Officer Garner has been placed on administrative leave while an investigation takes place, but the court of public opinion has already handed down its judgment. Its medium of choice: GoFundMe, the fundraising platform which has in many ways become the purest expression of direct democracy. The tragic tale of HeeHaw has sparked online outrage on a scale reminiscent of some of America’s recent human police-brutality scandals; it is hard not to be appalled by the apparently senseless assassination of a small and harmless donkey. Israel’s fund, which set a target of $30,000 to care for Elsberry Riding and Farm’s other animals and set up a “HeeHaw Foundation”, has at the time of writing raised $155,000. Among the named donors are “Justice for Heehaw Solana”, an apparently California-based campaign collective which has made 14 contributions amounting to more than $75,000 and whose profile picture is a drawing of the donkey in heaven, complete with a halo. Another, who stumped up $5, has set their username to “Trenton Garner is a coward”. Many of the donors have sent hundreds of dollars. The page’s main image is of the dead donkey, eyes glassy, a distraught Hannah leaning over his body. 

GoFundMe, which was set up in San Diego by two tech founders in 2010, has raised more than $30 billion so far for a multitude of causes. Anybody can set up a fundraiser, which has a target attached and is shared across social-media sites for friends and strangers to donate to. More than 150 million people have donated over the years. The causes are as richly varied as pots for weddings and funerals, cancer treatment, boob jobs, sex-change surgery, rent and helping Chelsea Manning pay court fines during the Assange trial. Whatever the story, the language is often identical: the deserving subject is portrayed as a weeping contestant backstage at the X-Factor auditions, pitifully relating their life’s hardships. Subconsciously or otherwise, they repackage their plea as an eminently shareable focus for sympathy, a flurry of vulnerability and gratitude with smiling or teary pics attached. Queasy though it may be, this approach has a cash value. 

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The stakes are sometimes comically low — unbelievably, some shameless people ask for money so they can go on holiday without even bothering with a sob story; sometimes, though, they could not be greater. Many of the site’s most famous appeals have served as political statements. In 2015 GoFundMe pulled a crowdfunder for Sweet Cakes by Melissa, an Oregon bakery which refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Conversely, after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016, the platform waived all transaction fees and donated $100,000 to the fundraiser for victims and their families. The site is ostensibly a neutral platform for universal kindliness — but the causes it promotes or pulls reveals the handprints of gatekeeping just behind the curtain. In some cases, the appeals it hosts have national or global significance; just one week after George Floyd was killed in May 2020, his brother’s fund to cover a memorial and legal fees had raised $7 million. By the time it closed, it had made $14.5 million. Since 2022, a fund called Stand with Ukraine set up by the married actors Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher has raised more than $37 million. 

Then there are the swindlers. The site has hosted fictitious stories several times over the years. In 2017, AP reported the heartwarming story of a homeless veteran in New Jersey who, after lending a woman his last 20 bucks, received $400,000 when her GoFundMe page to “pay it forward” went viral. Kate McClure and her boyfriend Mark D’Amico, who masterminded the scheme, were sued by the homeless man, Johnny Bobbitt, when they pocketed and splurged most of the money. It turned out the trio had made up the story  — and all three were convicted of theft by deception. Police found texts sent by McClure which read: “I had to make something up to make people feel bad.” The site has an investigations unit, and will police fraud when prompted — but this is not a charity doling out grants; it is a platform for financial transactions between strangers. 

GoFundMe has become an unlikely organ through which the public can intervene, in real time, in tragedies, scandals and amusing or moving stories. While official institutions like the police and the courts take years to grind out justice, crowdfunding provides instant satisfaction. In a sense, donations function like votes. In a time of mass disaffection with politics and politicians, GoFundMe gives people an unprecedented sense of control, a way of making their solidarity, sympathy or horror known. News cycles may seem increasingly senseless and frightening — think of those boy-racer crashes last month, which injured a family in Ireland and killed two police officers in Middlesbrough. Inquests in both cases could involve years of feet-shuffling; crowdfunders for the victims in both cases have now raised €750,000 and £1 million respectively. These donations have an immediate purpose — to help the wronged — but they also work as decrees. They say “I believe you”; “we are on the good side”; “I am repulsed too”.

Take the case of Lindsay Clancy. The torrid trial over her killing of her three children — an act her lawyers do not dispute, but claim she was not criminally responsible for on grounds of mental ill-health — may have collapsed, but on GoFundMe the emotional verdict has already been announced. A fundraiser for her parents is illustrated by a drawing of Clancy in her wheelchair surrounded by hundreds of women holding hands in solidarity. So far more than $1.2 million has been raised to “give [Mike and Paula Musgrove] back some of the financial stability they have lost” supporting their daughter’s court battle.

Brandee Mulligan, herself a mother of three who vlogs on TikTok and who set up the appeal, wrote on the site: “This fundraiser is not asking anyone to agree on Lindsay, her case, or what the outcome of her trial should be.” But of course it is a referendum on Clancy’s case. The debate over her postpartum psychosis has riven America and the world along sex lines; a look through this appeal’s list of donors suggests almost all (who are not anonymous) are women. The site only allows you to comment if you give; those who have are not bashful about their support for Clancy.

The Clancy case is a particularly extreme flashpoint — but crowdfunding culture has transformed society in other ways. GoFundMe’s most common cause, making up a third of appeals, is for medical fundraising. In America the site has become an ersatz public-healthcare system, powered not by taxes but by good will. There is, of course, nothing sinister about these campaigns themselves — the success of fundraisers for the thousands of suffering adults and children on the site is a rare perk of the internet. But that people should have to rely on GoFundMe at all — and that they must narrate their struggles to optimize them for virality to do it — is bleak. 

