March 11, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
According to the Edinburgh Evening News, Tom Campbell, the head of an organization that promotes tourism in the historic Scottish city, believes that street solicitors working on behalf of charities are a bigger problem than beggars.
In reporting that news, the paper said in an editorial that it supported Mr. Campbell’s views. “At last someone in authority has taken a stand against the blight on our streets that is the ‘chugger,’” the editors wrote. Charities, it added, “have countless ways to tap into the benevolent hearts of caring people in Edinburgh and beyond. Press-ganging them in the open streets should not be one of them.”
According to the editorial, Mr. Campbell has joined the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce in calling for a crackdown on “chuggers” or charity muggers, as street solicitors are derisively called throughout Great Britain.
But in a followup story, charities including Save the Children and the World Wildlife Fund, which use street solicitors in Edinburgh, defended the fund-raising practice. They said that street fund raising, in which solicitors ask pedestrians to make monthly gifts that are automatically deducted from their bank or credit-card account, is cost effective. They also said their solictors are polite and follow strict guidelines.
However, that argument carried little weight with most of the nearly 50 readers who posted comments in response to the article.
“How any charity can defend chugging is beyond me,” one person wrote.
“Whenever one of these ‘chuggers’ comes anywhere near me, I just keep on walking … and so do most people,” another commented.
A third person simply urged: “Deport them.”
Perhaps bowing to such sentiment, two charities, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth Scotland, have stopped using street solicitors in Edinburgh, the article noted.
Why do you think street solicitors have provoked so much negative publicity in the Britain compared to the relatively mild reaction to them in the United States?
