Mick Hartley

The Taxpayers Alliance has been looking at the amount of taxpayers' money Stonewall UK is pulling in:

Hundreds of publicly funded bodies have been paying the LGBT group Stonewall a total of £1 million a year in taxpayers’ money for diversity advice, a report says.

Most of the money has gone straight to the Diversity Champions scheme, which has been criticised for its stance on transgender rights.

Public spending campaigners claim that the payments amount to taxpayer-funded support for a lobby group. They are demanding an end to the scheme.

The total public spend on Stonewall diversity advice, compiled by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, comes at a sensitive time and Whitehall has sent mixed signals on whether the government should continue supporting the group.

Between 2018-19 and 2020-21 some £3 million was paid by 327 publicly funded bodies. Of that, £2,573,779 went to the Diversity Champions scheme and £532,099 was spent on conferences, events and training programmes.

More than two thirds of universities and most Whitehall departments contributed, according to details released under freedom of information laws.

The highest payment came from Homes England, a public body that funds affordable housing developments, which gave £45,942. The Foreign Office was the most supportive government department, giving £19,012.

The NHS and related bodies gave Stonewall £466,065 as a total of 58 health service organisations paid into the Diversity Champions scheme.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance highlighted a “Queering Children’s Literature” event costing Goldsmiths College, University of London, £396 for a Stonewall speaker. The lecture in 2019 was “to celebrate how much has been achieved in queering children’s and young adult literature”. A total of 86 universities make payments to the group.

We've been hearing about the unfortunate effects of this Stonewall influence, most lately with the disclosure that some NHS trusts are placing transwomen, that is, male patients, in women's wards – even if they have a history of sex crimes. Any women who object could be charged with a hate crime.

Stonewall has been accused of siding with transgender militants who have alienated some feminists and pioneering gay and lesbian rights campaigners.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance called for an end to “taxpayer-funded lobbying, so public money is not used to distort political decision-making by advancing policy positions taxpayers may seriously disagree with”.

James Roberts, its political director, said: “Public sector bodies often say they have no more fat to trim but with the spending review on the horizon, it’s clear that savings can be made by ending payments like these.”

Its report, Stonewall Subsidy, due to be published today, said that Stonewall had “received significant scrutiny in recent months, particularly of its Diversity Champions scheme”, adding: “Organisations pay a subscription to Stonewall in return for guidance on issues such as gender-neutral spaces, pronouns and transgender inclusion. It has been argued that the privileged position offered by this has allowed Stonewall to lobby and campaign at the taxpayers’ expense.”

Stonewall is an out-and-out  lobbying group, pushing for an acceptance of a gender ideology that threatens women's sex-based rights. It's not that hard to understand. Taxpayers' money shouldn't be going anywhere near these people. In fact it's astonishing that they've had this level of success.

James Roberts, of the Taxpayers Alliance:

Equality, diversity and inclusion is a booming business. Firms fall over themselves to display their virtuosity [their virtuousness, surely – MH] online while hiring expensive consultants to tell their own staff they are bad people.

Unfortunately, the phenomenon also costs taxpayers a pretty penny. The TaxPayers’ Alliance has found that the LGBT charity Stonewall’s controversial Diversity Champions scheme cost public bodies over £1 million a year, which saw them pay for guidance on issues such as gender-neutral spaces, pronouns and transgender inclusion. At least 327 bodies were signed up. This is on top of myriad other programmes that taxpayer-funded organisations have been engaged in, such as unconscious bias training….

At least 20 organisations, including the House of Commons and the National Assembly for Wales, were paying thousands for Stonewall’s Trans Allies programme or trans training/inclusion workshops. And one eye-catching finding was the £396 paid out by Goldsmiths university for a “Queering Children’s Literature” event. This comes after a council-run library in east London was forced to apologise after presenting a fancy-dress session to encourage children to read in which a performer wore a sexually explicit costume. Vision RCL, who arranged the event for Redbridge council, had reportedly received £740,000 as part of the government’s Culture Recovery Fund.

This sort of waste does not have to happen. There are strict equality laws in place. Responsible employers ensure that they adhere to them; there is legal recourse against those that don’t. What we are seeing instead is the unnecessary taxpayer-funding of loudmouth wokeism.

Many public sector organisations would have you believe they run tight ships, that they have no more fat left to trim. Don’t believe a word of it: there’s millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money sloshing around the social justice blob. The hard-won money of working taxpayers is lining the pockets of aggressive activists who push for deeply divisive and unpopular ideological agendas.

It’s time for public sector bodies to follow the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the equalities minister herself, Liz Truss, and withdraw funding for wasteful schemes like Diversity Champions.