Should government accounts be able to block people on X? It’s a question I was forced to return to AGAIN after finding out I am blocked by the Mayor of London’s Culture Team.

I am also blocked by The Green Party, Islington Council (my former council) and the Labour MPs Chris Bryant and Torsten Bell, among countless others.

I believe the Culture Team account didn’t like me drawing attention to an event they advertised about “queer birding”, which is part of “Haringey Unearthed”, “a grants programme delivered as part of Haringey’s London Borough of Culture.”

So it’s only fair that I draw even more attention to this terrible programme, and the taxpayer funding involved.

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Another day, another stupid example of how the UK’s foreign aid budget has been spent.

Taxpayers were charged £4,809,498 for the project Gender Responsive Resilience and Intersectionality in Policy and Practice (GRRIPP) - Networking Plus Partnering for Resilience.

This was funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), which was awarded £1.5 billion of the UK’s Official Development Assistance between 2016-21 (and was wound down in 2022). The GCRF was designed to “addres[s] the United Nations sustainable development goals.”

Taking place at University College London between Nov 19 - Apr 24, the GRRIPP Network+ aimed to “build an international, network of scholars, policy makers and practitioners to promote gender and intersectionality.”

It was led by Professor Maureen Fordham, whose UCL profile highlights what United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) she has met:

A UCL webpage about the now-closed GRRIPP project explains that it used “four interconnecting themes” (even though I can see five…). These include “Critical Theory” and “Decoloniality”:

Its abstract is filled with paragraphs of leftist gobbledygook such as:

We seek to establish a radical vision which begins and centres upon gender and intersectionality rather than adding it, post hoc, to domains and sectors. The primary challenge we identify is to embed gender and intersectionality in resilience thinking, policy making and practice through better understanding the drivers of gender inequality of risk and resilience in order to build gender responsive resilience (GRR).

&

Our horizontally-structured "ideas space" allows for critical and situated perspectives and indigenous and de-colonial knowledges to emerge based on, inter alia, non-Anglophone sources and lived experiences.

&

Beneficiaries will also include local practitioners and activists, those working in NGOs and with social movements, and also educators from grass roots to university levels.

&:

A conscious aim of GRRIPP is to decolonise knowledge production and provide levels of autonomy for regional teams which we hope will have impact in our regions of influence.

What a load of utter nonsense! You can read the whole thing here.

The project’s “Outcomes” aren’t much better. These include a “GRRIPP training workshop on Gender and Territory” in South America…

… and “Elaboration of five local climate change adaptation plans with gender mainstreaming in five municipalities in Argentina.”

A YouTube page about the project explains that it “commissioned more than 20 research projects across Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and Southern Africa”, with videos on subjects such as “Moving towards a SMART, Inclusive South Asia Disaster & Resilience”:

One of the videos on the YouTube site has as little as 7 views at the time of writing:

And the rest aren’t much better:

Could this be because it’s all total bollocks?

Unfortunately, it’s not the first ridiculous project funded by the GCRF. You can read more here:

£4,487,566 of the UK foreign aid’s budget was awarded to a study on “Deliberate Self Harm (DSH)” in South Asia, I can reveal.

GCRF: South Asia Self Harm research capability building initiative (SASHI) is a project that took place across two phases at Bangor University and then the University of Manchester (between September 2017 to March 2025).

Its abstract explained…

Our main aim is to produce new and robust information to inform the understanding of the nature of DSH in the context of profound social, political and economic challenges in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) such as India and Pakistan.

… and that:

The work will be of direct relevance to other Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) and will also be of interest to people working with minority immigrant communities in the UK and services providing support following an episode of DSH.

Forty eight organisations worked on the research, including British universities and foreign ones, such as Bahria University (based in Islamabad, Pakistan), University of Karachi (Karachi, Pakistan) and Raju Hospital (Chennai, India).

A page about the project, authored by The Centre for Mental Health and Society, reads “We have a growing portfolio of self-harm and suicide prevention research at the Centre for Mental Health and Society. A major focus of the work has been in South Asia.”

