards that surely disguise the same person you saw last week selling a different charity. 
Or could it be their absolute inability to understand that I choose which charity to support and for how much and do so with every penny going direct!


You regularly find chuggers patrolling Park Street in Bristol. And don't think you can cross the road to avoid them - they usually work in pairs on both sides of the street. I once got stopped four times in one lunch hour. 
In the end I was practically running down the middle of the road windmilling my arms around.
The thing is if they were collecting change, I might donate. I'm just not keen on handing over my bank details to a complete stranger.
They can cut the cheery "Hey! How are you today" bull as well. We all know they're only being nice because they want our money.



I just blank them. I've only lost my wig twice, once when I was asked if I "Grew my own beard" (resp : "tosser") And once when I was stopped for a cancer charity. 
I did the usual blank, and he responded with "You wouldn't feel that way if you knew someone with cancer". I was actually walking up to the general hospital to pick up my girlfriend who was having chemotherapy. He wasn't to know that, but that doesn't make it any less of a horrible thing to say. I blew my top, a minute of shouty nastyness ensued, I pushed him, and he fell. 
It remains the only time in my 36 years when I've reacted to something with violence. 
But from day to day, I just completely blank them. They're stopping me while I'm walking the streets of my hometown, and hassling me for money - so I don't see why I should have to be polite to them. 
Most of them work for a company called "dialogue direct" have a look at their website. If you're really bothered by them, you should write to the charities they're collecting for, expressing how disappointed you are.


I dislike them personally. The money you end up signing away has to go to their wages. I've known several people who worked for a fundraising agency - I know for a fact that none of them give a shite what they are raising money for, it's just another commission to chase. I'm sure this isn't the case for every single chugger, but I do think it applies to the majority. I don't really want to pay the wages of these people, so I would rather give directly to a charity. 
As someone has pointed out above, an aggressive sales technique designed to not let you speak for several minutes and then guilt trip you for wasting their time when you don't sign up is bound to annoy people. 
However, despite all that, there is no doubt that chugging revenues are important to charities. I think therefore most useful thing you can do is get the full sales pitch from a chugger, and then if you are interested go and seek out the charity's website and donate directly to them. That way they get all of your cash, instead of a small percentage.


Oh, and forgot to mention the chugger that opened his spiel with "You've got a conscience, haven't you mate?" 
"No, I'm a robot. Bye."


What bothers me is always the implication that the effective prevention of child poverty, animal cruelty and leukaemia actually comes down to me wearing a sticker and parting with my last bits of silver. 
I just struggle with the idea that third world poverty is genuinely being best served by handing stickers out in a hi-visibility sash, and posting the odd tin of 20ps to an office above a video shop in Plumstead.


Just confront them with "Look m8, just forget about your comms and I may hand over some money for your favourite charity" see how quickly the conversation falls flat then.....


Reading these comments, I am a bit aghast to know just how much goes to the fundraisers. Have been giving to 3 of them, almost £50 pm, and all through chuggers - if I had known that the agencies keep so much, would never have given them anything and gone direct.



Beacuse they do not embody the spirit of charity and giving. Because they are often rude, insulting and confrontational. Because they harrass people, do not take no for an answer and chase you through the street. 
Other than bus drivers, they are the rudest people I have ever had the misfortune to come across. Is that a good enough reason?



It's fine to have a go at the chuggers, for all the reasons outlined above, but charities need ways to raise money and, like it or not, street fundraising is a very effective route, even taking account of the upfront cost when using an agency. 
Unfortunately very few of us spontaneously give to charities, we generally have to be asked. Unfortunately again this costs money, that dreaded admin that gets so many people exercised about when it comes to charity fundraising. 
Street fundraising doesn't just bring in short term income, it helps charities recruit more long term supporters, which is the holy grail for so many of them. It costs a lot of money up front, and comes with the very real risk of alienating a lot of people for the benefit of recruiting a small number. It's been an area of intense debate for many years within the charity world, and many charities have stopped using it, but no-one has come up with a better way of recruiting younger donors. Online giving has expanded hugely over the last few years but it is still small beer compared to more traditional ways of giving, and actually requires even more investment up front. 
Charities need to be more honest about how money is spent to raise money, but we the giving public need to be more honest and accepting about their need to spend money. It's all too easy to rationalise not giving to charity by saying all of the money donated is spent on admin, but that simply isn't the case. Most charities spend between 10 and 15% of what they raise on administration, the rest goes to the cause. The flipside of that is that any charity which says it doesn't spend anything on admin isn't being completely honest. Regular giving is a commitment, so it is worth having a look at the charity's annual report, which should be available on their website, before you make that commitment.


