In the UK, two censorship groups – the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Stop Funding Hate – have received money from other organizations that are in part funded by taxpayers.
The CCDH was the recipient of funds from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation – whose assets are worth £1.3 billion (some $1.6 billion) – but which also had the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs deposit more than £300,000 ($370,000) of public money to its account.
The Telegraph is reporting that £200,000 then went from Fairbairn Foundation to the CCHD last year – and the article frames this as “left wing activists” receiving government money, by proxy, to help carry out “political vendettas.”
One of CCDH’s most striking policy goals, revealed via internal documents surfaced by a whistleblower, was to “kill Musk’s Twitter.”
The report goes into some detail about how this group and its CEO Imran Ahmed are connected to the UK’s currently ruling Labour: it would appear to be via Morgan McSweeney, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff – who was a founding director of CCDH in 2018, to step down in 2020 – but remain Ahmed’s “dear friend.”
In addition to this group, that also featured prominently in investigations in the US focused on how third parties were used to allow Big Tech to apparently collude with the Biden White House – Stop Funding Hate is now in the spotlight as well.
This group “specialized” in getting advertisers to drop news outlets in the UK perceived as conservative – GB News and the Daily Mail among them. Their “proxy” funding source was the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (who also contributed to the CCHD with £100,000).
The foundation’s investment portfolio is worth £900 million (USD 1.1 billion) – and yet it got allocated taxpayer money from the UK government and the Greater London Assembly, to the tune of £1.4 million from 2020 to 2023 – and even £180,000 from the National Lottery.
Stop Funding Hate received £100,000 from this foundation in late 2020. Its links to Labour are appropriate to the era – the group’s chief Richard Wilson supported former party leader Jeremy Corbyn and was also opposed to the UK leaving the European Union.