Catherine Robinson, who is the lead researcher on the project, worked on another study about self-harm in South Asia (awarded £976,251 from the taxpayer-funded Medical Research Council). Titled A Youth Culturally adapted Manual Assisted Psychological therapy (Y-CMAP) for adolescent Pakistani patients with a recent history of self-harm, its abstract explained:

“There are more than 100,000 acts of self-harm in Pakistan annually. The aim of Y-CMAP is to evaluate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of this culturally adapted psychological therapy in adolescent patients with a history of self-harm. Our study in Karachi determined the effectiveness of a 6-8 session CBT-based intervention (C MAP) in adults who had recently self-harmed.”

Robinson’s grants, listed on her academic profile, include: “Improving assessment and treatment of mental disorder after Deliberate Self Harm in South India, 2015 – 2017”.

The South Asia Self Harm research capability building initiative was funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), which was given £1.5 billion of the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget.

The GCRF was designed to “address challenges faced by developing countries”, and counted as part of the UK’s pledge to spend 0.7 percent of gross national income on ODA.

I don’t want to sound terribly mean - I care as much as the next person about alleviating mental illness and psychological suffering - but the UK is not the world’s saviour, and I am not sure why we are funding research on self-harm in South Asia. Let me know your thoughts.

More:

Yesterday I wrote about the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), which I was amazed to discover this week (even years in to my research, I still find new things all the time). I knew that we were funding a lot of daft foreign projects, but some grants actually came out of the foreign aid budget!

You will be pleased to know (when I show you more details of what it funded) that the GCRF was wound down in 2022.

But not before it wasted a whole load of taxpayers’ money on niche foreign research. Its budget for 2016-21 was £1.5 billion!

Read more

It’s not the first time I’ve mentioned this, but the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has become an outlet for foreign aid.

To show you what I mean, I have randomly searched for Kenya on the UKRI grant database.

Read more

The Wellcome Trust, which received £103,600,000 from taxpayers between 2021-25, has commissioned a song “about the impacts of extreme heat on human health”.

The song, titled “Cool Me Down”, was produced by the American hip-hop duo EARTHGANG.

On Instagram, Wellcome Trust wrote:

We need to communicate in different ways to reach new audiences. Music can inspire hope and drive climate action.

That’s why Wellcome has partnered with Sounds Right and commissioned Grammy-nominated hip-hop duo EARTHGANG (@earthgang) to create the track “Cool me down” about the impacts of extreme heat on human health, launched with UN Live yesterday for Climate Week NYC.

Listen to the track “Cool me down” by EARTHGANG now, on your streaming platform of choice.

Below EARTHGANG are pictured with Alan Dangour (far left), Director of Climate and Health at Wellcome, who was recently posted to NYC for Climate Week. Nice work if you can get it!

You can listen to Cool Me Down here…

… as well as see it being made in the studio:

Unfortunately this is not the first time the Wellcome Trust has tried to get climate messaging into the arts.

It also funds Climate Spring, an organisation that tries to embed climate narratives/ storylines into TV shows. You can read in detail about its work below:

What a load of nonsense.

The Wellcome Trust is simply demonstrating why it should lose all taxpayer funding.

More:

The planet is on fire. Apparently.

So naturally our leaders have flown to NYC this week to report back on how terrible things are.

One is Alan Dangour, Director of Climate & Health of the Wellcome Trust, which received £103,600,000 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

I’m still not entirely sure what the Wellcome Trust does, other than posting vague videos and hiring about a million equity officers.

Posting from NYC, Dangour called for “a move from commitment to urgent action to protect human health around the world from the impact of climate change.”

Obviously this doesn’t affect his travel, though.

Another to grace NYC with his presence was Mete Coban MBE, the £151,465 per year Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy.

Coban faked a football career - claiming he was due to transfer to Real Madrid having previously “been scouted by the Istanbul side Galatasaray before transferring to Inter Milan” - and also clocked up over 40,000 air miles while working as Hackney’s Cabinet Member for the Environment.

But he still had some wise words for us back home…

… posting about “a Puerto Rican-led community organisation in Brooklyn putting climate justice into action”…

… and how “Nature-based solutions are helping bring New York Harbor back to life”:

Wow, this sounds sooooo useful to Londons/ everyone in the UK.

