FakeCharities - Tory-style (2)

We're all familiar with Labour's model of the fakecharity, i.e. set up and fund registered charities to 'campaign' for stuff that they wanted to do anyway and/or sub-contract government functions to favoured recipients.

The Tories have learned a thing or two, so to get away from the old model whereby they are openly in the pocket of 'industry lobby groups' or 'trade associations', they are now collaborating with righteous sounding organisations like the Public Health Commission or the Sustainable Consumption Institute. The latter was brought to my attention by David Phipps over at IndHome, who did an admirable job of fisking one of Call-Me-Dave's more moronic speeches, well worth a read, but let's dig a bit deeper.

As I explained a couple of months ago, the former is a food industry lobby group, and a bit of clicking tells us that the latter is a joint-venture between willing grant recipients at Oxford University and Tesco supermarkets, who want to dress themselves up as an 'environmentally friendly' business.

But then again, Labour are just as guilty of making concessions to particular businesses in exchange for money, starting with the Bernie Ecclestone donation, but other tips of that particular iceberg are their symbiotic relationship with Sainsbury's supermarkets, Lakshmi Mittal, Hinduja Brothers, Northern Rock and peddlers of 'sustainable energy', for example (there are dozens of others, but you get the general idea).

So I'm having another one of those Animal Farm moments: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

The only question which we might be able to answer is "What are we going to call these organisations?" They're not really fakecharities in the accepted sense but they're not quite industry lobby groups either. If anybody can think of a term that encapsulates the horror, please leave a comment!