A couple of weeks ago during a quick trip to London me and ZYY attended a Free Speech Union talk on the problems apostates from cultish religions experience, in which a very brave, highly intelligent and articulate woman, Khadija Khan, told of the very real dangers Muslim apostates face.
After the talk we chatted with some of the attendees, one of whom, John, told us a story that reminded me just how vicious the Left really is. His story was written up by Toby Young, and although it is a few years old, I think it worth re-telling as it does show the Left for what it is, and that is not the all-inclusive, kindly, caring face it to tries to present to public.
John was a regular participant in Zoom meetings held by South London Cares, a charity set up by Alex Smith, an ex-Labour spin doctor and aide to mad Ed Miliband, that existed, it says, to introduce older people living on their own to community-minded young professionals and so alleviate loneliness. John was then 74-year-old, a retired civil servant, and the charity provided him regular opportunities to meet his neighbours.
John is well-travelled, broad-minded and tolerant of other people’s traditions, and bears no ill-will to anyone on grounds of skin colour. He was ill-prepared, therefore, for the events following a December 2020 Zoom meeting called “South London Stories”. One of the young participants raised the subject and expressed disapproval of Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), regarded in Holland as a loyal servant of St Nicholas who helps distribute gifts to children. Men dress up as Zwarte Piet to hand out sweets and cakes, often wearing curly wigs, bright red lipstick and blackface.
Needless to say, Zwarte Piet has been the subject of considerable controversy, with the usual far-Left dismal Johnnies claiming that the character reflects colonialism and is, of course, racist. Nonetheless, he remains popular in Holland and most Dutch support the tradition and say they don’t regard Zwarte Piet as racist at all.
In the Zoom discussion one the elderly participants also expressed disapproval of Zwarte Piet and John sensed that the South London Cares employee leading the talk very much expected everybody in the group to do the same. But John did not go along with it. He didn’t know much about Zwarte Piet and, reasonably, was disinclined to either defend or criticise the tradition and so, when it was his turn to speak, he merely said he didn’t find the character particularly offensive.
Now a reasonable person might disagree with that, but what followed was far from reasonable. After the Zoom meeting ended, John got a call from South London Cares and was told he’d given the wrong answer: Zwarte Piet was a racist tradition and perpetuated a stereotype of black people as subordinate and unintelligent.
The caller acknowledged that, in describing the character as inoffensive, John did not intend to offend, but even so his comment had been recorded as an “overt act of racism” and, in true Stalinist/Maoist fashion, he was given a formal warning and told that he must apologise to the group and admit his error in thinking and promise never to do it again. If he failed to apologise he would be given a “red notice”, and expelled from the group.
Needless to say, John was somewhat taken aback. He had thought the charity wanted to make people like him feel wanted. The charity’s website carried stories like that of an 86-year-old saying about a 30-year-old volunteer that “I don’t feel like I have to watch what I say around her – we talk about race, religion, upbringing, all sorts, ” and another about Tim, reported as saying about the charity that “I can talk to anybody about anything!.
Reasonably, John had thought he could talk in a relaxed, unguarded way with the group, but here was an intolerant, self-righteous, arrogant young man threatening him with social exclusion if he didn’t sign up to the charity’s childish race obsessed ‘anti-racist agenda’, making John feel like he was being made to apologise on behalf of the white race for the sins – least as much engaged in by African, Arabs, Asians, Orientals and so on - of colonialism and slavery.
John politely explained that he had nothing to apologise for and a few weeks later he received an official letter telling him he’d been banned. Yes, that’s right, a charity set up to help the elderly engage with neighbours banned him for not sharing the fake, posturing and infantile outrage that the far Left’s obsession with race requires from all, on pain of excommunication or worse.
John has said that he should have realised earlier what the charity was really all about when it posted a gushing statement about the “inspirational leadership” of Black Lives Matter, containing the usual far-Left nonsense about “systemic racism in our communities “and its commitment to rooting out “systemic injustices built up over centuries”, which John thought that was written by a political organisation.
As Toby Young said, “To my weathered eye, there was another explanation: South London Cares, like so many other charities, may have been captured by the woke cult. The reason the executives of these charities all sound like they’re reciting from the same script is because certain words and phrases – “systems of oppression”, “our blind spots and inactivity have led to failings”, “anti-racist learning and training” – have taken on a liturgical significance. It’s a way for these activists to signal their fealty to the cult – the equivalent of loyalty oaths. So South London Cares may now have a new purpose. Instead of mobilising young professionals to provide support and companionship to older people, its mission is to re-educate these unenlightened dinosaurs — creating a valuable social network and then threatening them with excommunication if they don’t produce the right Pavlovian responses to “racist stereotypes”.
In the letter John got telling him he was no longer welcome was a long list of thoughtcrimes he’d committed, including “microassaults”, “microinvalidation” and “microinsults” (“Suggesting a black volunteer and black neighbour may get along based on skin colour”), any one of which was enough to trigger an “amber” warning. As Toby Young also said “I cannot think of many 74-year-olds who would emerge from a Zoom session with one of these Red Guards without blotting their copybook.”
South London Cares, of course, received money from the State (expropriated from the taxpayer), as well as Comic Relief, the Mercer’s Company and Deutsche Bank. Its website included endorsements from Theresa May, Sadiq Khan and Tracey Crouch, the ex-Minister for Loneliness (sic), reflecting the fact that very many ‘charities’ are now State-funded and highly politicised organs of the Woke Globalist establishment, willingly peddling its intolerance. Obedience to woke globalist dogma is now the norm, from the National Trust to the RNLI. Even the British Legion and it’s Poppy Appeal has succumbed.
Many so-called charities are almost entirely funded by the State – so long as they use the money to further State-approved orthodoxy. Former government advisor Nick Seddon described government departments use of government-funded charities to carry out research that supports government policy, giving the example of the National Family and Parenting Institute (97% state funded) and NCH (88% state funded) produced ‘Families and the State: an inquiry into the relationship between the state and the family’ which is indistinguishable from an ‘an official government report and full of the usual crap about equality and diversity, and inevitably calling for more State intervention.
In 2021, the Leftist Civil Society said that the UK government gave away “somewhere between £500m and £35bn” to charities, depending on how you define a charity and the precise nature of the grant or donation. It is not too much of a stretch, in my opinion, to compare the British government’s funding of reliably woke ‘charities’ with the way USAID was used in the US to further the Biden regime's globalist agenda.
Indeed, the fascist hate-peddling Hope not Hate is classed as a charity which appears, in one way or another, to receive money from government, national and local. The link to the charity commission’s website indicates that its income in 2023 was £418, 237, but its expenditure was £749,578. How is that possible? Somebody must be helping it, and we know that the Starmer regime holds it in high regard, to the extent that it ignored a direct incitement to violence that demonstrably resulted in serious violence, unlike the comments on Facebook for which folk got serious jail time.
However, to end on a happier note, the vindictive South London Cares mob are no more. Bust. Go woke go broke. Please be very careful about which charity you donate to, as the chances are it will be as woke as an unattended alarm clock.
And if possible, work to stop government giving taxpayer’s money away to its shock-troop charities.