Ever feel you’re in the wrong job?

All together, these charities represent a £42,319,690 increase in funding across the last five available tax years:

Migrant Help (£194,462,000, 2021-25)
(The charity received £153,592,000 between 2020-24, meaning an increase of £40,870,000)
Migrant Help offers advice in everything from “How to claim asylum” to “Finding legal representation” to “Accessing healthcare”. The charity runs a schools programme to “dispel myths and encourage through and discussion around how to be more welcoming to people from outside the UK.”

When the charity isn’t trying to brainwash children, it has celebrated International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia & Biphobia and Transgender Awareness Week. It has also criticised the EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces, calling it “harmful, dehumanising and lacking in basic compassion.”

Below: A social media post by Migrant Help

Read more

Dr Debbie Weekes-Bernard is Sadiq Khan’s £151,465 per year Deputy Mayor, Communities and Social Justice (he has nine deputy mayors in total).

She is also the Chair of Praxis Community Projects, whose title is a bit ambiguous until you head to its website, which advertises “A Migrant’s Guide”:

Costing £3 per copy (or free online), the Migrant’s Guide is “interactive guide to support you through your immigration journey in the UK. For migrants, by migrants.”

It comes in different languages:

And is extremely extensive, covering:

• LGBTQI+ support

• Immigration raids

• Mindfulness activities

• Register for GP & care needs

  

• Homelessness support if you have children

• Free activities

• Universal credit

• Housing benefit & council tax

Among other areas:

You can see the whole thing here.

Like I say, £151,465 per year Weekes-Bernard is Chair of Praxis, which she describes as “a charity supporting migrants and refugees and is a Distinguished Friend of the Migration Museum.” (Which itself received £1,147,120 from taxpayers between 2021-25).

Minnie Rahman is the CEO of Praxis and another alumni of the New Economy Organisers Network (NEON)…

… which trains left-wing activists for air and otherwise, including open-border-loving Zoe Gardner.

More on NEON here:

Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that Praxis Community Projects received £4,014,260 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

It’s part of a much bigger picture, with taxpayers being charged billions for charities, many of which effectively advance open borders or other ideological positions many taxpayers disagree with.

To see more, look no further than my list of taxpayer-funded charities (asylum and migration), which comes to £261,897,909:

Apologies for the newsletter being a bit late today. I am trying to send them off at 4pm most days, but I have been beavering away on my charity lists.

The latest total is £2.6 BILLION. Gulp. Especially when you see how stupid some of these charities are - which is why I’ve noted them down in the first place.

Paid subscribers can access the full list, which tells you which charities are the Top 10 biggest recipients of taxpayer funding.

To add, this is a sample I’ve chosen - mostly based on what charities I’ve found out about first (or known about already) during the course of my research. There are 170,000 charities on the Commission for England and Wales alone, so the final taxpayer figure is likely to be even greater.

I’ve also updated by asylum and migration list.

Have you heard of Professor Sally Hines “(she/her)”, a “Gender Studies and Sociology academic” at the University of Sheffield?

When Hines isn’t busy researching “transgender, gender and sexuality theory, gender and sexual citizenship, sociologies of the body, sociologies of intimacy, intersectionality, and theories of recognition and difference”, as well as “Pregnant Men”, she can be found on X, tweeting about anything from…

…defending the “lanyard class”…

… to saying that people “really don’t have to worry” about “the future bone density of trans people”:

… to claiming that the Gender Critical movement “is now fully associated with the extreme right”…

I think it’s fair to say Hines is not the biggest fan of (and vice versa)…

… whom she accused of “obsessively tweeting about a paper that I co-wrote on trans pregnancy.”

But why shouldn’t Linehan highlight this study - seeing that Hines’ research on “Pregnant Men” received hundreds of thousands in taxpayer funding?

And that’s just the start…

Hines has been Principal Investigator on six projects that received £1,843,715 total in taxpayer funding:

All of these were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), a subsidiary of the UK Research and Innovation.

Hines is also listed as Co-investigator on a taxpayer-funded project titled ESRC Seminar Series: Critical Diversities@ the Intersection: Policies, Practices, Perspectives, which received £16,378 and ran from 2013-2015.

