Lottery approves grant for group that insulted Blunkett approved
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Your support makes all the difference.The National Lottery yesterday agreed to award a grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns after the controversial support group for asylum-seekers promised to remove a claim from its website that the Home Secretary was "colluding with fascism".
The NCADC will receive £336,261 from the community fund on condition it does not use the money to fund "doctrinaire" activities or aid convicted terrorists facing deportation.
Diana Brittan, chairman of the fund, said yesterday that she felt the money should be awarded to help people facing deportation who are "very vulnerable" and in need.
Lady Brittan said she had concerns about some of its work but believed there was no legal justification for blocking the grant. "It is right to support the work they are doing for vulnerable individuals, but some of their publicity material was clearly doctrinaire and we decided the grant should not be given to pursue cases where deportation is part of a sentence passed by a criminal court on a terrorist," she said. "There are a number of lessons we have learnt from this."
Senior sources at the fund said yesterday that the group, which has already had a grant of £191,000 from the lottery, was unlikely to get more.
The fund's strategic grants committee said there was no legal justification for withdrawing the grant but attached strict conditions to the award.
The grant was suspended after the fund learnt that the NCADC had given money to a group linked to Palestinian terrorists, and had accused David Blunkett of "colluding with fascism" on its website and New Labour of being "the height of evil".
Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, said she was pleased the fund had agreed to look again at the operation of this grant "and that the concerns David Blunkett and I raised some weeks ago were valid". She said she hoped the fund would apply "a lot of common sense" to monitoring grants and would treat lottery money with "utmost respect".
She added: "I still have doubts about this particular organisation. But the decision to award the grant is the fund's alone, and the Government will defend its right to make it free of interference from politicians," she said.
"I welcome the measures the fund is taking to ensure lottery money does not go to bodies whose main purpose is to be political or doctrinaire."
The community fund was subjected to a sustained hate-mail campaign after the Daily Mail highlighted its grant to the NCADC. The newspaper urged readers to vent their justified "anger" about the grant, which prompted a deluge of racist, anti-Semitic and threatening letters to Lady Brittan.
The NCADC yesterday met the fund's executive and agreed to abide by conditions imposed on them. The NCADC vice-chairman, Pete Widlinski, said: "While we never doubted that the fund would make the grant, we find it unacceptable that staff and trustees of the fund and our own workers have been subjected to a sustained campaign of misrepresentation, race-hate and threats. The allegation that we 'encourage' criminal activities has been proved to be completely unfounded."
MPs will debate the future of lottery funding today.
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