In all of the excitement of the Independence Referendum, it would be easy to overlook that the 19th September 2014 as being a significant date for more people than just those concerned about the state of the Union. It also marks the day when Charities will need to put up or shut up as far as any activity that could be deemed to be Party Political in nature in the run up to the 2015 General Election. If these organisations (it does not just apply to charities) are likely to campaign on matters that could later be judged to favour one political party over another, and they are likely to spend some of the budget or resources in kind in doing so, they may need to register in a similar manner to which political parties register their involvement in the campaign. Some charities have already registered, in some cases as much out of caution as out of intent. However the obligations of being registered are not simply a matter of putting a name on a document and there will be an ongoing administration cost associated with registration, to be borne by the charities donors.

As I have written previously, the insidious impact of the legislation which directs charities to register in this way, is that many other charities will hold their counsel or modify their approach to certain issues, to avoid any prospect of falling foul of the rules. There is also a challenge for the charities to anticipate what the parties will campaign on. Although we have been in a faux election campaign for about 12 months, none of the political parties have so far published their election manifesto, so charities may well be campaigning on matters that in due course will be seen to be party political.

I wrote on the 4th September about controversial remarks made by Brooks Newmark, the charities Minister. He has since met with at least one senior charity representative whose account of the meeting suggests that Mr Newmark, despite an unfortunate choice of words (something to do with knitting) seems to be keen to support charities and only wants to prevent them from getting drawn into party politics which has been illegal for many years in any case. We all misspeak and I would be the first to hold my hand up to having said things I later regret. However Mr Newmark has a key role as far as charities are concerned and his words in speeches and Q&A sessions are bound to be listened to very carefully. The same is true of his twitter timeline. Over the last week he has tweeted quite a bit about his meetings with charities and support for them. This is great news, but of course his association with a charity and one of their campaigns, particularly if that then appeared to influence the Tory Party manifesto could be getting the charity into trouble. He is after all a Politician, hoping to get re-elected personally, and for his party to be returned to power. Mr Newmark has also tweeted in response to comments made by others. One of these was in relation to the blog by Stephen Bubb as referred to above. Another was to point to a blog by a chap whose nomme de plume is ‘Guido Fawkes’. Mr Fawkes has a reputation for favouring right wing causes, I don’t follow his blog so can only comment about this particular posting. The blog posting that Mr Newmark promoted, firstly explained what Brooks had said in his speech and then goes onto say:

“Guido has written previously on how sections of the third sector are stuffed full of Labour acolytes, spin for Labour and even write policy for political parties. Good to see the new charities minister is on board with the campaign to get charities out of politics…”

I have since challenged Mr Fawkes on what he means by ‘sections of the third sector’. He refuses to comment apart from explaining that I should do my own research and that he doesn’t need to justify his accusation. I cannot argue with that, but I do think Mr Newmark needs to be more careful about which blogs he mentions in his tweets. Mr Newmark is the Governments spokesperson for its dealings with all 163,000 charities in this country, not just the odd one or two that Mr Fawkes feels have made some bad appointments. Most of the 163,000 have never had the chance to meet an acolyte of any political party, apart from when the local MP turns up for a photo call. In the next 8 months some of them might be a great deal more cautious about allowing their organisation to become associated with someone hoping to get elected!

Let us hope that a future Government repeals the legislation which has led to this state of affairs. So far Labour have promised to do so if elected!