Readers may know that I keep detailed audits on charity spending in my Resources section (available to Paid Subscribers):

I have recently updated my list of ALL taxpayer-funded charities and the total comes to a huge £1.8 BILLION!

Bear in mind that this accounts for 50 charities alone (over the last five tax years) and there are over 170k in total registered on the Charity Commission for England and Wales.

I have been dividing charity spending by theme, including asylum and migration…

… think tanks…

… and the arts:

Other resources include:

• The 10 most expensive Foreign Office grants in 2023–24

• List of countries that can vote in UK elections

• The Red-Green alliance: how the British Left organises

Remember this when the Government next brings up “austerity”!

From 2024:

“Will you help people like Abduallah who are being pushed into crisis and isolation?” asks Refugee Action, a charity that received £16,765,000 in taxpayer funding between 2021-25:

I don’t think taxpayers will be very happy when they see its activities - never mind the hundreds of millions they are already being charged for de facto open-border charities:

For instance, Refugee Action provides “activist packs” to give people “everything [they] need to become an advocate for refugee rights - from information about our ongoing campaigns, to practical guidelines on how to mobilise and take action.”

Activists are encouraged to influence their MP, “organise a letter writing event” and make their “community a place of sanctuary” - by working with open-border charity City of Sanctuary UK:

Throughout March, Refugee Action is also encouraging people to “March for Refugees” to help “drown out the voices of hate.”

You can discover more of its activities on its Instagram feed, where it posts important information such as this beautiful quote about Pokémon.

“Pokémon taught a generation that movement, exploration, and diversity make worlds stronger.

“Migration is not new. It is not abnormal. It is how societies grow.

“Britain has always been shaped by movement, including people seeking safety.

“Maybe the lesson was there all along.

#pokemon30”

I don’t think Pikachu or Charizard demanded hundreds of millions from taxpayers, though…

For paid subscribers:

List of 21 (and counting) asylum and migration charities costing the taxpayer £240 MILLION:

Between 2021-25, taxpayers were charged £5,944,810 for Battersea Arts Centre (BAC). So I’m sure they’ll be delighted to know it is soon hosting Second Trimester, an “ambitious new show” about a “pregnant son”.

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Over the last few years I have been keeping a beady eye on the activities of the British Council, which taxpayers were charged £1.20 billion for between 2020-24.

The charity says it “creates friendly knowledge and understanding between the people of the UK and other countries.” It is the perfect example of what Establishment types call “soft power”; an institution that apparently reinforces what a great country the UK is and strengthens its global ties. British Council employees have even been awarded MBEs “for services to UK Soft Power”.

In reality, the British Council is a woke horror-show, as shown in its recent grant scheme only applicable to organisations that are “diverse-led and/or working with underrepresented voices and either completely new to international work or just starting to work beyond the UK.”

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It’s not been a good month for dogs.

Earlier in February GB News commentator Scarlett MccGwire suggested “one of the problems is dogs” when it comes to making the countryside more inclusive, before touching on “the fact that a lot of Muslims find dogs very difficult”. Clip here.

Yesterday, in a now-deleted tweet, Camden Council launched a consultation on “responsible dog ownership”. The Council is proposing to extend its Public Spaces Protection Order, which could mean “dogs not being allowed in certain areas in [Camden’s] parks and green spaces”.

Anyone can access the consultation here, which closes on February 26. You can answer it even if you neither live or work in Camden.

It asks questions such as:

How often over the last 12 months have you witnessed antisocial behaviour linked to dog ownership/ fouling in public places in Camden that are managed by Camden Council? (See Appendix A)

Dogs are not allowed in certain areas within Camden’s Parks and Green Spaces. To what extent do you agree or disagree that dogs should not be allowed in the areas listed in Appendix A

(So the council has already taken steps to inhibit the movements of our four-legged friends.)

Do you support the proposal made by Camden Council to extend the current Public Space Protection Order deal with dog control and dog fouling in public places?

The form also asks about your ethnicity, sexuality and gender:

Camden Council’s tweet received thousands of angry replies and hundreds of thousands of views before it was deleted. A bit ironic for a council that apparently wants to know what the public thinks. In general, councils love launching endless consultations to give the impression of caring about residents’ views, then pressing full-steam ahead with what they wanted all along (see “liveable neighbourhoods” and LTNs!)

Are we seeing a war on dogs?

