A match made in heaven
The CAA and the Charity Commission
As has recently been reported by Middle East Eye and The Guardian questions about the charitable status of the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) are once again being raised, this time in response to the registered charity’s public opposition to the Starmer government cancelling some arms export licenses to Israel. This was after a substantial complaint submitted by Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) against the CAA was dismissed. In correspondence seen by your writer, the Charity Commission, ostensibly responsible for regulating the conduct of all charities in the UK, has repeatedly refused to revisit the question of whether or not the CAA really is a charity.
The latest round of accounts filed by the CAA shows that it is in buoyant financial health. In fact, as of December 2023 it has been a dramatic increase in its funds held in reserve, holding cash reserves of £3.75m (compare that to £2.39m in December 2022). In 2023, the CAA received £2.6m in donations and legacies and incurred a total expenditure £1.23m, the majority of which was reportedly towards the vaguely defined ‘charitable activities’. As a registered charity, the CAA is exempt from taxation on donations and legacies, capital gains (including bank interest), and other taxes. These significant financial advantages are all predicated on the assumption that charitable funds are used for charitable purposes. This does not extend to political campaigning for a particular political party or a political cause. This naturally should lead us to ask whether the CAA really is a charity.
In May 2024, the Charity Commission, the organisation responsible for registering charities in the UK, dismissed a complaint JVL had submitted against the CAA. In correspondence seen by Mr Abney, the Commission dropped the investigation on the basis that JVL did not have the required legal standing to bring the complaint, since it was not, in the Commission’s view, ‘a person that is or may be affected by the registration of the CAA for the purposes of s36 of the [Charities Act 2011]’. Since the submission of the complaint, the issue of JVL’s standing had never previously been raised by the Commission. In April 2024, the Commission had attempted to dismiss the complaint on the basis that JVL was not a legal person, seemingly neglecting the fact that it was at that time a registered company, something anyone with even a passing interest . The effect of dismissing the complaint in this way was not to investigate the substance of the complaint, namely that the CAA was clearly engaged in partisan, political campaigning.
In October 2024, as was reported by The Guardian and Middle East Eye, John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington and a frequent target of the CAA, wrote to the Commission requesting further investigation of the CAA’s charitable status. In an email to the Commission, McDonnell expressed dismay at the lack of investigation, writing:
I do find it difficult to accept that, given the evidence presented to your body on the political behaviour of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Commission has not undertaken the thorough and comprehensive investigation of the organisation’s charitable status that I would have thought these serious complaints merit. More recently the Campaign Against Antisemitism has engaged in highly political and contentious public attacks on the government and individual government ministers. I was shocked at the tone of these public attacks coming from what is listed by the Commission as a charity.
In a legal opinion accompanying McDonnell’s email, Geoffrey Bindman KC, a senior consultant on public law and human rights at law firm Bindmans, wrote:
Jewish Voice for Labour has been urging the Commission to investigate the activities of the Campaign against Antisemitism (CAA), which has repeatedly attacked those who criticise the conduct of the state of Israel towards the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank.
In response to this further complaint, the Commission only agreed to a limited review of the CAA’s behaviour, in a pattern which has been replicated in the past. In a letter sent earlier in November, the Commission wrote that:
The Commission has previously considered concerns about the decision to enter CAA onto the Register of Charities and we concluded at the time of registration in 2015, we fully considered the question of its charitable status. Following representations made by JVL, we maintain the view that it is established for charitable purposes for the public benefit and should be registered.
The effect of this was, again, a refusal to revisit the underlying issue of whether or not the CAA was truly engaged in charitable activity. However, the Commission did take up McDonnell’s concern about political statements relating to the UK government’s cancellation of some arms export licenses to Israel, statements which it planned to investigate in line with their existing ‘risk framework’ (a set of guidelines outlining the Commission regulatory approach). However, the representative was careful to clarify that ‘The new assessment is solely focussed [sic] on the Charity’s September 2024 website statement’.