I have no problems with chuggers. If you don't want to talk to them, just walk on by. 
I'm not sure where 'blighty' has got the 'implication that they are unpaid'. If you have been told that by a fundraiser on the street, then take his/her badge number and speak to the Fundraising Standards Board, but don't act so shocked that they are paid. It's expecting a bit much from someone to think they are standing on the street asking for money on a voluntary basis, isn't it. 
All fundraising costs money. Websites, mailings, phone calls, everything. But it clearly works. Do you think that some of the biggest, most professionally run organisations in the country would use chuggers if they weren't making money from them?


I dislike running the 'gauntlet of guilt' but there's an upside. 
Find a cute one, pretend you're really concerned about their 'cause' and flirt shamelessly. I'm a 50-year-old male and it's not often I get approached by delightful young women in their 20s...the best bit is their reaction when they realise that I've been stringing them along.
Is that unfair? I don't think so - they're the ones who make the approach so it's tuff luck sweetheart!


I agree with christelle. My home town of Reading is regularly filled with four to six chuggers pestering you for the same cause. If it was one person I'd be inclined to say 'sorry, not interersted', but because you get 'approached' by all of them my attitude is to ignore them completely. I end up zig-zagging up the street to avoid them, and actively don't support any charities that use this approach.



Best response you can give them when they ask Do you have a minute? is to reply Do you want my time or my money? This usually baffles them for enough time for you to walk past. If they then say oh just your time a response, good I have lots of time by very little money works a treat.


Just give them a wild stare and shout "Fish!". They tend to back off...


Most of them work for a company called "dialogue direct" have a look at their website.


The UK arm went into liquidation last year, apparently.
http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/news/949042/dialogue-direct-fundraising-uk-goes-into-liquidation


I sometimes get the impression that "chuggers" have pre-concieved ideas about people before they speak to them. In which case, should they be doing the job in the first place?
I've met some really friendly people who've given me some useful information about their charity work. However I get the impression that some have a bit of a God complex when it comes the understanding of their given charitable cause.
If I was doing the job myself, (which I would be rubbish at), I would ask myself, why has that person put their head down and turned away. Again, I get the impression that many of the people I have met are quite insular in their understanding of the world and of people in general as they approach them.
Can you really sell a profession on the word mugging. It's not really a joke is it?


Because charities should be run ethically. And instead they employ people to walk the streets to bully people into donating, which is most likely to work on the most vulnerable members of society. That's why I hate them.


I think the general direction of this article is quite agreeable. Some of the above comments completely reaffirm the aforementioned needless hostility; "I should have gone back and decked him..." and the constant use of the word "hate".
Some of the reasons that have been given above are slightly superficial and are masking deeper problems that are an inevitable sociological factors of our culture's underlying philosophical issues and Britain's political ideologies (for instance, the angle in the clip is individualism and the private sphere).
Two disregarded, and perhaps more cynical explanations, are the public's general resentment for anyone who believes practical and theoretical ethics, ecology, religion and political philosophy have a place outside of class rooms and debating halls. This is some kind of ironic liberal dogma...The slightest moral judgement sounds to most people like a lack of tolerance that they think is entailed by cultural relativism, a misguided theory last popularly held by pre-fifties anthropologists! 
It could also be a resentment for students, young people, people who challenge their pre-verified basic beliefs about the world - for instance, when people get nervous around vegans, political demonstrators who don?t just do it because of youthful sense of thrill and just about anyone who cares about things they feel too guilty to consider... And a bundle of other common prejudices that are not based on rational assumptions (yes, some may be).
Sadly, people think these workers are egoists, or even worse, smart-arsed grifters, but the fact is, even if they pocketed 90%, at least they contribute slightly towards something that they think is important, and yes, such things are "pathetically emotive" and "obvious", but that does not mean that such 
things are not important in an objective (not absolute or universal) sense. It may be a job rather than a purely altruistic cause, but it is still helping more than working in almost anywhere else on the high street they stand on.
How many people will think this and tell themselves 'I know more than them about world politics', 'I am already a vegan', 'I already give to a charity', but do not know exactly how ineffective their charity is, or how consequentially flawed their principles are? It's this esoteric reaction that maintains an inability to overcome understandable ignorance, such as the consequences of where you buy your clothes, lunch, and pharmaceuticals. No one can only promote good or right consequences (whatever your teleological values are), nor assess the outcomes of every action. However, it is clear that you don't have to be a rule-worshipping deontologist or hedonist because of these human limits! you can instead uphold principles that can be constantly held up to challenge and can evolve through philosophical dialogue... oh yes, but you only have an hour lunch break so you can't.... please.
You do not have to have a PHD in philosophy or read that much more than the guardian or other insulated pompous nonsense to do such things, just drop the defensive attitude and consider that the annoying chuggers and their tedious tactics may actually be highlighting things that you do not fully understand. A less sceptical and more open mindset does not mean that you are a hippy with little epistemic basis and a childish sense of social injustice.
Moral laziness occurs when we use unconsidered, yet reasonable sounding arguments to silence our moral emotions, such as those concerning the flaws of religion, relativism, evolutionary theory, egoism, determinism and the attitude of all or nothing - 'what's the point - I can't change things'... Such things may be very reasonable, but whenever I hear people's wacky arguments for why, say, they have chosen to adopt a Nozick or Hayek-sounding view on the free market, it?s based on misconstrued historical information, and what someone even less intellectually motivated told them.. many journalists talking about things that they are unqualified in, which is fine, but then act as though they are an authority...take the time to look at these things yourselves.. Do not read extreme attention grabbing books by Singer and Chomsky and then go the other way either, weigh it all up.
Although I am not denying that the chuggers are flawed in the same way, I am claiming that maybe we should be more mitigating when moaning about their 'selfishness' and cheek.


