The self-proclaimed King of Toxic Masculinity, who converted to Islam in 2022, had previously claimed to have funded a number of charitable projects, from establishing a dog shelter in Romania to rebuilding an orphanage, but this was a whole new level of giving. “I donate $25 million a year to feeding children in war-torn countries, especially in the Islamic world, because that’s where war is,” he explained in a video posted to TatePledge.com, which compiles evidence of his alleged good works. “I’m going to be starting a foundation, the Tate Foundation, which is going to be dedicated to charitable acts. I will be spending millions and millions of dollars on charitable acts for the rest of my human life. God has blessed me with fantastic wealth. It’s more money than I will ever personally need.”

In case viewers didn’t get the message, the video then displayed a statement: “This is how the most famous man on earth exerts his influence. Despite all the attacks from his fiercest critics, he is the only one actively trying to change the world for the better.” So, nine months on, how is he doing?

As of yesterday, according to Tate’s website, he and his brother Tristan have donated “$12m+” in “14+” countries in collaboration with “20+” non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and changed the lives of “1,165,340+” people. The site carries details of 43 of the projects they have donated to, the most recent being on December 18, when they helped to provide winter clothes for Yemeni children. Other programmes include the installation of water pumps in African villages, the provision of school meals at orphanages in Somalia, and the handing out of clothes and food parcels in Syria, Gaza and Yemen. Some of these are also supported financially by the War Room, Tate’s online network that charges $8,000 to join.

Looking at these various programmes, it certainly appears that his donations are enabling charity workers to do valuable and much-needed work. There is, however, a catch: there is very little evidence of more than a million lives being changed, or of tens of millions of dollars being spent.

Fewer than 10 charities feature in the videos, and at least one is now defunct. The Tates’ most regular collaborator is Muslim Global Relief, a Manchester-based charity with an income of £3.4 million and three employees. Its deputy managing director Mohammed Bashir told me that Muslim Global Relief had conducted “16 to 20” projects with Tate-donated money this financial year — but that the total amount spent was “£30K at most”. Asked whether the Tate-funded projects were long-term or one-off events, Mr Bashir said: “One project at a time in different places.” The charity, he added, had made a policy decision to carry on taking money from the Tates, regardless of the charges they faced. However, if they were found guilty, Global Muslim Relief would sever all ties.

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Oddly, when I asked how the funds were transferred, he said that the Tates’ donations, the choice of projects they fund, and the photo opportunities they presented were handled by a journalist, whom he declined to name. “We don’t have direct links with [the Tate brothers],” Mr Bashir said. “There’s a journalist based here in the UK who’s a representative and looks after the charitable arm for them. He’s the one who gives us the donations, and then we do the projects and give them the appropriate feedback. There’s no ongoing long-term funding for one particular project in one particular country.” (I invited the journalist to discuss his work with me via Mr Bashir, but he didn’t respond.)

In terms of “appropriate feedback” provided by the charities, this usually takes the form of a video in which donors can see how their money has been spent. The Tates then publish this footage on their website — a reputation-enhancing tactic that hasn’t been without criticism. Muslim Hands, a highly reputable charity based in Nottingham with an income of £33 million and a staff of 113, was involved in eight projects with the Tates before they were charged, and now regrets that involvement. “Muslim Hands is extremely concerned that a number of pictures and videos we provided privately to an individual donor to verify the delivery of aid projects by our staff have been used without our authorisation on a website promoting the charitable endeavours of Andrew and Tristan Tate,” the charity told me.

“Given the very serious offences with which the Tate brothers were charged in June, we requested the removal of all this material from the Tates’ website several months ago and made it clear that we would neither welcome nor accept any further donations on their behalf while current proceedings are active. The videos feature eight Muslim Hands projects: three in Niger, two in Mali, and three others in Syria, Yemen and Somalia. It is unacceptable, however, that this material has been used without our formal authorisation to support fundraising by the Tate brothers, to project a positive image of their charitable endeavours as individuals at a risk of damage to our reputation, and to insinuate a level of giving that is not reflected in the relatively modest donations we have received in this case.” Videos featuring Muslim Hands remain on the Tate Pledge website.

