Guardian columnist George Monbiot contacted us at CMF last Monday to ask about our finances.
The Guardian has recently linked CMF and other organisations to financial backers with mega-bucks and right-wing politics in the southern states of America. A chart across a double page spread headlined ‘Abortion debate: Dorries campaign urged to reveal how it is funded’ featured CMF in a web diagram linked with the Lawyers Christian Fellowship, the Evangelical Alliance, the Christian Legal Centre, the Wilberforce Academy, Christian Concern and the Christian Insititute – all described by The Guardian as organisations linked to the Alliance Defence Fund: ‘a wealthy US evangelical organisation active on socially conservative causes’.
He asked: ‘Could you give me the names of your major donors and the amount they contributed in the last financial year?’ He was told that about 95% of our income came from our 5,500 UK members in donations, subscriptions, legacies and other payments but that the exact amount given by each individual member was confidential. Most of the rest came from rents. (As a mere journalist I can’t be a full CMF member; I am not a doctor – but anyone can become a Friend of CMF – free of charge!)
Two days later George blogged that he’d contacted 15 ‘organisations which call themselves thinktanks’. He then named CMF as one which had refused to give him any useful information: ‘They produced similar excuses, mostly concerning the need to protect the privacy of their donors.’
But it was a legitimate excuse. Almost all of our members are Christian doctors in the UK who would not appreciate reading their names along with details of their personal donations to a Christian charity in a national newspaper. We have no funding from American political groups and the perception that our doctor-members are all well paid means that unlike many charities we aren’t funded by trusts, corporations or government grants either. We run on a tight budget with lots of goodwill from our own members.
Data protection laws mean we cannot release details about individuals, but there is plenty of information about CMF’s finances already available in the public domain on the Charity Commission and Companies’ House websites.
I suspect however that these easily accessible facts might not have served the conspiracy theory narrative George was intending to create. His insinuation was that we had something to hide other than our members’ personal details.
CMF is a moderate sized charity with an annual turnover of about £1.2 milliion. Our current appeal aims to raise a further £1.2 million over three years to strengthen our ministry among doctors and to pay off the remaining mortgage on our offices. Our staff is so small that many do not work full-time – hence the limited response to George’s phone call. There’s nothing sinister and we’ve nothing to hide.