So all in all, Hines has led or worked on projects awarded £1,860,093 in taxpayer funding.

Let’s take a closer look at some of this work…

Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences and Practices of Reproduction received £668,244 in total and ran from March 2017 to April 2021 at two universities (the University of Leeds and University of Sheffield).

Part of its abstract reads: “Trans male pregnancy shows how shifts in gendered and intimate practices occur within changing social institutions, technological advances and developing cultural understandings. Vice versa, such social, technological and cultural transformations impact on how individuals live their gendered, bodily and intimate lives. Diversification of gendered, sexual and intimate practices, and advances in health care practices and reproductive technology, have significantly altered contemporary experiences of pregnancy and birth.”

Then there’s Living Gender in Diverse Times, which also took part in two phases at the University of Leeds and University of Sheffield - costing taxpayers £1,057,555.

Its abstract reads:

“From coverage of Miley Cyrus' declaration that 'You Can Just Be Whatever You Want to Be' in 'Time Magazine', the introduction of a gender fluid character into the video game 'Sims 4' and Facebook's launch of multiple gender 'options', the last year and half of media coverage lends support to the 'Financial Times' End of Year (2015) pronouncement 'Year in a word: Trans: Gender discussion becomes a nuanced, fluid , 'non-binary' affair'.While there has been significant cultural interest in the ways in which young people are moving away from the traditional binary identities of male and female and adopting gendered expressions that destabilise conventional gendered norms. Academic research has yet to explore the ways in which the meanings of gender have changed for young people or to address the implications of this on gender as a social category more broadly. The overall aim of this project is to gain in-depth evidence driven knowledge of the understandings and practices of gender in the 21st C. UK amongst young people between the ages of 15-24.”

Wow, what great value for money…

Interestingly, another person Hines has been rude about on X is yours truly.

A couple of weeks ago she appeared to imply that I am part of a “politically dangerous” trend of journalists misleading the public about social sciences and humanities:

“They care nothing about evidence and wilfully mislead the public”, Hines wrote.

But where’s her evidence for that? I hope it’s obvious by now I enjoy publicising facts - which is why I encourage readers to check out the full list of taxpayer-funded research led by Professor Sally Hines.

More:

Dr Donna McCormack (they/ them) is a Senior Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, who received £196,016.22 from the taxpayer-funded British Academy for “their” project Doing Disability Futures (which links Palestine to “disability justice” among other things).

McCormack has “a strong interest in monsters” and is “a founding member of the Monster Network”, as well as "currently developing a project on Queer Fish”, making me wonder why the British Academy ever funded they/them’s work, as well as promoting McCormack on its socials:

Worse still is that McCormack has had taxpayer funding through another channel: the absolutely abysmal Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a subsidiary of the UK Research and Innovation - which spends “more than £9 billion of public money” every year:

Between 2018-20, McCormack was awarded £120,080 towards “their” research project Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics while working at the University of Surrey’s English department (hardly very useful for organ donation research).

The project analysed human organ transplantation “through the lens of contemporary novels and films”.

It explained that:

“Through the completion of a research monograph, the organisation of UK and international events, and the creation of multi-media outputs on transplantation, this project will analyse not only the impact biotechnologies have on how we understand the human body in relation to health and illness, but also how transplantation is tied to larger issues of national belonging, social justice and bodily ethics.”

In “their” academic profile, McCormack touches on the now-completed project, saying that “this intersection of visceral body and communities boundaries is at the heart of my research.”

Wow, this sounds sooooo useful to taxpayers/ the world.

I can’t wait to find out what McCormack studies after Queer Fish. Perhaps Queer Fishy Monsters?

Great use of over £315,000 (the amount spent on McCormack’s research by taxpayer-funded bodies).

More:

“I also have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the Monster Network.”

“I am currently developing a project on Queer Fish.”

Can you believe these statements were written by a researcher awarded £196,016.22 by the British Academy? A supposedly prestigious organisation that received just under £340 MILLION from taxpayers between 2021-25:

Meet Dr Donna McCormack, a they/ them “Senior Lecturer English & Creative Writing” who received the grant for “their” project Doing Disability Futures at the University of Strathclyde.

