Ben Wealthy

Compassion and Christmas go hand in hand. The work of wonderful charities, made possible by remarkable volunteers, can be relied upon to bring warmth to the festive period in ways our weather naturally fails to. But yesterday something rather chilling happened which undermines our season of goodwill and warrants some reflection. The Charity Commission ruled that a tweet sent earlier this year by Oxfam linking benefit cuts to poverty could have been "misconstrued as party political campaigning". The tweet in June referred to a "perfect storm" caused by zero hour contracts and high prices. A complaint was lodged by Conservative MP Conor Burns who said he was "shocked" by how "overtly political" it was. Politicians, especially Conservatives, are somewhat confused about what charities exist for. A poll of MPs carried out by nfpSynergy found that 78% of Conservative MPs said it is a negative trait for charities to "be political." This c...

I was really lucky growing up because we had loads of books at home. But books are like hugs, lie-ins and the sun (that rare yellow object in the sky, not the newspaper) - you always want more. My local authority, Harrow Council, is consulting on the closure of four libraries. One of those on the shortlist is Rayners Lane, the library of my childhood, where I attended storytime sessions before I could walk and sought solace to study for my GCSEs. The tales of our public libraries are intertwined with our own, aren't they? Anyway, I want to share some views here which would be difficult to express through a multiple choice questionnaire. Closing, or indeed cutting, something is almost always a consequence of failing to reimagine it. By shutting a service a council is rarely suggesting it is no longer needed, just that it has not been adapted to meet new and changing needs - usually for a complex combination of reasons. We should be braver in rethinking our libraries before shel...