So many predictable and one-sided comments here so far. 
My theory of street fundraising is based on my own experience. I signed up to two charities in the street because I supported both causes and never got round to do anything about it. If you have been meaning to give to a / the charity you will stop, and if you are too stingy to give you don't. .If you don't give, you will complain about the method of fundraising and if you do you won't. Simple as that! 
It is so easy to blame the fact that street fundraisers are paid as a reason not to give, but why are we all so pious and bloody mean? Do we all want chairtable causes to raise as much dosh for their chosen cause as possible? Yes we do! Do we like being targeted at? No we don't! That is the nub of it.
When you consider that the average person in the UK gives less than one per cent of their annual income (that is 0.9p in every pound) charities should be allowed to ask us to give more without being attacked. Average giving has fallen by 11% in amount given and the number of people giving has fallen by 2% which shows that chairities do need to ask us even more, and if that means pay people to do so then so be it.
Bear in mind that the street fundraisers are normally asking us to give £10 per month. That is less than 30p a day. It is peanuts! Yet, £240million - or therabouts - was raised from the street last year, so it clearly does work.
I hate them because very little of the money actually goes to the charity in question.


says @jonbyrce, but do you or we ask the same question to Tesco's about how much of our money goes to the farmer when we pay the cashier for the 6 pints of milk that we have just bought? No we don't! 
As I have said earlier, I believe that when it comes to giving we tend to give to charities where there is a personal or emotional connection first. (How many individuals give to homeless charities who have actually been homeless or known anyone to be homeless? Very very few.) We also limit our giving by the number of chairties that we give to rather than the amount that we give overall. Finally, we begin to search our souls for excuses not to give!
Interesting that there are no complaints from those who have signed up on the street? The bottom line is that we can all give more if we want to!


I work for a charity and I understand how hard it can be to raise money but these people are being paid to harrass people and if my employers start using chuggers I'll no longer support them. Walking through my town is like running a gauntlet of rude, pushy, idiots being paid to bully money out of people for whichever is the charity of the day. I know you have to spend money to make money but there are more ethical ways of doing it.


I agree with out of bubble and sue and probably others. (BTW I don't like turning to a page and finding a video starting -although at least there wasn't an advert. Sort it out, Guardian.) However, from the video you can see that the chugger you interviewed thinks he's morally superior to the passers-by and presumes to know what it is people in a metropolis are thinking. Crazy. You wonder if they were born of human parents.


@YouSillySoren - good read, I think you're quite accurate.
I ignore chuggers because I have made the decision to contribute at my choosing. I also don't carer much for my time being taken up - 99% of the time I'm on a town/city street I'm going somewhere I want to be and don't appreciate being held up.
I'm happy to plead selfishness, but I'd prefer to be selfish than hateful & bile-filled based on wild assumptions, like many of the posters here.


I hate the ones that skip towards you, have purple hair, and a Home Counties accent.