The project “will use arts-based and speculative methods to engage with global and local histories of colonial violence and ongoing injustices, as well as to tell stories of alternative futures that disrupt existing knowledge and power hierarchies about marginalized communities”:

Wow, that sounds so incredibly useful to disabled people…

In a personal statement on “their” academic profile, McCormack explains: “my research is situated at the intersection of post- and anti-colonial studies, queer theory, and the medical humanities. In much of my work I formulate post- and anti-colonial, critical race and queercrip ways of analysing contemporary fiction in order to both critique systems of violence and to open up space for imagining what is possible. My focus is the body in the context of health and illness and trauma studies. I work across literatures from North Africa, the Caribbean and Canada.”

“They” also “have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the Monster Network. I have written on Richard Goldschmidt’s theory of hopeful monsters, and I am interested in alternative evolution theories as forms of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-homo- and transphobic resistance. I am currently developing a project on Queer Fish.”

You can read “their” whole profile here - as well as head to the Monster Network website…

… which also has its own Instagram page:

Doing Disability Futures, too, has its own website and Instagram page - which are as bonkers as you might imagine:

For instance, the Instagram page links Palestine to “disability justice”:

And yeah, the rest of it is just as weird…

The British Academy is not the first taxpayer-funded entity to fund McCormack.

Between Aug 18-Aug 20, McCormack received a £120,080 grant for “their” project Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics.

McCormack is one of two so-called experts in Critical Disability Studies/ Theory I have written about this week - the other being Professor Dan Goodley, who comes out with some utter crap (and has had over £2.4 million in taxpayer-funded grants):

Both can be found on the social media output of the British Academy and are clearly meant to be shining examples of academics in the humanities and social sciences:

But their work is not just nonsense but insulting to the people it purports to help. Hundreds of thousands - and potentially millions - of pounds could have been put into making a real difference to disabled people’s lives.

Instead we get a doctor who’s interested in queer fish and an indoor-hat-wearing professor of gobbledygook.

My video on Dr Donna McCormack:

A note: my writing schedule has been a bit random this week in the aftermath of a big family wedding (which was wonderful). Next week I am going back to my usual schedule of 4pm Monday-Thursday with a weekend round-up.

“Inflatables are important to the world in so many ways.”

These are the words of Dr Michael Shaw, yet another “academic” promoted by the British Academy, “the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences” - which received £339,073,050 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

The BA posted this video of Shaw (above), in which he explains the wonder of inflatables. I wonder if a fart sounds more intelligent than this:

“And the research that you can see behind us is several inflatable sculptures that become slightly site-specific by the fact that you take the air from the place that you inflate them and blow them up. They’re also site-specific because they start to draw the reflections of their surroundings of this amazing building onto their surfaces, and also when they’re suspended, they kind of move around on the convection currents that occur in most buildings.”

Shaw is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University, whose pronouns are “He/him”:

You’ll be pleased to know that, aside from an AHRC Fellowship between 2005-2008, he doesn’t seem to have had much taxpayer-funding.

Even so, why are we are we being charged HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS for the British Academy? An organisation promoting an academic whose research profile reads:

“The giant inflatables seek to re-invigorate space by reconfiguring how the viewer moves around the gallery or building. Each response is wholly bespoke, and any inflatable can only exist thanks to its host architecture. The intent is to develop a meaningful interaction, whereby the sculpture reinvigorates viewers’ perceptions by complementing or contrasting the space’s geometry and flow. These universally accessible inflatables are immediately engaging for the young and family visitors; and intriguing to others as they nuance pathways of motion, block existing site-lines, create overhangs and continually curving forms that kiss the ground in limited contact points. In brief, they are sculpturally dynamic, animated works that enliven any space.”

Not forgetting its promotion of Professor Dan Goodley, an expert on “Critical Disability Studies”…

… who claims that “Depathologisation works in concert with disabled artists, disabled activists, and disabled intellectuals, whose politics have learned much from their own engagements with decolonising activists and postcolonial theorists, depathologising the university creates conversations with black scholars and others who have decolonised the university, and it pulls in disability politics as a key resource, depathologisation is therefore but one theory and practice-a praxis that sits with disability as the driving subject of critical inquiry and social change.”

