Christopher Snowdon:
IEA Discussion Paper No. 45
February 2013
It is not
precisely news that a large number of organizations that assume the mantle of
charities with all the public approval (vague but widespread) that it implies
are, in reality, funded by the state that uses taxpayers’ money often to ensure
that the organizations in question pursue a political line that is of benefit
to it. Nevertheless, this knowledge is carefully hidden, partly by the
organizations in question but partly by the public’s own desire not to know the
truth, which might result in a completely new way of looking at “settled”
notions or supposed right and wrong.
It is, however,
useful to have some chapter and verse as we get in this pamphlet and its
predecessor, the IEA’s Paper No. 39, also by Christopher Snowdon, published
last June and entitled Sock Puppets – How the government lobbies itself and why.
Both papers
enumerate organizations that receive money from the government or the EU, which
would not exist without that input and which do not, therefore, need to answer
to their donors about their activity as charities. Many of them are really
lobby groups, coincidentally or not, lobbying for policies that the government
or the EU (it is often hard to tell the difference) want to push through and
which are not particularly popular with the populace.
With the Euro
Puppets there is a further complication: the EU, by and large an unpopular
project imposed on the population of various member states by the political
elites, has felt for some years that it needs to find some credibility with
that population. As it is not about to become accountable or less centralized (au contraire), let alone less devoted to
the ideas of regulating every aspect of life it can lay its hands on, it has to
think of another solution. One presented itself almost immediately, an adapted
version of something instituted in the early Soviet years: the creation of
something called civil society. This is an expression that is used more and
more and particularly by transnational organizations of which the EU is
particularly important as its aim is to become a state (not something it hides
or is particularly ashamed of. Such organizations have no accountability and
their credibility has to rely on emotionalism rather than political structures,
just as the governance they try to impose is managerial (sometimes openly as it
happened recently in a few EU member states, sometimes less so, as in normal EU
legislation). They, therefore, announce that certain organizations to do with
social activity are the real civil society. It just so happens that those
organizations are ones either founded or approved of by the governing
structures and, as the Euro Puppets
demonstrates, funded by them. A closed and rather vicious circle is created:
the unaccountable and managerial governance “proves” its credibility by
pointing to the support given it by the civil society that consists of
organizations it has created and approved that will never display any kind of
independence. Needless to say, we are paying for it and for the legislation
that those organizations campaign for.
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