Other causes on the site reveal a particularly despicable quality of the modern internet: the firm conviction that your own problems are others’ responsibility to fix. So it is that the platform is littered with whingeing appeals to “save me from homelessness” or “help me through unemployment” set off by unconvincing tales of persecution by evil housemates or evil bosses. In many cases, the person rattling the begging bowl looks rather like they’re asking others to compensate for their own laziness or irresponsibility. GoFundMe culture has created a sense of victimized entitlement in people who see themselves not as agents in their own futures, but as “causes”, personal brands navigating broken systems. 

At its best, the site is an apparatus for democracy, empowering the public to correct institutional failures or register their disgust. At worst, it teaches us that every grievance has a price tag. I for one look forward to seeing the great works of the HeeHaw Foundation, which if nothing else will provide catharsis; in other matters, though, I remain a skeptic. It seems we live in a world where a single mother’s desire for a BBL warrants mutual aid. In a saner time, you’d get off that flat ass and work for it; today every news story, personal tragedy and vain desire has a “donate” button attached.

Take-off began with daft endurance videos, such as spending 40 hours counting to 100,000 and watching a bad rap video repeatedly for 10 hours. As his audience grew, so did the scale and vision of his videos: crashing a train into a pit, stranding himself on a raft at sea for seven days, surviving for 50 hours in Antarctica. Then he began making serious money from advertisers and sponsors, finding the appeal of spraying around cash after handing $10,000 to “a random homeless guy” while insisting “this is not clickbait”. The latest MrBeast video features 100 identical twins competing for $250,000. It has had 53 million hits in two days.

Donaldson’s videos are slick and his success has made him rich. Forbes estimated he earned $54 million in 2022 — and his numbers have kept on surging. His burgeoning media empire, reportedly worth $700 million, shows the rising significance of YouTube, now the most popular source of content for television viewers in the United States. But in recent weeks he has been buffeted by controversies with revelations of racist comments made as a teenager, teen grooming allegations involving a transgender (now dismissed) co-host, and the launch of a lawsuit by five women against his production company and Amazon over claims they “systematically fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism” during filming of the world’s biggest reality show contest with 1,000 people competing for $5 million.

This is damaging — and not just because it might hinder the Amazon tie-up that lifts Donaldson to another level. MrBeast is built on his brand of benevolent niceness, with profits supposedly going “towards making the world a better place”. Having started out as a typical YouTube goofball, he became an internet superstar with acts of outlandish altruism. He doles out cars, houses, islands and yachts as well as cash. His videos boast of adopting a South African orphanage, helping paralysed dogs run, building 100 wells in Africa, feeding 10,000 people for Thanksgiving, paying a salary to everyone in a Ugandan village for a year. They have eye-catching titles such as: “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time” and “We Brought Water to Kenya”.

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This is performative philanthropy at its most cynical, glib and patronising, using disability and poverty as a platform to boost Donaldson’s own celebrity and wealth. His stunts promote the concept of simplistic solutions to challenging problems, wrapping the munificent American donor in a warm glow of benevolence as he drops in to spread a little of his MrBeast largesse to some lucky recipients. Inevitably, some charities have jumped on board — including, bizarrely, GiveDirectly, started by US economists to focus on data-driven interventions rather than more random MrBeast ideas such as “Giving 20,000 Shoes to Kids in Africa”.

Yet consider some of those stunts. Few things appeal more to well-meaning Westerners than needy orphans, so there is a boom business in unregulated and fake orphanages in poorer nations. Some are squalid, others fronts for abuse. Children are often lured from families with false promises of money, schooling or security. One recent Australian study examined this phenomenon of “orphanage trafficking” that “fabricated narratives” to attract funds from donors. Such concerns were raised by Lumos — a group founded by J.K. Rowling to end institutionalisation — with statements addressing MrBeast’s counterproductive focus: “Many orphanages across the world are set up to exploit children for profit, exposing children to harm and abuse. By promoting orphanages, even well-intentioned ones, we promote the work of those that are not, continuing the cycle of exploitation.”

Or take the issue of wells. Again, this might seem a sensible way for outsiders to help poorer communities. But the landscape of Africa is littered with donor-funded wells and water systems that failed due to lack of maintenance. This has long been recognised as a problem; one report 15 years ago found that £270 million had been wasted on building 50,000 rural water supply points that ended up broken on the continent. Thus one Kenyan activist praised MrBeast for shining a spotlight on the issue of clean water supplies, but pointed out the big issue was sustainability, saying her group worked in areas where six in 10 wells were broken. “People go back to drinking from the creek because there was no infrastructure put in place for follow-up maintenance for repair,” said Saran Kaba Jones, founder of Face Africa, which helps create locally-appropriate water supplies for communities.

Building such wells can be lucrative, however. One infuriated whistleblower passed me documents a few years ago showing that at least £16.8 million from a £25.4 million aid-backed scheme to install wells, water pumps and irrigation in some of Africa’s most deprived areas went to consultants pocketing rates above £600 a day. Former aid minister Rory Stewart has talked of visiting a £30,000 water scheme in which so much went into design, implementation and evaluation that only £1,500 ended up being spent on two toilets and some plastic buckets. Then there are multi-million-pound disasters such as PlayPumps, an infamous scheme backed by Western politicians and promoted by pop stars, in which African children would pump water by playing on a roundabout. It proved to be expensive, impractical, liable to break and reliant on either child labour or women forced to spend hours spinning on the carousel.

