Charity really does begin at home

One of British prime minister Gordon Brown’s favourite do-good hobby horses is aid to Africa. It is one of the very few areas of the country’s debt-ridden finances that may not face the scythe in coming months and years.
Like motherhood, it is hard to criticise largesse that is aimed at those who are far worse off than ourselves. But then it all depends how you disperse that largesse.
Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) appears to be in the business of creating fake organisations - or for those who have been following my blogs on fake grassroots organisations - a kind of development aid AstroTurf.
One of these, “Connections for Development” CfD, is supposedly a forum for ethnic minorities to engage on issues relating to international development. According to a recent report by the NGO Policy Network entitled “Fake Aid”, DfID created CfD two years ago and is its only donor. An independent review has already questioned the purpose of CfD.
You may well ask what all this has to do with development and how does it help the poorest in Africa. You might also ask, what is the real purpose of such government- sponsored AstroTurf ?
Here’s a clue: In August several British newspapers carried a report from the Taxpayers Alliance that government spent some £37million in 2007-08 on think tanks, charities and political campaigning. In other words, as the Alliance put it, on 'government lobbying government'.
If AstroTurf organisations tell the government what they’d like development aid money to be spent on, then government can’t be doing the wrong thing, can they?
Hence the government can claim it is doing what “the people” want.
It’s a circular argument that puts a whole new meaning on the word ‘spin’.

When support is Bogus

One of the big eye-openers in Nick Davies’ “Flat Earth News” is the appearance of AstroTurf organisations, so called because their grass roots aren’t real. Bogus front organisations are something we have suspected exists but could never be sure about.
PR groups have created “a mass of pseudo groups to fabricate activity on their behalf” says Davies. The tobacco industry started the trend, and not everyone was fooled. But they are now everywhere and include big ones like Cancer United (to push Roche’s anti-cancer drugs in Europe), American’s for Constitutional Freedom (for the porn industry), Agricultural Biotechnology Association (for the GM foods industry) and many, many more.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (real!) found that between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil spent $15.8 million on 43 different front groups.
My American friends may be aware of AstroTurf “events” in townhalls around America pushing the debate on healthcare, a concerted attempt to attack Obama’s policies.
Journalists working on international affairs have long been aware of AstroTurf thinktanks such as the Heritage Foundation, but this is a whole new ball-game.
The moral is: do you know what you are looking at when you look at a interest group’s webpage? Always ask yourself “can this be AstroTurf?”
Groups which have a lot of money disproportionate to their size may well be AstroTurf.