The left has long had a prickly relationship with charitable activity, from Clement Attlee’s denunciation of charity as “a cold, grey, loveless thing”, to more recent Labour leaders’ reluctance to defend tax breaks for charitable donors.
The essence of the Left’s case against charity is that it encourages a belief that private initiative and self-help can provide public goods and thus undermines support for state-organised and tax-funded welfare. From this perspective reliance on charitable endeavour is inevitably associated with inadequate and inequitable provision. George Lansbury said he would not accept ‘charity as a substitute for social justice,’ while the NHS was intended to overcome the inherent weaknesses of what Nye Bevan called ‘the caprice of charity’. David Cameron’s repeated – if oft ridiculed – belief in a ‘Big Society’ with an expanded role for charitable activity, has reinforced the view that the public sector and the charity sector are substitutes rather than complements.
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