Wade through all the jargon and word salad in the new 12-page mission statement and you might think you'd stumbled across a Green Party manifesto or a blog by Greta Thunberg. It talks of 'proudly cross-cutting strategic ambitions of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Climate Action'. There is a lot about 'justice' – climate, racial, social and economic justice, that is.
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Yet this is a document issued by a 700-year-old City of London charity with a very specific role: to maintain all the Square Mile's non-rail bridges over the River Thames. These include one of Britain's most famous landmarks, Tower Bridge. And, because it has £1.5 billion in the bank, the charity does all this at zero cost to the taxpayer.
Well, great! Then why should we care how it wastes it’s money..?
Whopping grants to outfits such as Spectra CIC (£1 million to help it 'build capacity in the trans and sex-worker sector') or Race On The Agenda (£1.5 million to 'combat racial injustice'), may assist a subset of London life. But is it too much to ask a charity set up to maintain bridges to, well, maintain a few more bridges?
Maybe safeguarding the infrastructure of our capital city shouldn’t be something we are reliant on a charity for? Maybe it should be brought back into government control like all the other bridges not covered by this shower?
This all raises broader questions. Whose money is it anyway? And who voted for this stuff? The cash belongs to the people of London, whose antecedents paid all those tolls to cross the river. And over centuries the fund has grown into a vast investment portfolio.
And the people who paid those tolls are long dead and so don't have a claim on the money.
No one is suggesting the City Bridge Foundation had any idea of a possible Hamas link. However, it all adds to the impression of an organisation with more money than it knows what to do with. As well as appointing its own poet in residence, for example, it pays each one of its 29 staff more than £60,000 a year.
I really don't care, not when government and local councils are squandering my taxes willy-nilly. I just wish I earned that much for not doing my job.
