Letters - 06 December 2013
From charitable status to the use of titles
Charitable status
I am among those who hold the view that the Religious Society of Friends may have made a wrong turn in accepting the Charity Commission’s governance model. Of course, our trustees must accept responsibility for the Society meeting the requirements of charity law, but how does it follow that trustees have to be a primary decision-making body? Instead, they could monitor, warn and, in the unlikely event that their warnings were ignored, could resign. We could have retained our wise, diffuse decision-making processes, it seems to me.
To be a trustee nationally of the Religious Society of Friends is to hold a position that is neither kind to the individual nor, I believe, good for the Society. Those who attempt it I hold in the deepest respect for their courage, believing and hoping that they will always be aware of the need to avoid becoming just another worldly efficient, Spirit-excluding executive committee.
Away from Friends House, as Area Meetings and Local Meetings find it harder to persuade Friends to give up precious weekend time, they may suggest that, as centrally, their trustees become the decision-making body. But we might be sleep-walking away from our Spirit-led tradition in a quest for efficiency, easy but sterile. We can’t appoint the Spirit to trusteeship, but one hopes very much that trustees will always meet in worship and firmly under the discipline of the Quaker business method, so that both Friends and the ‘still small voice’ may always be heard.
Roger Wilson
Sustainability
Will all our work on sustainability and the environment be for nothing?
Is anyone else worried about the investor protection part of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership?
George Monbiot said in the Guardian on 4 November:
‘The purpose of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is to remove the regulatory differences between the US and European nations. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. But I left out the most important issue: the remarkable ability it would grant big business to sue the living daylights out of governments which try to defend their citizens. It would allow a secretive panel of corporate lawyers to overrule the will of parliament and destroy our legal protections. Yet the defenders of our sovereignty say nothing.’
Ken Clarke in his reply says:
‘Investor protection is a standard part of free-trade agreements – it was designed to support businesses investing in countries where the rule of law is unpredictable, to say the least. Clearly the US falls in a somewhat different category and those clauses will need to be negotiated carefully to avoid any pitfalls – but to dismiss the whole deal because of one comparatively minor element of it would be lunacy.’
Does anyone else see the ghost of the (dis) Honour-able East India Company rising from the grave?
Are we thinking about what this means for Quakers and our various concerns?
Mary Marshall
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