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Human Appeal, another international relief charity, has also received unwelcome exposure on the Tates’ pledge site. The organisation, which has 500 employees and an income of £43 million, is featured in a food distribution video in Lebanon with posters bearing the names of Andrew and Tristan Tate. Yet it claims it didn’t receive money from the brothers. The charity said: “Human Appeal has never received any donation from a Tristan or Andrew Tate. A member of the public in the UK donated in a legitimate manner and wished to dedicate his donation to the names Tristan and Andrew Tate. Like most charities, donors are permitted to dedicate their donations to third-party names of their own choosing.

“The humanitarian aid distribution photos from the website were taken a while ago at a charity food distribution in Lebanon in aid of vulnerable refugees. These were shared by us with the donor. There was no one in attendance at this aid distribution by the name of Tristan or Andrew Tate, nor would our policy have allowed it.” Nor is Human Appeal the only charity now attempting to distance itself from the Tates. Action For Humanity – International, an NGO based in Salford, launched an internal investigation after I passed details of a video posted to the Tate Pledge website that features an Action For Humanity employee thanking the Tate brothers, the Tate Foundation and the War Room for food and hygiene kits provided after the earthquake in Morocco on September 8. The Tates had been charged with their offences at the time of the donation.

The internal investigation established that the donation was made through the Canadian arm of the charity, and was for just £800. “‘Action For Humanity – Canada’ is a partner organisation of the UK-based ‘Action For Humanity – International’, but is in itself its own legal and operational entity,” a spokesman said. “‘Action For Humanity – International’ has never received funds from the Tates. We can confirm an £800 donation was made to ‘Action For Humanity – Canada’. ‘Action For Humanity – Canada’ has begun the process to return the donation in full.” The charity told me that its due diligence policy requires it to check the source of donations only over £3,000, and added: “As this was a donation of £800 to our Canada office and was made via a third-party charitable crowdsourcing platform [CanadaHelps] which has passed our due diligence process, regrettably the donation was not rejected. A second donation of £12,000 was attempted to be made by the Tate Foundation in November 2023 to ‘Action For Humanity – Canada’. As a result of our due diligence procedures, we did not accept this donation.”

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Meanwhile, other charities singled out by the Tates have simply disappeared. The first video posted on the Tate Pledge website was dated to April 13, and features hundreds of construction workers in Dubai receiving boxes of food, courtesy of a charity called Life Guided By Light. A similar Dubai-based food handout supported by the Tates, and executed by men wearing Life Guided by Light T-shirts, was carried out in a car park for Chinese National Chemical Engineering Corporation (CNCEC) vehicles. The workers wore high-vis vests bearing the letters CNCEC. Yet when I tried to ask Life Guided by Light why it felt it necessary to feed workers employed by a huge multinational corporation, I discovered that the charity’s three trustees had dissolved it last September following a year of zero income and zero expenditure.

Earlier this week, I showed the Tate Pledge page to two senior academics with expertise in the charity sector. While neither wanted to be named, one expressed concern over the use of “stereotypical images of victims in need that are now being heavily criticised by the NGO community”. The Tate videos, he pointed out, often feature young African children expressing delight at being given a plate of food. The other added: “It seems like a classic case of ‘charity washing’ — trying to bolster a hugely damaged reputation through good works. I suspect many charities wouldn’t touch the money.” And yet, the reality is that the Tate brothers and their War Room associates are funding some worthwhile projects in difficult areas, particularly one benefitting children and orphans in Irbil, Syria, run by the Little Hearts Foundation. The only issue in question is the scale of that funding — and on that, transparency is lacking.

In a June 4 video on the Tate Pledge site, Andrew Tate said: “I promise to provide full accounts and receipts to prove that the money goes directly to charity to feeding children in war-torn countries.” But when I asked Tina Glandian, Tate’s US-based lawyer, if I could see these accounts and receipts, I received no reply. I also emailed the Tates and their associates in Romania several times asking for details of charitable spending but, again, heard nothing back.

Finally, a UK intermediary contacted the Tate team on my behalf. “Unfortunately”, he said, “they have decided not to comment at this time.”

To use the military expression, humanitarian aid has always been expeditionary. And if there were echoes of Western missionaries during the heyday of European colonialism, this was anything but a coincidence. Relief work tends to attract idealistic young people on the Left, but its origins lie partly in the imperial notions of “uplift” through missionary activity, and partly in the ambitions of the Red Cross movement to mitigate the most terrible effects of warfar

The would-be relief worker joined a non-governmental organisation such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or Medicins sans Frontières and would then be assigned – again, very much like a priest or a soldier – to a crisis zone. And, again like a 19^th-century European missionary or a soldier, the decision about where to deploy was made either by the NGO, or by rich donor governments, or within the framework of the United Nations and its development agencies, which themselves were largely controlled by these same governments – by anyone, in short, but the people in the places where the emergency was unfolding.

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That’s not to say that humanitarian aid is ‘imposed’ on those who benefit from it. If anything, it is usually the opposite: a human being in dire straits does not have the luxury of rejecting assistance because of its provenance. And institutionally, the NGOs could not operate without at least the consent of the governments in the affected areas.

But consent should not be confused with having had much of a say in how a decision to launch a humanitarian intervention was arrived at. As with economic development – also largely imposed from without by the World Bank and the IMF – it was taken for granted that governments in affected areas would cooperate. If they didn’t, it was assumed to mean, as it did in the case of the government of Sudan during the Darfur crisis, or the government of Sri Lanka during the Tamil Tiger insurgency, that the government in question was either responsible for or complicit with whatever dire situation had drawn the NGOs in in the first place.

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The aid agencies, however, did not believe they were the solution to the emergencies. Most relief workers felt that Sadako Ogata was speaking for them when, as High Commissioner of the UNHCR in the 1990s, she declared there were no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems. Nonetheless, when they were in the field most humanitarian NGOs claimed to be acting purely on the basis of the needs of populations affected by war, refugee emergencies, epidemics and natural disasters. They viewed themselves as politically neutral, their actions concerned only with alleviating the sufferings of their beneficiaries.

Those who engage in what, in less linguistically-sensitive times, was called charity claim to be impartial. Striving towards that goal is a way for individuals and organisations to ring-fence their activities from politics. An NGO that renounces the pretense of neutrality might be able to perform many of the technical tasks of a humanitarian agency such as medical aid, water and sanitation, but they would be considered a solidarity organisation, outside the UN-supervised system. That means operating with fewer resources, fewer protections and more restrictions on where they can work.

The vast majority of NGOs have never wanted to operate like that. But working within the system has its own frustrations. It is human nature to want to solve problems, not simply alleviate them. To insist that this is all that can reasonably be expected of them, as I did in my book on humanitarianism, A Bed for the Night, seems to many aid workers to be morally intolerable.

The problem is that there is scant evidence to suggest that humanitarian action can change the world. It is possible that the international human rights movement can do this. But despite the overlap between human rights work and humanitarian action, they are very different activities.

A human rights activist must be a rights absolutist; there is no room for compromise on basic principles. In contrast, the relief worker must resign themselves to making deals with warlords or dictators. Short of military intervention, they must shake hands with the devil if they want to achieve anything concrete.

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In my book, I described two acute threats to the humanitarian project. The first was this alliance with the human rights movement, which I argued would benefit human rights groups, since relief agencies would end up serving as their eyes and ears in places where humanitarians could go but human rights rapporteurs would never be permitted to enter; but would actually be detrimental to aid agencies, since it would endanger their ability to keep working.

The second was the co-optation of relief work by powerful governments because the prestige of humanitarian action was valuable as a moral justification for imperial ventures. The most grotesque example of this I know was George W. Bush justifying the continued American occupation of Afghanistan on the quasi-feminist rationale that the Taliban oppressed women. And shortly before the 2003 Iraq War, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell told an assembled group of representatives of American humanitarian organisations that they were a tremendous “force multiplier” for the US military.

I wrote the first version of A Bed for the Night in 2003. In the intervening 16 years, these two tendencies have come to largely define what is expected of aid agencies both by governments and activists, and how these agencies construe their own project. What has changed, though, is that the context in which relief groups work has grown far, far worse.

