Pesticide Action Network: another fake charity, and some proposed action

You may have seen that, a few days ago, Euro MPs voted to put strict controls on pesticides.

The European Parliament has voted to tighten rules on pesticide use and ban at least 22 chemicals deemed harmful to human health.

The UK government, the Conservatives and the National Farmers' Union all oppose the new rules, saying they could hit yields and increase food prices.

The rules have not yet been approved by the 27 member states' governments.

The draft law would ban substances that can cause cancer or that can harm human reproduction or hormones.

UK farmers say the law would "seriously threaten" UK food production. It could wipe out the carrot industry and seriously affect many other crops, the National Farmers' Union has warned.

Certain pesticides are particularly useful in Britain to combat diseases associated with wet weather, such as potato blight.

So far, so utterly unsurprising. However, to extol the virtues of this wonderful new measure, the BBC decided to interview a "charity" called Pestercide [sic] Action Network.

And, as his Ecclesiastical Eminence points out, the Pesticide Action Network are funded... by the EU!

Here are their accounts for 2006 [PDF], when they received £240,715 [page 19] from the Commission of the European Communities (a.k.a. the EU Commission).

And here are their accounts for 2007 [PDF] (the latest available), when the Commission of the European Union handed Pesticide Action Network another £240,419 [page 20] of our hard-earned cash.

What a massive fucking surprise that was, eh?

A MODEST PROPOSAL

These fake fucking charities are springing up left, right and centre: see a pro-state charity quoted in the MSM and the odds are that the "charity" is, in fact, little more than a QUANGO. This fake charity will derive a large part of their funds—our money—from the government whose measures it is supporting.

I am thoroughly sick of this: there are so many of them. And, whilst various bloggers have highlighted different ones at different times, I think that it would be a splendid idea to establish a central website—an up-to-date, searchable directory of these fake charities—which people can visit to determine easily and quickly which charities are funded with our cash, and by how much.

I have registered the domain fakecharities.org and will set up and style a content management system framework over the next week or so. [Almost done: see update.]

This endeavour will be considerably easier if a number of people participate, so if anyone would like to help me to establish and maintain fakecharities.org—which will, I believe, be a valuable resource—could they please drop me an email (published in the RSS & Contact Details section of the sidebar) with the title "fakecharities.org help".

UPDATE: five hours later, fakecharities.org is taking shape. I haven't debugged for Internet Exploder yet, but it should look (and operate) fine in modern browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, etc.

UPDATE 2: RSS feeds now properly validated and run through Feedburner.