by Charlotte Gill, The Critic (Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons)
The state is handing out billions of taxpayers’ cash to charities challenging political policy — without effective democratic oversight
Look at the following statements and ask yourself: which ones are true, and which are false?
- Under the last Conservative government, a charity whose Migration Fund supports open borders was awarded more than £1 million in government grants
- USAID (the United States Agency for International Development, which President Trump and Elon Musk dismantled) was awarded tens of millions from UK taxpayers
- The Home Office has a contract with a charity called Migrant Help worth hundreds of millions of pounds
- Taxpayers were charged £841,830 to fund a university project “The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000”
Doubtless you will have suspected that this is a trick question. It is. Every statement above is true: £1,395,000 worth of grants were supplied to the pro-migration Paul Hamlyn Foundation between 2020 and 2023, a period for most of which Boris Johnson was prime minister. Not content with delivering its own aid schemes, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (including what was the Department for International Development) awarded USAID with at least £100 million. Commencing in 2019 (and due to end in 2029) the Home Office signed a £235 million contract with Migrant Help (an NGO that describes its aims as providing “independent advice and guidance to assist people seeking asylum in the UK”).
And as for “The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000” project, this isn’t even going entirely to the support of British researchers. One of its investigators is Portuguese and was living in Sweden the last time I checked.
Over the past two years I have been investigating where our taxpayer money goes and reporting the findings on my Substack. What my digging has uncovered is a treasure chest whose bounty goes to everything from diversity recruitment firms advising Whitehall to studies about “pregnant men”. These transfers of government funds to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) pressure groups, research bodies and suppliers are not secret.