More:

Today I can reveal that taxpayers funded a research project titled “Queer AI for the Ally” under an entity titled “The Digital Good Network”. The network was launched in 2022 “with a £4 million investment from the [taxpayer-funded] Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC] and £1 million from collaborating organisations.”

A webpage about the project, awarded funding in 2025, reads:

“Educating even the most well-intentioned allies about queer identities and experiences can be emotionally burdensome. It can require disclosures that risk precarity and even danger. And as regressive politicking further threatens the safety and wellbeing of queer individuals, allyship – encompassing all positive ways of supporting the rights of marginalised communities – has become more vital than ever.

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Last week, Will Norman, London’s Walking and Cycling Commissioner, was photographed trying “the excellent new cycle lanes on Lambeth Bridge”.

He was joined by two cycling groups, the London Cycling Campaign and Cycle Sisters UK. In this piece I am going to delve into the latter as an example of how ridiculous identity politics has become, so much so that there are now exercise charities only open to minorities.

Case in point: Cycle Sisters describes itself as “award-winning charity which creates accessible and empowering spaces for Muslim and ethnically diverse women to cycle and become more healthy, confident and connected.”

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In her Budget speech in November last year, Rachel Reeves told the public that the UK’s net financial debt was £2.6trillion: 83% of GDP.

She also promised “stability for our economy” and “security for our public finances”.

With that being said, why on earth are taxpayers being charged for a study titled “Reducing Disability Stigma in Kenya through Strategic Media Representations”?

This post is free to read. Support my research by taking out a subscription or making a donation on Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you to everyone who has funded my work.

It kicks off this January and lasts a year, costing £87,751. Some may point out that that’s a fairly small sum in the grand scheme of things, but even spending a penny on this is utterly stupid (and it’s just a microcosm of the whole system).

Here’s an exert from its abstract:

“Ableist portrayals in East African media have significantly contributed to the stigmatisation of disabled people, resulting in reduced opportunities in housing, employment, healthcare and civic engagement (Ndavula and Lidubwi, 2022; Rugoho, 2024). Collaborating with the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), the Kenya Union of Journalists (KUJ), Signs TV and Action Network for the Disabled (ANDY), this project will pilot the design and testing of a toolkit for inclusive, non-stigmatising disability representations in Kenyan mainstream media. The aim is to enable media makers to sustainably reduce stigma and improve social attitudes through media content, considering the intersection of disability, age, gender, religion, class and other social identities.”

Taking place at Bournemouth University (ideally-placed for research in Africa), the project is funded by the utterly atrocious Arts and Humanities Research Council:

Its lead researcher is Dr Catalin Brylla, who is Bournemouth’s “Principal Lecturer in Film and TV and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion and Social Justice”.

“He is also Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and Chair of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.”

According to his profile on Bournemouth University’s website, “Catalin undertakes research in the areas of media audiences, social cognition, cognitive film theory, stereotypes, embodied experience, representation, ethnography, disability, gender, post-colonialism and practice-led research. His research is practice-led and impact-driven, and it aims for reducing the stigma of marginalised communities.”

In the past he worked on an “AHRC-funded project on disability and media advocacy in Tanzania”, and he has “made several feature documentaries that represent marginalised or stigmatised social groups, aiming to bypass 'othering' stereotypes. These include "Zanzibar Soccer Dreams", portraying women's football on the predominantly Muslim island of Zanzibar.”

In addition to this absolutely critical work, he has supervised a PhD project on “An Ethnography of Political Activism against Gentrification in Hackney”.

Deep state interlude

Interestingly, Brylla’s Bournemouth profile also shows how his work contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals:

While trawling taxpayer-funded grants, I have noticed that many abstracts bring up the UN and its Sustainable Development Goals - as if ticking off a box to get funding. Hmm!

Anyway…

Dr Brylla’s research is utterly pointless. I doubt Kenya asked for him to “Map opportunities and obstacles in the Kenyan media industry for changing media practices”, and UK taxpayers certainly didn’t.

Sometimes I think the UK effectively has “Universal Basic Income”, it’s just that we are paying for crazy numbers of “academics” to sit around decolonising their own farts all day (they may as well be doing that).

As if taxpayer-funded grants weren’t bad enough, The National Lottery is pretty hideous too - as I have been keen to emphasise in past pieces:

Today I will explain how The National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF) recently funded “a gender identity support group” titled “Squirrel Friends”:

I discovered this using the excellent “Doge Finder” tool created by my colleague Sean Proctor. You can find it at doge-uk.com (we are still beavering away on operation “DOGE UK”!)