Worse still, there are even more awful examples to come.

What a load of HOT AIR!

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“Rather than being a problem, disability is an opportunity”, claims Dan Goodley, a professor of “Critical Disability Studies” at the University of Sheffield in a video for the British Academy (BA) (a registered charity that received £339,073,050 from taxpayers between 2021-25).

I wrote a bit about Goodley a bit yesterday. He has led or worked on projects costing the taxpayer approximately £2.4 MILLION, as well as being a Fellow of the BA, “the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences”.

I only ever intended to use Goodley as one example (out of multiple) of how terrible the British Academy is.

However, I had to show you the utter drivel he comes out with in his video for the BA, an institution that claims to “mobilise” the humanities and social sciences to “shape a brighter future.”

Titled “Disability as a driver of change: depathologising the university”, the video features Goodley saying things like:

“Rarely in public discourse is disability offered as a productive expression of human intellectual, cultural, and political life, and this negligent approach to the transformative potential of disability is apparent in the university.”

“Depathologisation works in concert with disabled artists, disabled activists, and disabled intellectuals, whose politics have learned much from their own engagements with decolonising activists and postcolonial theorists, depathologising the university creates conversations with black scholars and others who have decolonised the university, and it pulls in disability politics as a key resource, depathologisation is therefore but one theory and practice-a praxis that sits with disability as the driving subject of critical inquiry and social change.”

“We must and can find support and solace with others, so that we can depathologise university together. And while a disability impairment or a neurodivergent identity is always a personal matter, we should not forget that the potential for activism community that’s opened up is always a public matter. We cannot do this alone, and we need each other to disrupt the university.”

There’s also Goodley’s claim that “disability is an opportunity”…

… certainly if you’re looking for taxpayer-funded grants!

What a load of nonsense this is (from a professor who had “Left politics” in his X bio):

It can’t be said enough: THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!

Goodley’s grants (approximately £2,443,528):

UK government/public body funding (ESRC, EPSRC, Research England, DIUS):

• ESRC — £731,114 (Humanising Healthcare, 2022–25)

• EPSRC/UKRI TAS Hub — £147,414 (2022–23)

• University of Sheffield/Research England — £17,000 (2022)

• ESRC — £443,000 (Living Life to the Fullest, 2017–20)

• ESRC — £425,000 (Big Society, 2013–15)

• ESRC — £255,000 (Does Every Child Matter, 2008–10)

• Prime Minister’s Initiative 2/DIUS — £40,000 (2008–10)

• ESRC — £300,000 (Parents, Professionals and Disabled Babies, 2003–06)

• ESRC — £85,000 (Self-advocacy, 1998–2001)

If you also count the European Social Fund grant (£425,000, “Jobs not Charity,” 2003–05) — EU public funds rather than UK taxpayer money directly, but publicly-sourced — that brings it to £2,868,528.

Then there’s:

• Leverhulme Trust — £489,867

• Wellcome Trust (WAARC) — £1,007,109

• Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award — £2.9m

• SCOPE — £51,500

• BAAF — £8,500

More:

“Embracing disability as a deeply intellectual source of authority can help us redefine and unpack how we live and work together differently in the university.”

These are the words of Dan Goodley, a professor at the University of Sheffield.

I discovered Professor Goodley while nosing through the Instagram feed of the British Academy, which received £339,073,050 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

The British Academy describes itself as “the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.” Unsurprisingly for subjects increasingly recognised as complete nonsense, its output is gobbledygook upon gobbledygook - Goodley being a prime example. In the full clip, he adds: “Disability might feed into a wider practice of what I term ‘depathologisation’.”

In turn I will show you further terrible examples of British Academy research, but I thought you might want to know a bit more Goodley, who has been involved in numerous taxpayer-funded studies.

According to his research profile, “Dan is interested in theorising and challenging the conditions of disablism (the social, political, cultural and psycho-emotional exclusion of people with physical, sensory and/or cognitive impairments) and ableism (the contemporary ideals on which the able, autonomous, productive citizen is based).”