The “Global War on Terrorism” has meant that, much as relief workers might wish it otherwise, humanitarian aid is an integral part of the war effort. At the same time, the ideology of human rights has attracted the allegiance of the ‘best and the brightest’ within the relief world. Humanitarian action has always had a legitimacy problem: what gives an NGO in Barcelona or Geneva or New York the right to intervene in Chad or Yemen or Myanmar? The law-based claims of the human rights movement have seemed to offer a way forward.

The problem, though, is that across the globe human rights norms are in crisis. After having been in decline for more than half a century, the number and lethality of wars throughout the world is once more on the rise. And global warming will inevitably result in resource wars in the areas most badly affected by it. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

A world in which Russia, China, India, Brazil and the United States are ruled by authoritarian populists is not a world in which human rights are likely to flourish. Syria and Yemen have shown that the laws of war can be ignored at will, while Venezuela and Myanmar are emblems of the new freedom with which dictatorial regimes can create migration crises without anything being able to stop them.

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All of these developments have made the job of humanitarian relief organisations more difficult, but they have not changed its essential characteristics. It took a migration crisis closer to home to do that.

Much like the Rio Grande, which separates the United States from Mexico, the Mediterranean has long been a frontier between the Global North and the Global South. Given the size of the migratory crisis in the Mediterranean, it was inevitable that the relief agencies would become involved. But in doing so, the approach that had marked the humanitarian project since Biafra was unsustainable.

It’s one thing for a relief worker to go from London to Liberia and resist taking a political stance on the conflict there, claiming only to have come to alleviate its effects. But when the crisis is unfolding in the countries where the NGO workers come from, that stance is impossible to maintain.

Aid workers may claim that all they are doing in the Mediterranean, or on the Italian-French border, or in Calais, is helping migrants in need of assistance. But the reality is that in doing so, these aid workers are taking a political position vis-à-vis their own governments. The “neutrality” and “impartiality” to which relief groups could lay claim in the Global South makes neither moral nor operational sense now that the crisis has come home.

Not all relief groups are willing to admit this yet. But they will be forced to confront the fact that their actions are political. The anti-migrant politicians – Salvini, Orbán, Le Pen, etc – recognise the humanitarian agencies as their enemies, and they are right to do so. The challenge to relief groups is to decide how to respond effectively. And this can only happen if the humanitarian world finally abandons the pretence that its actions are not political. Aid agencies will be political actors like all the others. But the choice they face is politics or irrelevance.

This revelation highlighted the shamefully low priority given to people with autism and learning disabilities even in the supposed sanctuaries of specialist units run by mental health trusts. A subsequent national review found their health was being “adversely affected” by issues such as abuse, incompetence, neglect and sluggish treatment. It disclosed the depressing statistic that median life expectancy for people with learning disabilities is more than two decades less than all other British citizens.

So whom should we thank for exposure of this damning data and this long-overdue reform? Not the self-serving medical establishment, nor all those politicians shouting at each other over the despatch box at Westminster. More strangely, nor is it all those noisy big charities with senior executives on six-figure salaries, a ceaseless flow of press releases and carefully-natured brands. No, these breakthroughs are largely down to one grieving mother, whose beloved teenage son drowned in a bath following a series of mistakes.

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Sara Ryan was so distraught over the needless death of her son Connor, whom she nicknamed Laughing Boy for his zestful spirit, that she became a formidable campaigner. Desperate to stop other families suffering, and aided by a small group of activists and parents, the academic launched a social media campaign around the hashtag #JusticeforLB. It has had a remarkable impact. Yet ask her about those powerful charities and she tells me I have touched a sore nerve. “They are parasitic, partial and controlling in terms of the families they get behind,” she said. “They are shameful corporate entities more concerned with reputation than the impoverished lives – and deaths – of ordinary people.”

Harsh words. Sadly, however, they ring true. I know her view is shared by other traumatised parents since I have heard this again working on a recent series of articles exposing how people with autism and learning disabilities are locked up in barbaric conditions – forcibly sedated, violently restrained and fed through hatches in solitary confinement – simply due to their conditions. It is reminiscent of Bedlam. But once again, the campaign was led by families, not charities. So why is this?