A simple "Chug off", said with a smile works for me.
An organisation I worked for used them, and oh, the embarrassment at knowing that.


Because their sales pitch is akin to those TV ads that ask: "Do you have spare gold lying around that you no longer NEED?"
Sure I have - I'm tripping over the bloody stuff. Can't give it away.
I'll tell you what, though - I WILL donate to the charities I feel are deserving of what little disposable income I have, that I have researched myself and who don't solicit me on the street/my doorstep.


Personally, I quite like signing up - especially if there is a free gift involved. Oh, and then cancelling the direct debit mandatre before they get a penny. Any Charity that uses these methods to get money deserves what it gets. I donate direct.


Bear in mind that the street fundraisers are normally asking us to give £10 per month. That is less than 30p a day. It is peanuts! Yet, £240million - or therabouts - was raised from the street last year, so it clearly does work.


But cycleloopy...how much did the chugger-pimps get?


I don't like the practice of chugging, but to be fair, the chuggers I come across (in Southampton city centre) are generally polite, and it's not a job I'd like to have to do. Usually a polite "no thanks" works for me. 
I'm more bothered by door-to-door chuggers: recently I've had a couple of visits at home from a woman claiming to represent the Red Cross. She wasn't rude as much as over-familiar - call me old-fashioned but when somebody knocks on my door and starts addressing me as "mate" my hackles rise immediately. 
I give a monthly donation to a well-known charity whose work I admire, but they wind me up by calling me every few months to try to get me to increase my donation. I wouldn't mind so much, but after 20 minutes of listening to heartfelt pleas about the importance of their work, I then find out that it's an agency worker who's reading from a script and probably doesn't give that much of a toss about their work in any case, provided I cough up. 
(And I second tunaalbacore's comment about the video starting immediately on this page.)


As far as I know, if you sign up with a chugger, none of your money is going to the agency. It's all going direct to the charity. The charity actually pays the chugging agency a set amount for each sign-up as long as the direct debit isn't cancelled by the donor within a set time frame. 
(How it works could've been explored in this video instead of MacInnes 'have a go' showboating.) 
I used to be chugger. I hated it. Mainly because the large majority of people you were able to stop were the more vulnerable, poorer elements of society like students and the unemployed. They usually ended up making up your daily targets. The richos never stopped. 
But I can't understand the ire from some posters on CiF. I'd rather see chuggers out on the street than mobile advertising hoardings that promote adulterous dating sites ('Encounters' - saw it yesterday) or people trying to get you to buy a gym membership, or the ones that ask if you've had an accident in the last 3 years. Or Tory canvassers.


I hate the Triangle Chuggers; perma-features of and around Dublin's Grafton Street. 
You know... you're walking along, minding your own business, and then, suddenly... you spot a yellow-jacketed shark dead ahead, already launching into a cod-friendly: "Hey man, have you got a minute?" 
So, you involuntarily lurch to the right... where a second Chugger awaits, who's immediately lumbering towards you with a clipboard and a leaflet. Panic ensues, and you decide to barrel straight down the middle, between them... 
Rookie mistake. 
After all, that's where the third Chugger awaits, dead ahead, usually with both hands up like an American Footballer, launching into: "Excuse me mate, I just want a quick word..." 
Classic Chugger Tiangle, aimed at maximising revenues - and annoyance.


Listen to one of the chugger's suggestions as to why members of his profession are ignored: passersby may feel "guilted-out", he says, which presumably gives this master of vapid doublespeak the moral high ground over others who may already be contributing to one or more charities of their own unprompted choice.


A lot of sanctimonius bleating here - you'd think refusing to give to charity was an act of courageous moral fibre. Does anyone honestly think charities would do this if it wasn't cost effective? 
Anyway it's those costumed tits from Gym Box I hate.


I work for a charity and cannot afford to employ the services of chuggers. Judging by some of the comments here, this might be a blessing in disguise.


It's the guilt trip they try to impose on you that's so offensive. The pressure they try to exert is based on confronting you in a public place and creating a sense, however unjustified, that if you don't give to them you are being mean. The point is though, how the hell does a chugger know what I give to charity already and what right does he or she have to try and make me feel under pressure to explain myself in public. Personally I plan my charitable giving the same way I plan any other outgoing so I'm never going to sign up to a direct debit on the street no matter what the charity. Any conversation with a chugger is a waste of their time and mine.
Anyway if I don't feel like having to brush them off there is a fool-proof way to stop them approaching you as you go past. Just whip out your phone and pretend to be on a call. They never come near.