Charities were a creation of the 19th Century as a solution of the new middle class rich to the new era of poverty to help the deserving poor and to ensure the wealthy made their way to heaven. In a era where anything goes, many charities get up institutions of “help” the disabled and started over a century of institutional care when the remains still exist today.

By the 1930s depression, the rich were no longer as rich as they were and so charities who were already established started to look to the wider public for donations and so the notion of charity as we see today was born. And for another 50 years or so, charities provides services and support in a way that was indeed charitable.

I think in the 1980s and 90s, a few things happened. Firstly many disabled people gained a political voice and were quick to tell charities they are fed up on how the charities portrayed them in a manner which was aggressive to say the least. Also charities were being professionalised and were taking up more services funded by the state, which made them less independent. And these factored as lead to the modern so-called charity.

Now charities claim to be the friends and allies of the people they claim to support when in fact they are using the now politically correct activity of campaigning, the new public face of charities, to steal the voice of those it needs to control to survive. No longer are charities helping the deserving poor but the deserving poor are forced to help keep charity workers in a job.

Charities are now just businesses where fat cat directors are slowly being handed to remaining silver of this country as the government uses the notion of Big Society, to privatise any and every service going. Because ‘its charity’ we are expected to accepted second class standard and even as users required to donate money to pay for the salaries of the fat cat directories as the old boys network moves from banking to charities.

Charities are not bad but they are not being honest about what they really are and how they have very little to do the Christian notion of charity as the new growth industry and they slowly build new and quite threatening empires.

If you like what I say, have a look at my website at http://www.simonstevens.com or follow me on twitter, @simonstevens74