Asylum Matters present these new General Election resources as part of the Fight the Anti-Refugee Laws campaign. The resources are designed to support local groups in engaging with their prospective parliamentary candidates, calling on them to repeal the #AntiRefugeeLaws and commit to building an asylum system that treats everyone with compassion and dignity.
The resources include two documents:
- ‘Building a compassionate refugee protection system’ a 2-page document setting out key principles and policy asks for parliamentary candidates;
- ‘Campaigning ahead of the 2024 General Election’ which collates different resources and tips around campaigning in a General Election year and ensuring your work keeps within charity and electoral commission rules.
We hope that these resources will support campaigners in reaching out to candidates and setting out the changes our communities urgently need.
Quite a few of you have shared concerns around the legalities and risks of campaigning as a charity. This is an understandable worry as charity campaigning activity has been politicised in recent years, with attacks on some charities who speak out from both the media and Government ministers. For those of you who have concerns, please note the second paragraph in the second document which gives links to detailed information from the SMK Foundation about when and why campaigning is allowed under Charity Commission rules. In a nutshell, as long as your charity is politically impartial i.e. does not support or favour any political party or candidates, you are welcome to campaign on issues that affect your members and services users, in support of your charitable purposes. In fact, the new chair of the Charity Commission encouraged it in his speech last year.
Please do get in touch if you’d like to talk this through more and I am happy to come and speak to staff or boards about this if it would be helpful.
Please do share these resources with anyone keen to take action to defend the right to seek safety in the UK ahead of the General Election. You can also share the resources on Twitter and Facebook.
Mary Brandon, Asylum Matters
Comments are closed.