It is very wrong, morally, to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but I cannot disguise from myself the intense pleasure, amounting almost to joy, with which I learned of the public exposure of the wrongdoings of Oxfam in Haiti, Chad, and elsewhere. Its workers, sent to bring relief to the acute and chronic sufferings of those countries, used the charity’s money, partly derived from voluntary contributions and partly from government subventions (the British government and the European Union are by far the largest contributors to British Oxfam), to patronise local prostitutes, some of them underage, and also to conduct orgies, no doubt at a fraction of what they would have cost to conduct at home.
Oxfam, at least in Britain, has long been one of the most Pecksniffian of organisations, much give to auto-beatification. Mr. Pecksniff, in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, introduces his daughters, called Charity and Mercy, to Mrs. Todgers, adding ‘Not unholy names, I hope.’ It is therefore of the hypocritical Mr. Pecksniff that I think whenever I pass the Oxfam shop in my small town, with its unctuous slogan, Thank you for being humankind, posted in the window. It is only with difficulty that I resist the urge to throw a brick through it.
Of course, Oxfam, like many large British charities, has long been a villainous organisation — and the sexual exploits (or should I say exploitations?) of its workers in Haiti and elsewhere are the least of it. In the moral sense, though not the legal, it has for many years been guilty of fraud, of misleading the public.
I first realised this some years ago when I found a used book dealer of my long acquaintance poring in his shop over Oxfam’s annual accounts.
‘Look at this,’ he said, but I saw nothing until he pointed it out to me.
Oxfam, in common with many other charities in Britain, runs thrift stores in practically every British town and city. Such thrift stores are now more numerous even than Indian restaurants: they allow people to give away their unwanted belongings in the belief that, by so doing, they are furthering a good cause.
My acquaintance pointed out that, despite receiving their goods free of charge, paying practically nothing for their labour (which was voluntary), and paying much reduced local taxes, Oxfam shops made a profit on turnover of a mere 17 per cent, much less than his own, despite his incomparably greater expenses. How was such a thing possible, by what miracle of disorganisation (or malversation of funds)?
Until then, I had carelessly assumed that the great majority of any money that I gave to a large charity went to serve its ostensible end, say the relief of avoidable suffering. I was not alone in this, of course. When I asked the volunteer ladies in a local shop run on behalf of the British Red Cross what percentage of the money I paid for a book there went to the Red Cross, they looked at me as if I were mad.
‘Why, all of it of course,’ piped up one of the ladies.
The real average figure at the time for Red Cross thrift stores was 8 per cent; but the volunteer ladies supposed, because the goods they sold were free to the Red Cross and they themselves were not paid, that (apart from a small amount for unavoidable expenses) all the money raised went directly to victims of earthquakes and the like.