Currently he is working on research projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust (another rabbit hole for another time) and the Wellcome Trust, which received £105,998,100 from taxpayers between 2020-24.

Note: PI means “Principal Investigator” and CoI/ Co-Is means “Co-Investigator”:

He has also had grants from the UKRI via its subsidiaries the Economic and Social Research Council…

…Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council…

… and Research England:

According to Claude (my beautiful AI assistant), the total government funding for projects Goodley has led or worked on works out at approximately £2,443,528:

UK government/public body funding (ESRC, EPSRC, Research England, DIUS):

• ESRC — £731,114 (Humanising Healthcare, 2022–25)

• EPSRC/UKRI TAS Hub — £147,414 (2022–23)

• University of Sheffield/Research England — £17,000 (2022)

• ESRC — £443,000 (Living Life to the Fullest, 2017–20)

• ESRC — £425,000 (Big Society, 2013–15)

• ESRC — £255,000 (Does Every Child Matter, 2008–10)

• Prime Minister’s Initiative 2/DIUS — £40,000 (2008–10)

• ESRC — £300,000 (Parents, Professionals and Disabled Babies, 2003–06)

• ESRC — £85,000 (Self-advocacy, 1998–2001)

If you also count the European Social Fund grant (£425,000, “Jobs not Charity,” 2003–05) — EU public funds rather than UK taxpayer money directly, but publicly-sourced — that brings it to £2,868,528.

Then there’s:

• Leverhulme Trust — £489,867

• Wellcome Trust (WAARC) — £1,007,109

• Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award — £2.9m

• SCOPE — £51,500

• BAAF — £8,500

I wonder if Goodley’s taxpayer-funded projects make any more sense than the sentence “Embracing disability as a deeply intellectual source of authority can help us redefine and unpack how we live and work together differently in the university”.

The Overseas Development Institute (ODI Global), “an independent, global affairs think tank”, received £40,303,180 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

So I’m sure you will be delighted to know it held a “Wellness” session earlier this month - posting about it on Instagram stories:

Read more

All of these are current studies subsidised by the UK Research and Innovation via its nine research councils:

EDI+ Research And Innovation Network+ For Equality, Diversity And Inclusion In The Energy Research Community (Durham University)
Funded Value: £1,006,945
Funded Period: Oct 22 - Jan 27
Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
“The vision for the EDI+ network is to acknowledge and address key challenges and equip a cohort of researchers and their organisations to make lasting changes towards a diverse, equitable, inclusive and accessible research community. This will have impact beyond the academy and set a precedent, offering the means to tailor EDI action among the diverse organisations participating in energy research. It garners the best of scientific and social science evidence and critical approaches from the humanities to put EDI challenges in appropriate perspectives and make them available for action.”

EDICa - Equality Diversity and Inclusion Caucus (Heriot-Watt University)
Funded Value: £3,676,371
Funded Period: Jan 23 - Dec 26
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
“To achieve global excellence in research and innovation, the research workforce must bring a diversity of experiences, expertise and ideas which necessitates the change of the cultures and structures which exclude marginalised researchers in order to meet UKRI's UK-wide talent programme. Our vision for the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Caucus (EDICa) is to advance the creation of inclusive research cultures enabling diverse researchers to access and thrive in careers across the research and innovation (R&I) systems. EDICa will advance understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized researchers, creating the hope and possibility of a research career for those traditionally excluded while imagining a different research world which embeds equity.”

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As many readers will know, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the taxpayer-funded quango that spends “£9 billion of public money” annually on academia. This includes awarding £3.6 million to an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) caucus that Professor Jason Arday is still listed as a co-investigator on.

Understandably, there are lots of discussions around Arday at the moment and how this diversity poster boy rose to such towering success. It makes sense when you see the extreme extent to which UKRI pushes EDI in all its activities, bearing in mind that the UKRI isn’t the only taxpayer-funded body to fund academia - so this is a snapshot of an even bigger picture!

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Today I can reveal that Arday is listed as a co-investigator on two more studies funded by taxpayers totalling £4,412,501 - in addition to Arday being a co-investigator on an EDI caucus that received £3,676,371 from taxpayers:

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