MrBeast’s stunt philanthropy is an online progression of the aid sector boom and concepts of celebrity saints that go back to 1984’s Band Aid. This initiative began as a pop star’s heartfelt reaction to scenes of starvation in Ethiopia but ended up helping a brutal Marxist dictatorship while turbo-charging a naïve idea that nice foreigners can solve complex issues of development by chucking in cash. So politicians wanting to look compassionate promoted neo-colonial aid policies that were at best farcical and at worst a costly fraud imposed on tax-payers. They were cheered on by a self-serving industry that swelled in size and power as it claimed to be saving the world while in reality help fuel conflict, foster corruption and corrode democracy — as seen most recently with aid’s toxic role in Afghanistan that assisted the return of the Taliban.

Many of these charities entered into a Faustian pact with celebrities. They used the fame of stars in the tussle for funds while in return providing a platform for actors, models and singers to pose as experts on charitable issues. For instance, Save the Children took some minor celebrities on trips to three continents to “better understand how breastfeeding is such a crucial lifesaver for babies in developing countries”. And these sorts of strategies paid off: former foreign secretary David Miliband pockets £1 million a year running the International Rescue Committee, which has recruited a stellar list of “ambassadors” and was handed at least £33 million from Britain last year.

The aid industry routinely demonstrates how naïve interventions can do more harm than good while raising questions over its real beneficiaries. Intriguingly, a leaked 36-page “braindump” guide written by Donaldson for his production staff and shared on social media sets out his insights, strategy and tips for hooking viewers. He says their aim is to make the best possible YouTube videos and explains the need for alluring titles. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”. And the document concludes by stating his determination to build a company worth “10s of billions”. 

Such desires are the driving force of capitalism, an economic system that has lifted so many people from poverty, raised life expectancy and improved our world. Yet it can be a ruthless creed — and there are valid questions over the exploitative nature of MrBeast’s stunts that are such catnip for YouTube’s algorithms. He relies heavily on “poverty porn” — the depiction of suffering people to trigger pity in order to elicit donations — although such manipulative and parasitical tactics have been ditched by many leading charities amid anger at “white saviourism”. People with disabilities have also criticised his videos as “inspiration porn”, a term coined by the Australian activist Stella Young to describe their objectification for gratification of others. At the end of one video on cataract surgery, Donaldson makes a particularly degrading and asinine comment: “I wonder if we’ll get 1,000 more views from the people we cured LOL.”

This unlikely media tycoon says money is just “fuel to grow the business and help people and not much else”, pledging to give it all away while expanding his interests into food. Yet his model of philanthropy relies upon creating viral videos to build mass audiences for advertisers and brand partners. It is Comic Relief on steroids — another altruistic enterprise that used celebrities, crass stunts and pity to raise cash while reinforcing damaging stereotypes reminiscent of Band Aid’s idea of an Africa “where nothing ever grows”. The charity sparked fury when it sent four wealthy stars to live in a Kenyan slum for a week to show how life there could be tough.

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Donaldson and his team also insist they are educating viewers, showing solutions, inducing meaningful change and inspiring younger people to do good — familiar arguments heard from previous celebrity pushers of performative philanthropy. They claim, for instance, that building two wells in Cameroon inspired others to build another 299. But as seen, the issue is how many stay operational. There have been a string of scandals involving young Western idealists such as Renee Bach, who, aged 20 and with no training, set up a feeding and medical clinic to “save” children in Uganda — ultimately leading to the deaths of dozens of babies. Another example is Katie Meyler, hailed in the White House for her work empowering girls in Liberia that raised $8 million, even as some were being raped by her co-founder and lover, who had Aids when he died.

Donaldsons’s impressive success has led to a spate of similar stunt philanthropists turning staged acts of kindness into revenue-raising spectacles for viewers on YouTube and social media clicks. One influencer in India donated buffalos to a milkman whose business was struggling, while a popular content creator in Nigeria — one of several MrBeast imitators in a country with eye-watering poverty rates — showered cash on a couple of women market stallholders. Like so much of the aid industry, this is altruism dependent on the whims of the donors — and it is designed for entertainment and fund-raising rather than a sustained attempt to drive change.

It might seem strange to carp over a few good deeds filmed for YouTube clicks. After all, even if this Gen Z mode of philanthropy is brash and narcissistic, some lives are being changed for the better. Yet at the same time, Donaldson is exploiting less fortunate people’s problems to shape his image of decency, while reinforcing the aid illusion that has blown so much money and achieved so little over the past half century. And there is no doubt who is the biggest winner from the MrBeast brand of benevolence: the man who could become the world’s first YouTube billionaire. 

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.”

Life in Calais is an endless cycle of displacement, followed by disappointment. I arrived here in July 2016. I didn’t have much choice: back in Afghanistan, the insurgent Taliban had put out a warrant for my capture, incensed that I had supported the US military. So I left my family and friends. I fled.

Shortly before I arrived, the notorious ‘Jungle’ had been evacuated following clashes with riot police: thousands of displaced migrants were displaced once again. They have been trying to find shelter in several places in and around the city ever since.

Often they seek refuge in abandoned barracks or wooded areas, finding shelter in makeshift tents covered with tarpaulins. There isn’t much point in building anything sturdier, since the police launch eviction raids every 48 hours. The camps aren’t hard to find: they constantly smell of burning wood, mixed with the odour of waste that the local authorities refuse to collect. When the evictions take place, people do not always have time to collect their personal belongings, leaving the ground littered with blankets, wet clothes, and children’s toys.

Following several large-scale evictions in the past year, the authorities have destroyed the bushes and forests where the displaced were sheltering. Huddled people have been replaced by fences, concrete walls, and surveillance cameras that carry a simple message: you must not return. Much of Calais is like a war zone, with people surviving under the fear of the police, the evictions, and the violence that can arise between the different communities. It is difficult to access food, water, and medical services. And then winter sets in; every day, rain and wind flood and destroy makeshift shelters and lives.

