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Latest 18 January 2025

A good cause? How charities funnelled £28m into rightwing think-tanks

By Max Colbert
Street sign for Tufton Street, Westminster SW1, London, England. Alamy

Over the past two decades, rightwing think-tanks and pressure groups that spread climate denial, attack public services and stoke culture wars have bagged millions of pounds in donations from charities. Max Colbert investigates.

The list of “charitable purposes” in the law that governs charities conjures up the wide range of good causes that people in England and Wales support. The jumble sales, fun runs and sponsored swims that volunteers organise up and down the country all fund projects that “benefit” the public, from life-long learning to almshouses, from local sports clubs to drop-in centres for disabled children.

There’s no mention on that list of spreading climate denial, undermining the public sector and sowing division. But Good Law Project can reveal that over the last twenty years charities have poured almost £28m into rightwing think-tanks and pressure groups that have done just that – taking advantage of the generous tax breaks given to charities and helping the individuals who pay for it all to hide their identities. 

Our deep dive into public records shows how this money has flowed through 48 trusts and foundations. Thirty-one of these are linked to people who have donated a further £35m to the Conservative Party since 2001. 

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Fifteen are family trusts and foundations linked to Conservative peers and their direct relatives, or are charities that have a Tory peer sitting on the board of trustees. These entities have donated 46% of the total figure. 

And it has arrived in the coffers of the sprawling network of radical rightwing pressure groups based in and around 55 Tufton Street – a roster that includes outfits from the Institute of Economic Affairs, Global Warming Policy Foundation, and Taxpayers Alliance, as well as a host of pressure groups and associated spinoff projects.

As well as their extreme views, these organisations share one key policy: they never declare their funding. Despite this gap they exert an outsize influence on politics in the UK, seeding a  steady stream of news stories in the rightwing press and appearing across the media in the guise of “experts” on public policy on matters ranging from net zero to refugees.

For journalist Peter Geoghegan, who has been uncovering the dark money that fuels the right wing for almost a decade, Good Law Project’s groundbreaking research sheds new light on the workings of the shadowy groups that twist public debate.

“Tufton Street’s so-called think-tanks refuse to answer a simple question: ‘Who funds you?’” Geoghegan says. “Now we can see why: charities – which are supposed to support the public good – have effectively been acting as fronts to funnel money into Tufton Street bank accounts. The whole point seems to be to put another layer of opacity between the donors, their money and the causes they support.”

Not only do charities provide an extra level of anonymity, they also offer a way of boosting donations through substantial tax reliefs. For every £100 given by the wealthiest individuals, the charities they’re backing can net £182.

While the charitable trusts and family foundations controlled by the hyper-wealthy often give directly to these think-tanks and groups, our research shows that in some instances, the think-tanks themselves have set up charitable entities which act as vehicles for accepting donations from this elite class. 

A key node in the hidden web that distributes this money is the Institute for Policy Research, a charity founded in 1982 for “the advancement of public education and learning by research into social sciences management studies and economic policies”.

According to papers seen by Good Law Project, it was created by directors of the Thatcherite outfit, the Centre for Policy Studies, for the express purpose of “attracting charitable donations” – a goal that it has fulfilled in earnest, acting as a conduit for nearly a quarter of the funds we have identified.

Since 2008, we have identified more than £7m that has been distributed from the Institute for Policy Research to the Centre for Policy Studies, Taxpayers Alliance, New Culture Forum, Policy Exchange, and others. Around half of the money given has been to the Centre for Policy Studies. 

In the last five years, 99% of its payable grants have been to right wing and eurosceptic causes. 

Good Law Project has identified £1m donated by trusts to the Institute for Policy Research for its own use. Eight of these 13 trusts have been linked to Conservative peers, including Lord Cruddas, The Wolfson family, Lord Borwick, Lord Jon Moynihan and former Conservative peer Nigel Vinson.

The research paid for by the institute includes papers titled things like Tied up and Dangerous – How Red Tape Makes Us Poorer and Unsafe, Go Woke, Go Broke: Rolling Back the Frontiers of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion State, and Slow Growth is Morally Unacceptable.

According to Dr Sam Power, an expert in political finance at Bristol University, this funding “should be of concern to all reasonable-minded people”.

“Often these organisations operate as thinly veiled pressure groups,” Power says, “many of which seem intent on importing US-style culture war politics wholesale into the UK.”

Another big player in this murky world is the Politics and Economics Research Trust. This trust was founded in 2006 as the Taxpayers Alliance Research Trust, before changing its name in 2007. The group states its aims are to “advance the education of the public and in particular to promote for the public benefit research into matters of public taxation, public policy, applied economics and political science”.

The Politics and Economics Research Trust came under scrutiny in 2015, after it was revealed that it had given 97% of its grants the previous year to groups who favour Brexit, specifically the Taxpayers Alliance and Business for Britain. 

An investigation by the Charity Commission (PDF) found the trust did not have formal agreements in place to make sure the research it funded furthered the charity’s objectives to advance education, with money ultimately being returned to the charity. 

The trust has not given money to the Taxpayers Alliance since 2015, a year before the Institute for Policy Research increased its own funding of the alliance. Since 2016, the institute has given £857,000 to the Taxpayers Alliance.

Since 2008, the Politics and Economics Research Trust has given out more than £2.8m to groups on the right, while receiving money from Nigel Vinson, the MoyniTrust and the Street Foundation, among others.

The Street Foundation is a charity founded in 1995 by Richard Smith, the CEO of aerospace company HR Smith Group, who owns the building at 55 Tufton Street. Despite declaring that it makes “grants to individuals and organisations involved with children/young people with a disability/special needs”, Good Law Project revealed last year that the foundation had pumped £749,000 to rightwing groups over the last five years.

According to Geoghegan, these revelations raise serious questions about the ways in which people are using charities to avoid “scrutiny and transparency”.

“Tory donors and other powerful interests are able to use Tufton Street and its acolytes to push policies that distort public debate without putting their name to them. The only answer is to end the anonymous funding of political causes.”

It’s a solution that Power argues goes beyond divisions between left and right.

“Money in politics is like water,” Power explains, “it flows uncontrollably to the places where there aren’t barriers. Loopholes do not have a partisan political leaning, so are just as likely to be exploited by both sides. Something that can seem like a shortcut, or a little-known ‘get rich quick’ schemes for politicos, can just as quickly become standard operating procedures. It therefore benefits everyone if they are closed.”

The Institute for Policy Research, Politics and Economics Research Trust, Taxpayers Alliance, Global Warming Policy Foundation, Institute of Economic Affairs, Centre for Policy Studies, Street Foundation, New Culture Forum, Policy Exchange, Nigel Vinson, Lord Simon Wolfson, Lord Borwick, and Lord Jon Moynihan were approached for a response to this research. Lord Cruddas declined to comment.

Keir Starmer promised to return government “to the service of working people”, to clean up politics and uphold “the highest standards of integrity and honesty”. It’s time for the government to lift the lid on the dark money that is polluting our politics. It’s time for charities to return to their mission of doing work that does the public good.

The top funders of rightwing think-tanks with charitable status

Named Organisation

Total

Nigel Vinson Charitable Trust 7,850,248
Institute for Policy Research 7,084,262
Politics and Economics Research Trust 2,813,000
Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust 2,463,600

 

 

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