There was a moment towards the end of last year, when I began receiving emails about the new Together Alliance and its plans for a national demonstration against racism and hatred in London on 28 March, that I started to dream that maybe 2026 could be a year of change and hope. The year, perhaps, that compassion and tolerance could triumph over conflict and division.
But then the Women’s Institute (WI) and Girlguiding announced their policy changes on trans members, sparking a vicious social media pile-on; NCVO revealed that charity workers are feeling unsafe – read: scared – as they face threats and abuse just for doing their jobs (p5); and Oxfam wound up back in the headlines over a bitter crisis of governance and leadership which seems to have claimed the scalps of both the chief executive and chair, so far. And all this even before Donald Trump kidnapped the president of Venezuela and announced his intention to “acquire” Greenland.
So by the time 2026 kicked off, I wasn’t feeling so optimistic after all.
These developments have, however, given rise to a few thoughts. In no particular order…
If true, the way that Halima Begum learned that the board wanted her out of Oxfam – from a Times reporter – is disgraceful. As leadership coach Monwara Ali wrote online, “public humiliation should never be a governance tool”.
As more details have emerged of what went on, it seems clear that Begum was hired to lead a painful restructuring, something she may have had little prior experience of. But the tributes paid to her by friends and former colleagues on social media paint her as hardworking, bright, principled and utterly committed to social justice. Every time I have heard her speak, I’ve been impressed. Her impassioned acceptance speech on stage at last year’s Charity Awards, when Oxfam won the Overall Award for Excellence for its brilliant Women’s Rights Fund, was genuinely inspiring. Whatever mistakes she might have made in the job, the way that Oxfam handled her removal was a fiasco.
The social media frenzy that followed the decisions by Girlguiding and the WI to restrict their memberships to biological women following the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, was equally depressing. I know there’s an argument that maintaining silence on an issue represents complicity with the perceived wrong, but there’s another old adage that seems to have fallen out of fashion: if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Some of the responses that our columnist Penny Wilson received on LinkedIn when she asked lawyers to clarify the court’s intention were sadly predictable. Even though she specifically stated that she was “not asking for people’s personal position on trans issues”, in the end she turned off comments altogether.
At the Charity Commission’s annual public meeting in November, outgoing interim chair Mark Simms urged all charities to remain “open to challenge and debate”, and not to belittle those with different views as “wrong, small-minded, or politically motivated”. With this, he put his finger on something very pertinent. In the febrile environment that characterises much social media, it has never been more important for us all to debate constructively and politely; to ensure we stick to discussing the issue, and not the person. To continue with the clichés: walk a mile in others’ shoes first, and don’t rush to judgement. Maybe that’s something hopeful we can take forward into 2026.