Most of the people waiting here have fled countries scarred by war. Among the 1,500 people here are Afghans, Sudanese, Iranians, Eritreans, and Kuwaitis. Most of them are single men, but there are also families with children and single women. All of them see at the 30km expanse that separates Calais from England as a source of hope.

They all have different reasons for wanting to get across. Some have family waiting over there; some are left with little choice by the Dublin Regulation system, which could send them back the way they came. Given that the UK is no longer bound by the regulation, the beaches of Kent seem an enticing prospect.

For those wary of crossing in the winter months, there are some accommodation options in Calais — the Centres d’Accueil et d’Examen des Situations (CAES) are partly financed by the British authorities. But they are not particularly suitable for those people who only intend to pass through. They are in towns far from Calais without public transport — not ideal if you want to try a boat-crossing and need to be available immediately if the weather is good.

When I arrived in Calais, I didn’t know where I wanted to go: perhaps to the UK, or even Germany. The decision was made for me. Within a few months, I met an Afghan friend in exile who invited me to stay with him in his flat in Toulouse, while a friend of a friend helped me negotiate the asylum process and secure accommodation in Paris. Within two years, I had refugee status, and frequently returned to Calais to document the migrant crisis with my camera.

Every visit is more difficult; every story is more haunting. Since September last year, the prefecture has issued more than a dozen decrees to prevent organisations not mandated by the state from distributing water and food in the Calais town centre. When, last October, a hundred volunteers tried to prevent an eviction from a camp in Calais in a peaceful manner, the police responded with tear gas.

But it’s not just the police who have created this tragedy. The main funder of the aid providers in Calais, Choose Love, has actually hindered their work in recent months. In May, it forbade the NGOs it funds from distributing leaflets that provide basic “safety at sea” lifesaving information. Organisations were told they had to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” promising not to “carry out activities which risk breaching [UK immigration] law” — or risk having their funding pulled. Last month, Choose Love announced its withdrawal from Northern France, presumably under pressure from the Home Office.

Choose love, they say, as long as you’re not in Calais.

The tragedy continues to unfurl in Calais. Without support from the French Government or British NGOs, the situation has become increasingly desperate. Although the Franco-British border has always been deadly — at least 336 deaths since 1999 — the last few months have been particularly grim. On 24 November, 27 displaced people, including children, drowned while trying to cross the Channel.

The week before, I had met several shipwrecked victims in Grande-Synthe, a town about 20km from Calais. Kazhall Ahmad was from Iraqi Kurdistan and was alone with her three children. She was exhausted; the police had evicted their camp that morning without allowing them to collect their belongings, and she had spent the past month desperately searching for water for her children. Despite their grim situation, the children were hopeful for their lives in England, dreaming of becoming barbers or art teachers. Whether they get there is a different question.

The shocking drowning in November of so many — the worst the Channel has seen since records began in 2014 — turned the spotlight back on Calais. It was the first time I had seen so many journalists in the area. The displaced people I spoke to took heart from this, hopeful that the media attention and the shock it has caused among politicians could make things better.

But if the past years have taught me anything, it’s that when it comes to meaningful action, don’t hold your breath. Over the past month, both French and British politicians have talked up the existence of legal routes and opportunities for visas. But this is nothing more than a distraction. Freedom of movement is a right for Western white people, not for those who are displaced like me.

On both sides of the Channel, governments accuse smugglers of being entirely to blame for the deaths of innocent people. In truth, it’s mostly the lack of legal and safe access routes to the United Kingdom that contributes to the development of these smuggling networks. The smugglers are a key part of the problem: they use people’s distress to make money; they put people in danger by overloading the boats; they lie to people about the crossing being safe; and when migrants refuse to take the boat, they are threatened and abused.

Such facts are inconvenient, though. It’s far easier for the French government to invest thousands upon thousands of euros strengthening border control systems and deploying a Frontex aircraft over the Channel. This militarisation of the border serves no purpose. It will not deter people from trying to cross. They have no other choice; they will continue to pass, but in a more dangerous and clandestine way.

And the smugglers will win, those who are displaced will lose, and the political class will look the other way.

In 2015, we experienced our own form of cultural revolution, with many of the same symptoms as its more potent sequels in America, Britain and elsewhere. Before “Trump derangement syndrome” was a thing, people in Sweden were denouncing each other, unpersoning each other for wrongthink, and having frenzied public struggle sessions.

At the time heterodox or dissident Swedish thinkers (a group I certainly belong to), almost regardless of political background, thought of the dramatic social and political convulsions gripping our country as stemming from something particular and unique to Sweden itself.

This collective madness gripping Sweden between 2015 and 2018 seemed so uniquely Swedish, that we assumed something akin to it would be impossible to replicate outside of our country. In 2016 and 2017, this argument made sense. The refugee crisis, supposedly the underlying cause of it all, was a Europe-wide phenomenon. Yet our Scandinavian neighbours — our historical and cultural kin — seemed unaffected. They not only took in far less refugees than we did, but also seemed immune to the political polarisation and, quite frankly, the form of social psychosis that became very common in Sweden at the time.

The cause of Sweden’s “special period”, which lasted between late 2015 and late 2018, looked (superficially) simple: the refugee crisis, and the bigger issue of immigration. In this reading, the timeline is as follows: the death of the Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, and the spread of an image of his body washed ashore on a Turkish beach, helped light a humanitarian fire in Swedish society. This in turn caused increasing polarisation and anger directed at the selfish or “backsliding” Swedes who took a different position on refugees. They were too racist, too set in their ways, or too self-interested to heed the humanitarian clarion call.

