Reviews of First Edition
Victoria Glendinning, London Times Nov 18 1989
“informative and unexpectedly funny,” “he is not arguing against the voluntary sector which, he stresses, functions as a counterbalance to state authoritarianism and centralization from whatever party, and supports the unsupported – and sometimes unsupportable.”
Catherine Dawson Times Educational Supplement 29, 1989
Ian Williams is “challenging and iconoclastic.” He asks “can we offer the choice of the market and the security of the welfare state; how can we achieve economic justice without creating dependency, and how can we promote social and political equality without state coercion? In the best of charitable activity, that which campaigns for and empowers the needy like some of the answers, he believes.”
Hilary Barnard Chartist, 1989
Ian Williams’ ” Stimulating and readable” book “sprawls with detail, history and rich ironies surrounding charity law” Public school Educated judges have maintained a charitable indulgence for religion, aniumals and think tanks while denying charities political space for a wider social enfranchisement.”
Adrian Longley NCVO News
“The Alms Trade is a thought provoking contribution to an ongoing debate on charity law and its administration…
An interesting and persuasive contribution to the current debate on the reform of charity law and its administration.”
John Veit-Wilson Times Higher Education Supplement 23 Feb 1990
“Williams’s book aims to illustrate and demystify the hypocritical implementation of the political rhetoric of ‘concentrating help on the most needy’- a sentiment with which no one disagrees, particularly when it means tax benefits for their own high living needs.” Williams “shows how existing law is no based on defensible principles but is a collection of historical anomalies, so what the law defines as a charity is now often the opposite of all commonsense.”
“Alarmingly interesting”
Freedom
A suitable motto for the public schools might be ‘let us prey’.”
Janet Barron Literary Review
“The Alms Trade covers intriguing issues and from a voter’s perspective would make better bedtime reading for the present incumbents of office than anything they are like to open.”
Cosimo Books 2007
Blogroll
- Cosimo Books - Publishers of the new edition of the Alms Trade
- Deadline Pundit - Politics, Diplomacy and Social Commentary
- Ian Williams
- Rum Pundit - Rum in history, present and development
- Rum: A Social and Sociable History - About the importance of Rum in the Development of modern society
- The Catskill Review of Books - Reviews and Essays on Art, Culture and Politics from Washington Irving’s Old Stamping Ground