If you go to the website and click “Menu”, you will be able to trawl multiple grants (from universities to charities):

Here are TNLCF’s grants (for 2004-2025) - a whopping £12.18 billion’s worth!

I clicked on TNLCF Grants 2024-25, and then chose “Transgender” from the dropdown menu. Our search tool is quite crude but incredibly useful for identifying woke waste (given we are combing through masses of data):

Behold, the grants that “Transgender” bring up:

I’m afraid my eyes were most-drawn to the word “Squirrel” (even though I know there are other problematic examples above).

Below I have highlighted a £19,482 grant that went towards “Squirrel Friends - A Transgender Network”:

It’s description reads:

Squirrel Friends - A Transgender Network in Merthyr Tydfil is using a £19482 grant to provide a safe and welcoming space for members of the LGBTQ+ community providing drop in support services counselling a safe space and to get advice through a peer-to-peer network.

On its website, Squirrel Friends says it’s a “Peer-to-Peer support group founded by three trans women from South Wales, with the aim to provide a safe and engaging place for anyone within the UK who needs support with their gender identity issues, as well as family members who may be having difficulty understanding their loved one or who just need support themselves. We were later joined by another to become what the members refer to as the Elder Squirrels.”

Nutmeg (below) is the group’s “cheeky mascot who helps us to raise awareness of our group so that we can help and support more transgendered individuals.” You can also see the National Lottery Community Fund mentioned below:

One of Squirrel Friends’ founders says “I try my best to keep our mascot #Nutmeg_Squirrel out of trouble while at public events, ( A very tricky task indeed! )”

Anyway, aren’t you soooooo glad TNLCF is supporting this…

Yet another reason not to buy a Lottery ticket!

Something I regularly find in my research is examples of the National Lottery funding odious projects. Indeed, I have previously touched upon this topic on my Substack:

Today I wanted to home in on the particularly awful National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF), which I often find awarding grants to far Left projects.

One of the worst examples is the TNLCF funding The Common Knowledge, a company that has worked with Momentum, Progressive International (which boasts Jeremy Corbyn as Co-General Coordinator) and Novara Media – to give you an idea of its political leanings.

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Did you know that November has been “Islamophobia Awareness Month”? I’ve been keeping an eye on organisations marking the event, from University College London to the National Centre for Diversity (yes, that really exists). But what about taxpayer-funded entities? Without further ado, here’s what I’ve found:

The Scouts

Not only does the organisation mark “Islamophobia Awareness Month” but it awards a “blanket badge” to scouts who mark the occasion too:

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With the recent Trump-related scandal embroiling the BBC, it’s easy to think this might spell the end for the great British institution. At the very least, it could push it into a crisis in which droves of Brits decide to cancel their license fee.

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It’s been a while since I trawled through taxpayer-funded PhDs, but I’m afraid to say they haven’t got any better than my last documented examples:

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With Rachel Reeves’s recent stern words from Downing Street, many are wondering if she’s about to hike income tax. It seems pretty clear she’s about to put some sort of tax up in the autumn Budget (scheduled for November 26).

Reeves has prepared Brits for tax rises by warning that “the world has thrown even more challenges our way”. It’s the usual nonsense, as though an act of God was the only reason the UK’s economy is in disarray.

But as my readers will only know too well, the Government is also wasting astronomical sums of money and has NO EXCUSE to tax the nation more.

Behold, here is my latest list of crap we’re being charged for - 10 examples totalling £23 million (and there’s a lot more where that came from).

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And it’s UKRI profile:

More:

This is all thanks to Sean Proctor, who redesigned the site and has been helping me, voluntarily, for the best part of a year with various tech bits and bobs. Sean is a genius, as far as I’m concerned, and fantastic at organising information (and everything really) - hence the site is packed full of data.

You can find the rebranded website at doge-uk.com.

Head to the main menu and you have the option to trawl all sorts of different funding…

Take the Government-funded UKRI, which I often write about…

…. now you can have a good look for yourself…

… as well as watching a video explainer on the quango:

There’s also a tab on charities…

… and “Top Global Funders”…

… where you can see George Soros’s Open Society Foundations:

In due course, we’ll be adding more and more data to the website.

And we’ll introduce our premium Subscription tier, which will give you access to data maps of funding networks, and an associated Wiki (an ever-growing encyclopedia of funding entities, networks, and connections).

Subscribe here to stay in the loop.

Some additional thanks…

• To the DOGE Map Team - a group of volunteers who put together the funding maps (which we’ll eventually be showing).