In this telling, the tumultuousness of Sweden during these revolutionary years comes down to the refugee issue. The now familiar elements of a social panic that became a part of everyday life during those years, such as the public shunning of people over political disagreements, the doublespeak engaged in in order to avoid ending up as targets of social abuse, and the suppression of recent history in favour of constructing a sort of political “Year Zero” were all explained away as stemming from an overabundance of humanitarian enthusiasm. People really cared about refugees, and in their enthusiasm, things maybe got a bit out of hand. But is this really what happened?

There is a grain of truth to these claims of humanitarian enthusiasm. For a short period, donations to — and volunteers for — civil society organisations dealing with refugees exploded. Unfortunately, these explosions often turned out to be fairly shallow and counterproductive. Organisations were inundated with items like toys and clothing meant for small children, even as most of the people coming to the country were older men.

Pointing this out, however, was a risky proposition. The accusation of being a racist, and its attendant risk of social and financial ruin, loomed very large indeed. A lot of things became unspeakable during those years, including the question of demographics, to the immense financial strain that was being placed on various municipalities, to the larger question of what sort of negative consequences, the unprecedented pace and scale of migration to Sweden could lead to.

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Did Sweden get Covid wrong?

By Freddie Sayers

Ironically, one of the reasons Sweden is far less polarised today than many other Western countries is probably the belated discovery that these consequences of immigration are in fact very real, and that methods of ”shaping the narrative” cannot really change material reality.

More critically, there is the realisation that nobody — certainly not middle class progressives — wants to live with those consequences at all. Crime, overcrowded schools, social and ethnic tensions, and violence toward ethnic Swedish children committed by gangs of immigrants have all conspired to cool attitudes on the subject. Indeed, the word förnedringsrån (literally “humiliation-robbery”) has now entered the Swedish lexicon as a term for robberies that display a particular sort of sadistic cruelty, where the aim of the perpetrators mostly seems to be to inflict pain and humiliation onto their victims. As such, it is hardly surprising that the recent fall of Kabul to the Taliban was not in fact met with calls to increase Sweden’s humanitarian commitment, but rather with conspicuous silence, except for a speech by Prime Minister Löfven promising that the country would “never return to the days of 2015”.

With the benefit of hindsight, immigration now appears not as a question important in and of itself, but as a form of wedge corresponding to a very particular political moment of establishment fear and anger at parts of their own electorate. The Right populist Sweden Democrats entered parliament in 2010, but many were convinced they were a passing fad that would soon be gone. In 2014, however, they had more than doubled their vote share, becoming the third biggest party in the Riksdag. This caused an immense amount of political anxiety among the “chattering classes” in the weeks and months following the election, in a preview of the shock caused by Donald Trump.

Sweden entered a political and social state of exception similar to the one experienced by the US after the 2016 election. Rather than an explosion of blind humanitarianism, the way the refugee crisis affected Sweden should probably be better understood as an explosion of political anxiety of the urban middle classes.

More from this author

The radical Left is now extinct

By Malcom Kyeyune

The battle lines drawn up during the refugee crisis were very simple: on the one hand, you had the deplorables (though this term was not yet in use in 2015). They were the enemy. They hated immigrants, gays, and women. This hatred didn’t stem from being the losers of a particular set of economic policies. No, the “hatred” of “those people” came from a general odiousness, lack of education and moral fibre. The professional and managerial classes who opposed the plebs cast themselves as friends and allies of humanity itself.

Sweden was a portal into the future. The intense polarisation of 2015-2018 followed the now extremely familiar Western pattern of rural vs urban, “anywheres” vs “somewheres”. In 2015, the real fear and hatred of the (mostly imaginary) SD-voting country bumpkin could suddenly, miraculously be drawn in stark terms: good versus evil, humanitarianism versus selfishness.

But now, years later, we can see that these battle lines were a fantasy. The narratives of uneducated deplorables meanly trying to keep their children from interacting with immigrants have been replaced by the reality: Swedish middle-class families go to great lengths to avoid their own kids mixing with immigrants in school. They worry about the academic implications — not to mention the risk of violence and disorder — of letting the immigrants into “their” schools. Sweden’s permissive system of private charter schools, though often attacked for reflecting some sort of neoliberal logic, is in practice a way for many parents to self-segregate their children.

Sweden, being a historically egalitarian and homogenous country, never engaged in city planning meant to keep the poor from meeting the rich. The ability of the middle-classes to isolate themselves from the less desirable consequences of immigration has collapsed; with people living in extremely well-to-do neighbourhoods such as Stockholm’s Strandvägen now complaining about street racing, thefts, and drug dealing out in the open.

As a result, some of the fighters for the acceptance of refugees during the crisis years have later partaken in or even led local protests against mixing immigrant and native born students in the same schools. A decision taken in Trollhättan to bus kids from migrant areas to other schools met fierce protests in late 2020. One of the leaders of this revolt? The former liberal party politician, Rita Svensson, who had been on the record in 2016 as advocating for students to be given bus cards in order to break segregation.

Identifying the cause of fighting the deplorables with the cause of accepting immigrants backfired for the urban middle-classes. They find themselves caught between two imperatives. On one hand, the political ”interlopers” who do not share their own sensibilities (or their naked class interests) that have so ominously been ”emboldened” by the Sweden Democrats, represent a threat to the natural political order. Just like in the UK, everyone blithely accepted that globalisation’s losers would have ”no other choice” but to vote for the same parties that engineered their dispossession. On the other hand the middle-classes have discovered, like the parents of Trollhättan, that they do not like the consequences of migration. Their genteel humanitarianism has vanished.