I fear the answer is simple, if disturbing: many major charities have been captured by the state, becoming so reliant on government funding they have forgotten their purpose and forsaken their roots. Ryan told me a small charity called My Life My Choice fought alongside her from the start – but one household name just wanted her to sit holding a picture of her dead son behind them in a parliamentary meeting while another only jumped on the bandwagon once it took off.

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It is easy to fire out a few tweets when someone with Aspergers appears on I’m A Celebrity… Far harder to snarl and snap at the hand that feeds you so richly, since part of the problem is how organisations are compromised by their activities. So Mencap, despite posing as the key voice for people with learning disabilities and their families, ended up attacking the bereaved parents of Danny Tozer, a man who died in their ‘care’ amid evidence of failures. You might think this famous charity is a campaign group. Yet most of its funding – £163 million out of £191.9 million income last year – comes from running services as an offshoot of the state.

At least the National Autistic Society issued a report on unacceptable in-patient care for people on the autism spectrum last year and has highlighted how families are ripped apart by these revolting policies. But it has also recently shut a residential home it ran in Somerset amid a police probe into hideous abuse and bullying of people with complex needs. Note again that more than eight in every ten pounds of its income comes from statutory bodies. Meanwhile Scope, in a landmark move, has sold off its residential and daycare services to focus on campaigning – yet still insists its voice was not muted when receiving some half its income from the public sector.

I have seen the same situation in the development sector, where ideals have been corroded by the torrent of cash flooding from Whitehall’s coffers. Now household names collude with their paymasters to fend off criticism of profligate aid policies. The most outrageous example was the IF campaign, created six years ago by charities in harness with politicians who were purported targets of their pressure.

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Key players included Save The Children, which receives huge sums from the government and whose chief executive Justin Forsyth, a former Labour adviser, worked hard to woo influential Tories before admitting to inappropriate behaviour towards women employees.  One source at another charity told me it was made clear “either you do this or there might be repercussions”.  I am also told of routine meetings to plot joint fightbacks against media criticisms, not to mention all those questionable junkets for MPs.

The legacy of such self-serving and supine behaviour is the sickening sight of aid charities covering up sex abuse and corruption to protect their valuable brands. This symbolises how they have become powerful corporate entities posing as cheery do-gooders while they flit around the planet preaching their patronising creed and networking with politicians. Note also recent revelations in The Times exposing how scores more charities were signing agreements not to criticise government justice and welfare policies to ensure they could carry on sucking contentedly at the state funding teat. This is contemptible behaviour on both sides.

No wonder public faith in charities has plummeted following a series of scandals from Kids Company to Oxfam, two organisations proved to have moved far from their edgy beginnings as they cuddled up to politicians. Kids Company was found to have taken £46 million in public money after it imploded and the claims of its well-connected founder turned to dust. Trust in Britain’s 168,000 charities stands at its lowest level since checks began in 2005 due to issues such as aggressive fund-raising, high pay, abuse of vulnerable people and greedy growth obsession. Many also overlap each other’s work, especially in areas where state funds flow readily.

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An important report this month by the Civil Society Futures inquiry highlighted how charities are seen by a sceptical public as disconnected from their communities and the people they claim to represent. Some are simply brand-obsessed as they chase expansion, others too dependent on their local and central government contracts. “Collectively we must transform ourselves or risk becoming irrelevant,” it concluded rightly. “Some in civil society knew of abuse at Oxfam and elsewhere, and others knew that Kids Company would fail: there is a culture of silence and this undermines shared accountability.”

This was a damning but accurate report, calling for a return to radicalism by putting power back in the hands of the people. It is the latest alarm call for the big players who have become – with a small handful of honourable exceptions – corpulent and complacent corporations with their carefully-buffed brands, shallow campaigns and clutching of celebrities. The big question is whether they will heed the message before it is too late and start standing up for those they profess to serve? Or are they so in hock to the state that activists, families and communities must simply ignore them or even fight them if they seek real change?