my problems stemmed from the fact that, as a middle-aged bloke, you just weren’t conditioned to talk about your mental health. But it’s very different now.”
Unfortunately, however, in October 2020 the DHSC declared that it could not continue to fund Time to Change, and the charities that had run it for 15 years reluctantly announced its closure, with a warning that the gains made as a result of the campaign were at risk of sliding backwards.41 Time to Change ended on 31 March 2021, very likely a direct casualty of the pressures on public spending created by the coronavirus pandemic.
Cervical screening
Other health campaigns by charities may be less high profile than those on smoking or mental health, but they appear regularly. They often form part of the controversies, debates and stories in the media that lead to improvements in official policy or changes in funding decisions. Early in 2018, for example, BBC News reported on a survey of more than 2,000 women which showed that one in four of them did not take up regular invitations to have a smear test, and that the figure was one in three for the 25–35 age group, in which cervical cancer is the most common form of cancer.42 The reason women most commonly cited for not booking a test was embarrassment about a stranger examining their bodies. The research had clear implications for social policy and clinical practice, however, and Steve Brine MP, then the junior health minister responsible for cancer, pledged to support a campaign to reassure women and improve the level of response to invitations to smear tests, which are offered every three years to women aged between 25 and 49 and every five years to those between 50 and 64.
Who carried out and publicised the survey in question? It was a small charity called Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, founded in 2000 by a London businessman, James Maxwell, after the death from cervical cancer at the age of 40 of his wife, Jo. She had wanted other women to have what she had missed: better screening and diagnosis, more medical information, the confidence to challenge doctors, and communication with others suffering from the disease.
In the following 20 years the Trust expanded and made a significant contribution to advances in the prevention and treatment of cervical cancer, including the introduction in 2008 of a programme of vaccination for girls in school against human papilloma virus, the cause of nearly all cases of the disease. In 2020 the Trust was employing about 25 people, running a comprehensive website, campaigning for better prevention and treatment, providing detailed medical information and offering emotional and practical support to women. Its annual income in 2019 of £1.6 million was a mixture of voluntary donations, grants from the DHSC and the Scottish Government, and gifts in kind such as advertising on Google.
Changing people’s behaviour is rarely easy, especially when it involves asking them to re-examine deep-seated attitudes or to stop doing something they find pleasurable or convenient. The examples in this chapter show that it can be done through a combination of information, persuasion and legislation, and that charities have played a key part in both large- and smaller-scale measures to produce change affecting people’s physical and mental health. The next chapter examines the involvement of charities in campaigns about something just as fundamental and often more controversial – human rights and equality.
Equality, slavery and human rights
When George Floyd, an unarmed Black1 man, died after a White police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes in the US city of Minneapolis in June 2020, there was an upsurge of protest around the world, especially in the UK. There were marches and demonstrations all around the country throughout June, even in provincial centres such as Bournemouth and Cheltenham; protestors dumped the statue of the 18th-century slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour and daubed the words ‘was a racist’ on the statute of Sir Winston Churchill in Parliament Square in London.
The protests took place under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement, which started when Trayvon Martin was shot dead by a vigilante in Florida in 2013. The movement gathered strength from a shocking series of police shootings of Black people in US cities in the following years, and a UK version of Black Lives Matter was set up in 2016 for a demonstration on the fifth anniversary of the fatal shooting by the Metropolitan Police of Mark Duggan in north London. But the protests of June 2020, some of which resulted in clashes with police and a number of arrests, created a dilemma for the estimated 200 registered charities in England that are Black led or work in the area of race relations.2
“Most of them are involved in service delivery and are not campaigning organisations,” says Elizabeth Balgobin, a charity governance consultant specialising in equality and diversity:
“A lot of them have council grants that restrict what they do or might have a reputation clause, and there would be a fear of being criticised as political. Some staff might be involved, but that would be privately, below the radar. A lot of the activists are young people who aren’t working through charities.”
Nevertheless, some charities published statements of support, including the Bristol-based Stand Against Racism and Inequality (SARI), which said it would not be joining in demonstrations because of coronavirus social distancing rules, but ‘stands in absolute solidarity with the mission and belief of Black Lives Matter, “imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive” ’.3 Irvin Campbell, the charity’s chair, added that SARI could not condone any criminal acts in relation to the Colston statue, but believed it ought to be in a museum rather than a public space.4
Meanwhile two different UK organisations, neither of them charities, were using Black Lives Matter in their titles and raising funds for their activities. In their public statements, they seemed caught in a debate between revolutionary and evolutionary approaches. The one founded in 2016, Black Lives Matter UK, was raising funds in 2020 on the GoFundMe website, where it states that it aims to ‘dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately and systematically harm Black people in Britain and around the world’.5 An earlier update on this site adds that ‘a charity structure would not allow us the freedom and flexibility to do our political work in the ways we wish to do them’. The other organisation has a website, blacklivesmatter.uk, which states it is a ‘non-political, non-partisan, non-violence Black Lives Matter platform’, and dissociates itself from the other organisation.
It’s clear that informal bodies and pressure groups, which often communicate and organise through social media, play a greater part in demonstrations and protests than organisations constituted as charities. But charities in the UK have played a leading part in researching the nature of racism and discrimination and in campaigning for changes in policy and attitudes, and are likely to continue to do so. Their work began after the Second World War when immigrants from the British Commonwealth came to the UK, partly to help rebuild the economy and partly to escape unemployment and poverty.
From Enoch Powell to Black Lives Matter
The start of post-war immigration is popularly seen as the arrival in Southampton in 1949 of the Empire Windrush, bringing nearly 500 Jamaican men to join the UK labour market. Immigration from the Caribbean grew through the 1950s, but the government did not consider that immigration control or race relations legislation was necessary until 1958, when the effects of discrimination and disadvantage boiled over onto the streets. First in Nottingham and then in Notting Hill in west London, White gangs roamed the streets attacking Black people; nine White ‘teddy boys’ were eventually jailed. From the early 1960s, immigration