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Sweden's migrant rape crisis

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Today Sweden’s cultural revolution finds itself in an odd spot. An uneasy ceasefire prevails in Swedish society now. While the deplorables are still mocked, there is no bite to it anymore. SD voters are no longer at risk of having their careers cancelled. In 2021, an unspoken attitude of ”don’t ask, don’t tell” prevails.

In the areas in Stockholm where most of the country’s journalists live, it is probably less awkward to openly admit to sympathising with SD on immigration than it is to proudly proclaim that Sweden is far from full and ought to take in at least a million more Afghans in the next couple of years. The hard, eliminationist edge of Swedish politics is mostly gone; wrongthinkers should perhaps be subtweeted on Twitter, but they shouldn’t necessarily be fired, driven out into the wilderness, or subjected to violence.

In some ways, this turn toward ”moderation” in Swedish politics is a good thing. Outside of the inner core of the progressive sphere, such as NGOs and universities, you can no longer be summarily fired for sympathising with a party that has the support of between a fourth and a fifth of the nation. The radicals are slowly abandoning their old cancel culture methods, in favour of such quaint notions as having democratic debate (the horror!).

But it’s doubtful that the Swedish example ought to inspire optimism elsewhere. After 2014 the “losers of globalism” made their play for political relevance, pitting themselves against the urban middle-classes who dominated the political scene. A year later, those same urban middle-classes had declared a no holds barred war against the “enemy within”. In Sweden’s case, the casus belli of that war — accepting a historically unprecedented amount of refugees in a very short time, without contemplating the consequences of doing so — created a situation where the issues of immigrant crime, cultural shock, and ethnic violence became more odious than the deplorables themselves.

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Can tribalism be cured?

By Nikos Sotirakopoulos

Sweden was in many ways the first Western country to noisily declare war on a growing segment of its own population. In 2015, the social madness gripping the country made it seem like a fairly unique outlier, briefly confirming the deeply held national exceptionalism that makes up part of our country’s national ideology.

Today, it is clear that Sweden was simply the canary in the coal mine; just a couple of years later, many other Western countries would noisily be at war with their own homegrown ”deplorables”. Political demonisation against the internal enemy continues to grow. “The unmasked”; “the unvaxxinated”; “chuds”; “magatards”; “Brexiteers”. All of these labels, as it turns out, are incredibly malleable and thus politically useful.

And while that war has at least temporarily cooled down in Sweden itself, the way in which it did so looks likely to be the exception rather than the rule.

Ten years or so ago I got involved in setting up a food bank in Oxford. It was a bit different from most food banks because, rather than receive food donations from the public to give to families in need, it set out to be a “food recovery” operation. We asked supermarkets and wholesalers to give us their surplus fresh food (bread left over at the end of the day, wilting vegetables, that sort of thing) which we then gave to other charities operating in the city. The idea quickly took off and today the organisation is a well-established part of the city’s charity landscape. My involvement taught me many lessons: about the colossal (and shameful) amount of food that is wasted daily across the country but also that voluntary action, at a local level, is a good in and of itself. To paraphrase Shakespeare on mercy: the quality of food banks is twice blessed. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

In the Book of Revelation it is promised that eventually God will “wipe away every tear” and it is a long-standing fantasy of the British Left that our welfare state should emulate this feat. But there are practical reasons why this will never happen and what’s more, why it should not.

One of the surprising things I learnt from my food bank experience was the appetite there is for volunteering: it was never a problem to get volunteers to drive our vans and hump around sacks of potatoes. On the contrary we often had to put volunteers on a waiting list. It’s easy to sneer at ‘do-gooders’ (and some on the Left make a speciality of it) but the instinct that drives people to offer their labour free of charge is surely a good thing. It means that individuals make a personal investment in their local community — and these are the ties which bind. A well-stocked, well-run food bank is a sign of a healthy community.

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Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

I am pretty sure that when Mr Corbyn wrote about ending food bank Britain he was not aiming his guns at local volunteer groups; what he meant, I think, was that the benefits system should be generous enough to ensure that no one need access a food bank ever again. But there are good reasons to believe that, however munificent the social security payments were, we would never arrive at that happy destination. However hard we try there are always going to be some people in poverty; a combination of bad luck and bad individual choices will ensure it is so. Our benefits system is designed to provide a basic standard of living but despite its good intentions there are always going to be circumstances in which people don’t get what they need. It is an intractable failing of a huge bureaucratic mechanism.

Food banks are a relatively new phenomenon. They burst into the national consciousness in a major way some time in the noughties and the reason they did was largely through the efforts of a charity, The Trussell Trust, which now operates about 1,200 centres across the country.

Because the work of food banks is so practical — there is, after all, no charitable action more basic and fundamental than giving food to the poor — their appeal was immediate; kind and well-intentioned people saw food banks as a straightforward vehicle for their generosity. New food banks sprang up everywhere and because they were newcomers to the charity scene — the Trussell Trust only got going in 1997 — they attracted a lot of media attention.

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How charities are corrupted by Whitehall

By Ian Birrell

Much of that media coverage was misleading. The rise in the number of food banks was used to argue that ‘food poverty’ was on the rise, but that was faulty logic. Commentators and politicians said: “Look at the facts. Last year another x hundred food banks opened round the country. That proves our point.” Actually the rate at which new food banks were opening was unrelated to the underlying real rate of poverty. What the statistics demonstrated was that the food bank movement had caught the public imagination; people saw them as a way of helping others in the most practical way possible. The food banks were offering a new and useful service to people on very low incomes who flocked to them. Why wouldn’t they? If you are on a very tight budget a local food bank can ease the pressure. But, inevitably, food banks got dragooned into the political debate.

