I shall unfortunately be on on a prearranged engagement this evening, and so will not seeing this Panorama, which seems to have been a last minute decision to broadcast, not being in the current RT, and thus presumably deemed of evident urgency.
Given the almost exponentially burgeoning rate of news exposes on corruption and inefficiencies in governance in all sorts of areas in our land, and the fact that people are being made to feel good donating to charities monies that would have once gone to governmental departments staffed with salaried individuals dealing however inadequately with welfare issues here and worldwide, perhaps we should no longer feel shocked at allegations such as this one. But as to what are we to make of the restrictions now in place on transparency with regards to actual firms being invested in and actual returns on said investments, well, should anyone but the most naive be surprised?
This is the clincher:
'Bennet-Jones stepped down this year as Comic Relief's chair of trustees after 15 years in the role. "This sounds counter-intuitive, but it is the law", he said. "The broader the issues a charity supports, the more difficult it is to justify ethically screened investment - as the range of industries that might need to be excluded would seriously impact on the fundamental requirement to maximise returns".
No one could have been better placed to sum up the moral dilemma: is charity being used as a holding operation pending political change, or is it proving to be the key to maintaining the status quo?