The manufacturing of consensus
by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:
Bodies like Stonewall are falsely creating an imprimatur of civil demand.
Just how nationalised is Stonewall? An eagle-eyed gender critical account recently spotted that the trans activist charity’s latest published accounts show that, of total grant income of £2,401,159 in the 18 months to March 2021 just over half — £1,207,615 — came from government departments.
This is dwarfed by Stonewall’s ‘fees’ income, which includes money from the now-notorious Diversity Champions scheme — £4,920,675 in the 18 months to March 2021. This is despite a recent series of high-profile government or public-sector bodies opting to leave the scheme, including the Cabinet Office, the Government Equalities Office, Ofcom and the BBC. In June then-International Trade Secretary Liz Truss called for all 250 Government departments to quit the scheme.
This all represents growing public awareness of the incestuous relationship between professionalised and commonly government-funded ‘civil society’ organisations, and the official organs of government.
A little while back I discussed the emergence of this phenomenon over the twentieth century, as the state took over a growing body of welfare organisations once run by charities, and we swapped place-based charities for quangos. Such synthetic, professionalised ‘third sector’ bodies, I’ve suggested, functions as a kind of ‘policy laundering’, in which government employees pay supposedly independent charities to propose policies the government already wanted to enact, and which thus gain the imprimatur of ‘civil society demand’.
I’ve argued that this is in effect a post-democratic regime, in which policy laundering is used to route round the public duty to gain the assent of electorates, by employing insider ‘charities’ to help pre-determine the available options on which the electorate then gets to vote.
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