The food bank argument is now a permanent fixture in the Left’s political rhetoric. In the run-up to the election The Independent carried a story about a Tory candidate (and now MP), Darren Henry, who at a public meeting was incautious enough to offer the opinion that people who use food banks are often those who can’t manage their budgets properly. Predictably his comments were condemned by his opponents and, as the paper said, “drew gasps from the audience”.

He may well be right but he would have been better advised to keep his thoughts to himself; this is an argument the Right can never win. The Independent article, in typically tendentious fashion, observed: “The proliferation of food banks, which were rare before the 2008 financial crash, has increased hugely under the Conservative government, with many experts and campaigners blaming austerity and policies such as universal credit for driving the surge in need.” This is a perfect example of how the truth gets mangled in the poverty debate.

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Why money won't fix the poverty problem

By Andy Cook

Yes, it is true that food banks were uncommon in the early years of the new millennium; that’s because the movement was only just getting going. And then came the financial crash and reporters had to find a way of illustrating their stories. What better way than to highlight the growing numbers of food banks? The coverage acted as promotional videos for the food bank movement; it touched the generous instincts of the country and lo! food banks sprang up everywhere. What gets overlooked is that, had food banks been operating 30, 40 or 50 years ago they would have been just as well patronised — but then no one had thought of them.

None of this debate should obscure a fundamental truth: it is good to feed the poor. The Church has always seen it as one of the “corporal works of mercy”, that is those actions which attend to basic human necessity. It’ll be a black day when Britain fails to rise to the challenge of poverty and, despite the wonders of our welfare state, there will always be the need for that to be supplemented by the efforts of individuals.

I would go further: it is neither possible, nor desirable, that the state should displace and render unnecessary all voluntary charitable action. Across the country millions of people volunteer their time and effort to help make life a little better for others. Both sides gain from this arrangement and government is well advised to let the volunteers get on with it.

While the state should never lose sight of its obligations to the poor food banks should make us proud, not ashamed.

The Sacklers are the family behind Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical giant that developed opioid painkiller OxyContin. This drug is widely used for pain relief and even more widely abused by people who either became addicted through reasonable medical use or those just looking to get high. It is currently the scourge of many communities across the western world.

While drug use and abuse are not new, the remarkable thing about the Sackler scandal is the allegation that the Purdue Pharma knew about the widespread misuse of the drug. And even pursued it. The company was supposedly also engaged in comprehensive marketing schemes to ensure sufficient OxyContin proliferation to destroy their competition. They had determined that the base clientele of Oxy users were the perfect customers for naloxone, the drug that reverses the effect of opioid overdose. They realised they could increase their profits by selling treatments for the problem their company was creating. The implication is that the Sackler family was aware of and in favour of these profit making motives.

These revelations spurred artist Nan Goldin to lead a protest with Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York against the Sackler family’s funding of the institution. She and her fellow activists stood at the top of the iconic corkscrew curves and leafleted the glorious rotunda with white prescription-sized paper slips.

Goldin had been hooked on painkillers, and, having pulled herself out, wanted to make sure that consumers were aware of the dangers of the drug and of the willingness of both Purdue Pharma and, by implication, the Sacklers to perpetrate further addiction under the guise of care. But what Goldin and her fellow activists were also looking for was more than increased awareness.

They wanted the Guggenheim to refuse all future funding from the Sackler family foundations, and they wanted the name pulled off buildings and wings built with that money. It was not enough that visitors to galleries and museums funded by the Sacklers should know the corporate misdeeds of its patrons, but that the name and the money itself, should be scrubbed from institutional existence.

This is not the first time that activists have questioned the dirty origins of the money that fund America’s greatest cultural institutions. And the same thing has happened in Britain. In 2011, there was controversy over BP’s donations to the Tate; and there have been persistent calls from both sides of the Atlantic for arts and humanitarian organisations to boycott any funding from the Koch Brothers. Recently, there has been a move for the Zuckerberg name to be removed from a hospital that his foundation funded.

The argument against the Koch brothers is that they have used their influence and money to advocate for political candidates and policies that are opposed to action against climate change, and that the world is in such dire, existential straits that we cannot spend their money and still survive as a planet.

When BP funding was protested, similar logic was applied. BP is a fossil fuel company. If we keep using these energy sources, they said, we won’t have a planet anymore. Well, sustainable energy sources need to be implemented by energy companies, and when they reach a more profitable state of production and distribution, or perhaps when the fear-mongering surrounding nuclear energy dissipates, they will. Just as we’re not sending whaling ships out there to hunt down baby belugas and scrape the fat off them to enable us to burn a light in the darkness, fossil fuels will decline as other energy resources take their place.

Much of the American artistic, cultural, educational and medical infrastructure was funded by robber barons, tycoons of industry, and companies and families that had money to burn (hello, runaway capitalism). The Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and Astor families, to name a few, profited from unfair labour practices, not to mention slavery, the decimation of native tribes, exploitation of natural resources, all of which enabled an ultra-rich class that subsequently felt a noblesse oblige to provide at least some pittance to the lower classes.

Further reading

Ruskin's modern message

By Melanie McDonagh

So they did, in the form of contributions to and founding capital in major long-lasting cultural institutions. In New York alone, the funding basis for The Met, Lincoln Center, MoMA, The Museum of Natural History, and plenty of other basic, essential, cultural institutions that the citizenry of this city where I live rely on were funded with filthy money. No questions were asked as the public lined up to see all the unearthed wonders from Egyptian tombs, or sought treatment in clean new hospital wings. The received wisdom was that if the money needed to be cleaned, charitable giving was the way to do it. This is what was meant by the concept of “giving back”.