As it stands, the outcome of the further review has not been forthcoming. It is worth bearing in mind that the existing evidence shows the Commission has been more than accommodating towards the CAA. It has granted them the privilege of keeping their trustees secret, so we do not know who is most responsible for the administration of the charity. The Commission also gave the CAA a special dispensation, as previously reported by Mr Abney, to pay one of their trustees a salary for which the CAA had received special donations for the purpose.
The recent opposition the CAA has expressed to a ban on arms exports to Israel is especially egregious, but a brief look at the CAA’s website reveals a catalogue of overtly political statements which simply advance the emphatically pro-Israel stance of the organisation without any legitimate charitable purpose. The CAA is inescapably a product of the political right (cutting its teeth in bitter opposition to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party) and of the British Zionist movement. For example, in a recent post commenting on the Stand Up to Racism march which took place in October in London, the CAA wrote:
…there was plenty of racism on display among the so-called ‘anti-racists’, including signs and flyers demanding that “Zionism must be destroyed” and calling for an “End to Zionism”, claiming that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson are all “Israeli puppets”, and explaining “genocide maths” as “racism plus colonialism equals Zionism.”
Labour MPs and National Education Union leaders were among those in attendance. For those who like far-left ‘anti-racism’ maths, this seems like a more accurate equation: all anti-racisms are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Irrespective of whether you agree with every single sign held up at the protest, the implication of this facile dog-whistle is clear. You have much more to fear from so-called ‘anti-racists’ than you do from anyone they may oppose. The reference to the attendance of Labour MPs and trade union members taken as a sign of tacit support. Indeed, in an extremely charitable move, in the same blog post, there is a link to merch offered by the CAA including such slogans as ‘Hamas are Terrorists’ (for $32.80) and ‘Quite Openly Standing with Jews’ (for $22.48). The latter of course is a reference to when Gideon Falter attempted to disrupt a pro-Palestine demonstration and made himself look extremely stupid in the process, as previously reported by Mr Abney and others. The CAA has also recently started a campaign to cancel speaking events held by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Occupied Territories, invariably accusing her of being a committed antisemite and of unevidenced breaches of the much discredited IHRA Definition of Antisemitism.
Like the Jewish Chronicle, the CAA is a propaganda organ which seems to be diametrically opposed to any and all criticism of the Jewish State. What charitable purpose one can discern from the messianic language of their website and their vigilante monitoring of peace protestors is unclear at least to your writer. Their role in British public life centres on the weaponization of Jewish trauma, their basic idea being that pro-Palestine demonstrations are redolent of a curtain of persecution to which previous generations were subjected. The CAA is very committed to the idea that Britain is not safe for Jews anymore, even attempting to produce polling to that effect. In a survey commissioned by the CAA and conducted by YouGov shows their attempt to concretise this frightening reality. For example, take the following conclusion the CAA purports to draw from their survey:
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
This was in response to the statement ‘From what you have seen or heard, do you think the attacks that Hamas launched on Israel on 7th October 2023 were justified or unjustified?’, which is an obviously leading way of framing the question. Now, the full results of the survey have not been published, but even by the CAA’s own figures this ‘astounding’ conclusion seems to say much less than they think it does. Whilst 16% of 18-24 year olds did indeed think the attacks were ‘justified’ (whatever that means precisely), 35% thought they were ‘unjustified’, and almost half of 18-24 year olds decided they didn’t know (49%), this all out of a total sample size of 2,615 adults. Opinion polling is not well suited to gauging public opinion on complex geopolitical questions. However, in this case it seems to give some quantitative heft to the version of the world the CAA wants to represent: the young are stupid and hateful, the you must be afraid of left-wingers.
We shall see how the latest attempt by the Commission to investigate the CAA shakes out, and whether their manifestly uncharitable activities will be curbed. With its extensive cash reserves and notorious reputation of aggressive litigiousness, the CAA would almost certainly aggressively challenge any attempt to remove it from the Register of Charities. However, based on past experience, it does not seem that that will happen anytime soon.
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