Why are our taxes funding pro-migration activists?

My human rights campaign, your culture war politics

What is charity? It’s a question that ethicists have pondered for a very long time indeed. Of course, you don’t need a philosophy degree to have a rough idea about what the concept means in practice. For the vast majority of people, ‘charity’ is the voluntary process

Of course, what we may think of as common sense - that charity is an independent, apolitical process - is not what the law mandates. As with most of our bad legislative reforms, New Labour were the forerunners. In 2006, after years of secondary legislation, Blair redefined ‘charitable purposes’ in the Charities Act to include the advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation or the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity. 

The Conservative Party then reaffirmed the reforms in 2011. Prior to these changes, a charity that sought to promote inclusivity would have to provide evidence that their activities promoted religion or education or gave some tangible benefit to the community. Essentially, the Conservative Party granted express permission for controversial organisations to benefit from charitable status: Left-wing political goals suddenly became defined as non-political in the eye of the law. 

What does this then mean in practice? Or rather, in praxis? Let’s take a look at one example of a thriving charitable organisation that benefited from these reforms - a group called (of course) ‘Praxis’. If you’ve spend much time around Left-wing academics, you may be familiar with the term. Marx uses the term "praxis" to refer to the free, universal, creative and self-creative activity through which man creates and changes his historical world and himself. The charity itself affirms this connection, stating that “Our name comes from the Ancient Greek term praxis, which means turning theoretical knowledge into practical action. Throughout the centuries its concept has been enriched by philosophers like Marx, Gramsci, and Arendt.”

Praxis is a charity engaged in immigration activism. The group states that its mission is to ‘deliver direct services: providing specialist legal advice and holistic welfare support to help

people live securely and safely’. In practise, this means Praxis uses foundation money to push to liberalise laws over allowing asylum seekers with unprocessed claims to work, and helps migrants gain access to public money. It achieves this through a combination of direct community outreach and government lobbying (of course, done in a way that doesn’t *technically* break their charitable status). The group has campaigned against the ‘hostile environment’ and celebrated the blocking of commercial flights meant to deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda. 

So far, so political. Not that this matters. Praxis is a particularly successful charitable organisation: last year they received £2,378,165. Of this, £380.73k was from donations and legacies, and £1.99m from charitable activities. Of their total income, £599,334 comes from government contracts. This means the UK government provides around 30% of their total income. The British state is directly funding a ‘charitable’ organisation that is lobbying politicians to liberalise immigration laws that are already significantly more lax than desired by the public. 

Our laws are indisputably biased towards far-Left organisations, while unfairly penalising ideologically-aligned groups that have a Right-wing program. Migration Watch - a group that represents the wishes of the British electorate as supported by countless polls - is a company limited by guarantee. The only difference between the two groups is that Praxis pushes an open-borders agenda that is allowed to be defined as ‘promoting racial harmony’, while Migration Watch is boxed-in as a lobbying organisation for disputing immigration orthodoxy. As a friend once remarked to me: "My human rights campaign, your culture war politics".