The Sackler family, BP, the Koch brothers, Zuckerberg, all have money to give away, and they want to give it. If cultural or educational institutions no longer wish to take it, then that won’t stop these people giving it to some other useful cause, nor will any boycott negatively impact either their bottom lines or their impulse to generate more wealth and power. In the case of the Sacklers, the money may go to settle the myriad lawsuits being brought against them and their complicity in OxyContin addiction and over distribution. This will move the money from Sackler hands to government hands, a net win, since governments have never been guilty of misuse of funds.

Further reading

How greed corrupted the American dream

By Sarah Churchwell

Perhaps cultural institutions will crowd source their funding from now on, and in order to make sure that no unclean money filters through their Patreon accounts, they will ask donors to complete intricate forms as to their beliefs, practices and investments.

Or maybe development officers will solicit big gifts from companies that are only known for their good works, such as those in… some industry where everyone is paid equitably throughout the global supply chain and no one at any level is exploited, and each corporate officer has only the best intentions for their entity and has never even once hired an illegal nanny or under tipped or wanted their products to do well to the exclusion or detriment of their competitors.

It’s too bad all the big corporations aren’t into giving their money away anonymously, for no credit or return, so that society could benefit from their largesse without being confronted with the moral or ethical failures that facilitated it.

As things stand, protesters and activists believe that money from unethical pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, social media companies with dodgy privacy reputations, and capitalist investors should be off limits. It is unclear if the motivation here is to punish the donors – or the cultural institutions. Nor is it clear which funders should be forced to defund major cultural assets.

Further reading

The politics of the Patreon purge

By Douglas Murray

In Britain, it’s not so easy to hand back money to philanthropists. The Charity Commission regulations make moral outrage a little harder to pull off if you’ve already accepted money from a source subsequently deemed tainted.

But what do we really think will happen if we deny the fruits of humanity’s labours? We have sacrificed ourselves, our resources, our work. Lives were lost in the effort to further the human cause upon this earth, and now we wish to reap no reward from those devastating efforts. Let’s not lose our ground just because we hate what it cost to achieve it.

To target the tarnished legacy of our forebears is to negate the work they did on our behalf, work so that we could have clean water and plumbing, electricity at the touch of a switch, plentiful food, infrastructure, education, and yes, glorious, perpetual, beautiful, soul shocking, art. Art, that reward for our struggle, that means to connect with each other and with humanity from across all time, is the prayer that we say all together.

I attended on a heavily discounted pass, representing a great abolitionist charity, and it is just as well. Cinderella couldn’t afford this ball. NGO ‘discounted’ tickets started at £599, with £1,495 the premium rate (not including VAT of course).

It’s a cause everyone can get behind. But the only trouble is, there’s no way on earth the people actually doing frontline anti-slavery work could afford to be here. For the price of the cheapest ticket, a Latvian charity could run their prevention work for a month. And that’s not including the travel and accommodation.

Further reading

Normalising sex work benefits pimps and traffickers

By Meghan Murphy

I have been in and around the anti-trafficking world since the late Nineties, and have watched big business pile-in. I’m not against this per se. And I’m glad the issue is finally getting the attention it warrants: business needs to up its game to eradicate slavery from their supply chains. But there’s a world of difference between authentic efforts to clean up business practices and window-dressing.

It’s hard to tell how much corporate sponsorship has actually helped. As things stand, there is nothing to prevent businesses from requiring all of their suppliers to meet human rights standards. And there’s nothing to prevent those businesses from policing their supply chains to ensure they’re not full of slaves. But how many have actually chosen this route? As big fashion brands chase lower labour costs, it seems the problem is getting worse.

The corporate take-over has failed to make a positive difference to the lives of trafficked women, partly because cash tends to be injected into the already established, well-funded NGOs with bigger profiles than those who are actually making a real difference. A story broke only last week about the anti-slavery NGO, Prajwala, which has been lauded by praised by celebrities and governments alike, yet now stands accused of exploiting the women it shelters.

Further reading

Questioning the misogynistic veil isn't racist

By Julie Bindel

It’s a narrative that cuts across the whole aid industry. It is at the heart of the two-year Civil Societies Future inquiry which was published last week, which concluded that charities have become disconnected from the people they are meant to serve. They are focusing, instead, on chasing cash, growing bigger and protecting brands. In my experience, too, the anti-trafficking organisations that do make a difference are those smaller grassroots ones, run by those who can best support the victims – such as women of colour who understand the misogyny and racism that underpins the slavery business.

It has become fashionable for big corporations and trusts to throw money at this issue, mainly thanks to the efforts of those small human rights organisations which have worked so hard to expose how many enslaved, trafficked labourers have been working within corporate supply chains. But as I listened to these businesses “sharing best practice” in combatting trafficking, I heard nothing remotely innovative or new. It felt like it was just a way of enabling those businesses to put something in their Corporate Social Responsibility reports.

Further reading

Why woke keyboard warriors should respect their elders

By Julie Bindel

What really left a bad taste in my mouth, though, was when a young woman was wheeled out to talk about ‘sex work’. She wept as she begged the room – filled with rich Westerners – for money, on behalf of the NGO Kranti.

I know very well that these stunts are part and parcel of the fundraising ‘business’ these days. Comic Relief does it to great effect and it convinces thousands of Westerners to put their hands in their pockets. But small, grassroots NGOs tend to balk at displaying survivors in this way, considering it patronising and undermining.

There were several delegates there who agreed with me. But they were loathe to be identified lest their personal quest for funding be scuppered. Like an abusive relationship, the money seduces and enamours, only then to become the monster you can’t live with, can’t live without.