• To those who donated to DOGE UK when I first announced it. We received about £2,000 in donations and have spent it so far on the website and its associated costs, and videos for the site.

• And to the lovely Melanie Buila, who answers the DOGE inbox and has been an amazing help to me.

If anyone has any queries about the website, do email info@doge-uk.com - but to add we are a small team, in case it takes a while to get a response!

In the meantime, enjoy!

Yesterday disturbing footage was shared on social media, showing a woman cutting down yellow ribbons for Israeli hostages from a memorial in north London.

She has since been identified as Nadia Yahalom-Switat, a Palestinian-Jewish artist, and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded PhD researcher, “also known as Nadia Yahlom and Nadia Jaglom”:

I’m not the first to identify these details (as you can see via Gnasher Jew’s status above), but thought I’d add some info on Techne - the programme Yahlom appears to have studied with, which I am very familiar with.

First of all, I’ve pasted Yahlom’s profile (from Techne’s website) below.

Yahlom began her studies at the University of Westminster in 2022. Her PhD is titled Ghosts of the Al-Ghaib : A participatory, audio-visual exploration of haunting in Palestine:

Full text:

The practice-led research is a participatory, audio-visual exploration of haunting in Palestine. Working closely with those who have experienced haunting, supernatural sightings and/or spirit possession, I will be using film, sound, photography and other mixed mixed media to explore how jinn (ghosts, spirits, witches, demons and other forces of the al-ghaib or ‘unseen’ world) are experienced, embodied and described by different Palestinian communities. It draws on my background as a visual anthropologist and artist-curator and offers a radically new way of representing and conceptualising the relationship between violence, trauma, memory and the metaphysical in Palestine.

This PhD looks at how concepts of haunting relate to both historical and contemporary violence in Palestine from the British Mandate period (1918-1948) to Israeli occupation (1948-present). It examines what form hauntings take in Palestine and how these apparitions are linked to political volatility, violence, (post)colonialism and intergenerational trauma. Yet it treats ghosts as more than just symbolic, considering how experiences, memories and tales of hauntings may be explored through participatory artistic practice.

Inspired by Tina Campt’s (2017) theory that identity photographs of black communities can be “heard”, this research seeks new ways of working together with Palestinian communities to think about how silent, often invisible forces are experienced and can be audio-visually represented. This will be rooted in an exploration of ethnographies and participatory art work related to themes of trauma, memory and violent aftermaths.

Techne is a consortium of nine universities in London and the South East, which awards 57 doctoral studentships (PhDs) annually, sponsored by AHRC.

Anything AHRC-funded is taxpayer-funded.

AHRC is sponsored by the UK Research and Innovation, which receives around £8 billion per year from the Department for Science, Technology and Innovation (aka taxpayers).

This means Liz Kendall MP, who was recently appointed Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, is the one to quiz on why Yahlom is being subsidised by the taxpayer.

PhDs tend to cost around £20k (in annual stipend) and last approximately approximately 3.5 years. You can roughly estimate that each student will receive (at least) £70k from the taxpayer.

AHRC is by far one of the most ghastly/wasteful quangos in my view. Look at the research it has funded below:

1. The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000 - £841,830

2. Remediating Stevenson: Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement - £809,334

3. Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives - £136,909

4. Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse) - £805,769

5. Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism - £185,627

6. Diverse alarums: centering marginalised communities in the contemporary performance of early modern plays - £805,745

7. (De)colonial Ecologies in 21st-century insular Hispanic Caribbean film - £205,543

8. Comics and Race in Latin America - £759,293

9. Decolonizing South East Asian Sound Archives - £123,470

10. Everything Is Connected: Conspiracy Theories in the Age of the Internet - £786,083

So it’s not surprising it’s funded some equally awful PhDs via Techne.

These include one that argues porcelain “can be used as a “critique of white supremacy”.

… and others where students researched “garden as a site to cultivate queer anti-racist communities”, “spiritual activism” and “poetic responses to climate grief under patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemony”.

And Yahlom is certainly not the first Techne student to investigate the supernatural (her PhD focussing on “ghosts, spirits, witches, demons and other forces of the al-ghaib or ‘unseen’ world”).

At Techne’s 2024 summer congress, a “queer tarot reader” and “interdisciplinary feminist researcher”, who describe themselves as witches, performed “a series of spells and rituals”. My piece for The Telegraph below:

Time to defund it all…

More on AHRC:

Youtube version below: