Voluntary sector dominated by Labour and Liberal Democrat sympathisers

A survey of 700 voluntary sector staff by ThirdSector magazine found very strong support for Labour:

Much of the voluntary sector has become so dependent upon government funding that it is hardly voluntary at all. In return for massive government funding charities have increasingly echoed government policy positions. There is also enormous recycling of staff between central government, local government and the voluntary sector.

The most innovative poverty-fighting work is taking place in the smaller community-based groups.  The Conservatives should change the whole model of public sector funding of third sector organisations. Instead of direct grants, public money should only go to charities that successfully raise money from private sources through tax relief and matched funding programmes. There should also be voucherisation of funding so that money follows the choices of service users. The current Tory approach to the voluntary sector is managerial. It's an approach that won't produce a more diverse charity sector and it doesn't appear to be appealing to voluntary sector professionals either.

Tim Montgomerie

Millions of pounds of the DfID aid budget has been granted to the Trades Union Congress

6.15pm update:

Responding to the issues raised below, Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, has told ConservativeHome:

“We should of course work with free trades unions in developing countries, who represent some of the world’s poorest workers. But funding for this should be specifically targeted and earmarked, not given unrestrictedly to the TUC in Britain. Labour have some very serious questions to answer about how they are spending aid money which is supposed to go to people in some of the poorest countries in the world.”

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The International Policy Network has published a report this week about the "political abuse" of Britain's foreign aid budget. The IPN summarises its findings:

In a report in 2009, International Policy Network disclosed that between 2003 and 2006 the Trades Union Congress received over £1.2 million in taxpayers' money ostensibly intended for promoting development in poor countries. A significant amount of this money - which came from the UK Department for International Development (an entity created by the Labour Party in 1997) - was spent in the UK on activities that do not seem to have yielded any practical benefit to the poor either inside or outside of Britain.

Subsequently, IPN discovered that the TUC was recently granted a further £2.4 million by DfID for the period 2009 - 2011. The new support to the TUC comes from funds intended for large international development NGOs with a track record in poor countries. It’s unclear why this trend has been broken to fund a British trades union.

To make matters worse, unions that are members of the TUC represent over half the funding of the Labour Party. Since the DfID grants to the TUC come with few constraints, it is possible that DfID's money could essentially substitute for money that would otherwise come from member unions - freeing them up to give more to the Labour Party.

Julian Harris, Research Fellow at IPN and co-author of "A Closer Union: The Political Abuse of Foreign Aid", said, "This would appear to be a grotesque abuse of taxpayer funds. Not only is the money not going towards promoting economic development in poor countries - it is going to a group whose members have close political and financial ties to the Labour Party."

There is more on the IPN website.

Jonathan Isaby

The Director of Public Prosecution's socialist past

Yesterday Mr Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, criticised Chris Grayling's suggestion that householders may need more rights to protect themselves from intruders.

It is not the first time Mr Starmer has distanced himself from Tory policy. He has also defended the Human Rights Act against Tory plans to replace it.

Mr Starmer has a history of left-wing activism. As a student he edited a publication called Socialist Alternatives. Judicial activism worries conservatives and Starmer was seen to have taken an activist stance last year when he adopted new guidelines that appeared to accommodate assisted suicide. When The Guardian profiled him after his appointment in August 2008 he was reported as a "Labour supporter".

Mr Starmer is another example of Labour's dominance of "appointment-land"; a dominance that will continue even if the Labour party loses its Commons majority next year.

Tim Montgomerie

Twenty-five taxpayer-funded groups that should lose their welfare cheques

By Matt Sinclair of The TaxPayers' Alliance.

Yesterday, LeftWatch followed up on its attack on the taxpayer-funded Family and Parenting Institute's intervention in the political debate over whether marriage should be recognised in the tax system.  Ed West, at the Telegraph, has argued that taxpayer funded campaigning 'charities' should have their funding cut.  The new blog asked "What other taxpayer funded charities should lose their welfare cheques?"

Happily, I can report that we've produced a detailed report on this issue at the TaxPayers' Alliance, Taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning (PDF), which contains a nice big list of taxpayer funded campaigns to cut.  That report argued that, as well as introducing a law emulating the American restriction on the use of taxpayers' money to hire lobbyists, the Conservatives should cut funding from the following groups, which are primarily political campaigns or pressure groups:

Trade associations

• The Local Government Association - £14.8 million
• The NHS Confederation - £7.0 million
• The Association of Police Authorities - £1.4 million

(These groups do some actual work for the public sector so the figures above are only the membership subscription fees from public sector organisations paying for representation).

We need a list of taxpayer-funded charities that should lose their welfare cheques

On LeftWatch's first day we highlighted the government connections of Katherine Rake, who attacked Tory family policy on Radio 4 yesterday and was presented to the nation without reference to those connections.

Today's Daily Mail opened fire on Ms Rake in a typical all-guns-blazing-way.

Over at The Telegraph Ed West comments on LeftWatch and calls for the Conservatives to dismantle "taxpayer-funded 'charities'".

These charities will, James Forsyth predicted, be in the frontline of the battle against any Conservative government. Labour may lose elected office next May but they'll stay in power throughout the quangocracy and appointment-land.  One of the first acts of any Tory government should be to end government funding of all charities with a political agenda. Stonewall, for example, should lose its money. Ben Summerskill's political ranting against the Conservatives shouldn't continue at all our expense.

Conservatives should protect themselves from accusations of being anti-gay or whatever other charge will be thrown by these state dependents by channeling 50% of the saved money to genuinely good causes in that same field of work. The Family and Parenting Institute's funding can go to local community groups working with families in the inner cities, for example. The other 50% can make a contribution to repaying Brown's debt.

What other taxpayer funded charities should lose their welfare cheques?

Welcome to LeftWatch

Although LeftWatch will look at the SNP, Greens, Liberal Democrats and other left-leaning movements we are most interested in the Labour Party.

I suggest the following trends within Labour should be our focus...

This is evident in, for example, the retirement of nearly all the leading Blairite MPs, Harriet Harman's equality agenda and Gordon Brown's embrace of the impractical, job-destroying Tobin tax.

Labour's reckless spending is their last throw of the dice.  The spending buys them some extra votes, they hope, but certainly adds to the awful inheritance for the Conservatives if it doesn't.  Peter Oborne has written a great article on this phenomenon.

Not unrelated to the previous category but please help us compile examples of wasteful Labour.  Grant Shapps MP exposed Labour's £30,000 champagne bill this morning.  The bubbly was, of course, all bought at your expense.  And there there are the big examples of massive waste.

I recently wrote about the increasing nastiness of Labour's campaigning.  The McBride emails.  The smearing of Michael Kaminski by David Miliband.  Harriet Harman's attempts to bracket the Tories and the BNP.  ConHome regular Mark Fulford is working on a list of Labour's biggest lies.

There is also the huge issue of the appointees that Labour will leave behind in the quangocracy and appointment-land more generally.  Dennis Sewell has written a brilliant cover piece for The Spectator on this subject.  Even if Labour lose the next election, much of the British state will still be stuffed with left-leaning appointees, like Katherine Rake.

Are these the best categories?

This site is an experiment. Jonathan Isaby and I don't have the time to run another blog so this will only work if you feed us content.

Email me if you can help.

Who was that woman attacking Tory policy on marriage this morning?

At 0853am this morning the Today programme interviewed Katherine Rake of the Family and Parenting Institute. She used her three minute twenty second slot to attack the Tory idea that marriage should be recognised by the tax system. She avoided a question about the evidence that shows marriage is much more stable than cohabitation and continued her political talking points.

She was presented as an independent expert on family policy but who is she and what is the Family and Parenting institute?

Katherine Rake was until recently a very regular contributor to The Guardian and ran the Fawcett Society.  In a profile to mark her departure from seven years of running the Fawcett Society, she was described by The Guardian as "Feminism's calm champion".

The Family and Parenting Institute is nearly entirely funded by the taxpayer.  In 2008/9 £9.5m of the Institute's income of £11.8m came from the Department of Children, Schools and Families via the Parenting Fund.

When the media has people like Ms Rake on to bash Tory policy on the family or ex-Labour man Ben Summerskill, now of the government-funded Stonewall lobby group, to bash the Tories on gay equality we should know a lot more about their background.

So many organisations dependent upon government money are run by people who please the government.

5.45pm: I'm grateful to Mark Clarke in the comments for pointing out that Fiona Millar - Alastair Campbell's partner - chairs the Family and Parenting Institute.