"Who funds you?"💳👁️ Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Looking at the charity funding "Anti Racist Cumbria" and promoting open borders
Today I will introduce you to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF), in case you have not heard of it.
I first stumbled on PHF when I was researching who funds HOPE not Hate (HNH).
HNH has received a total of £585,000 from PHF, thrice being awarded its “Migration Fund”, according to PHF’s website.
Here’s a bit of info about that specific fund, which essentially advocates open borders:
What is the PHF?
PHF is a charity (description below) based in London:
It has a lot of capital:
Here’s its report for the end of year 2023, where it elaborates on how it spends this:
With that being said, from 2020-23 PHF has also been given just under £1.4 million in government grants:
Given its wealth, you have to wonder how this is justified.
And crucially, will taxpayers be happy knowing a trust they’ve funded also funds HOPE not Hate?
(Rhetorical…)
Here’s The Telegraph’s write up on PHF last year:
“The Government is funding a pro-migration advocacy group that believes UK borders are “systemically racist”, The Telegraph can disclose.
“Charity Commission accounts show that the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF), a Left-wing charity, received £1.36 million in government grants since 2020.”
The significance of foundations/trusts
PHF is the first Foundation/ Trust I am delving into in WW, although I have been researching them for a while.
Funders play a huge role in our political system, regularly perpetuating woke ideology via the bodies they support.
The main way they do this is by giving registered charities large amounts of money, to pursue their own (often woke) agendas.
*To add, trusts/ foundations are often registered as charities too - as is the case with PHF.
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants
To give an example, this week on a Channel 4 General Election debate, a lawyer (below) from The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) said she “could dismantle all” of the candidates’ immigration policies.
It wasn’t hard to work out her leanings; someone who thinks that any kind of asylum deterrent/ controls on immigration are cruel; who will never suggest an end number for the amount of people the UK can reasonably accommodate; or acknowledge that for every vulnerable asylum seeker there are those who are exploiting the system and/ or dangerous.
Don’t just take my word for it. You get an idea of the JCWI’s worldview from its Instagram page, which I screenshot in this article. Its social media content makes clear its contempt for the Conservative government, especially former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and its pride in having blocked a flight to Rwanda:
“SUCCESS! All of our clients who were facing removal to Rwanda have now been released thanks to the tremendous work of our legal team”
Charities can only be effective politically when they have funders, which pay for lawyers and other professionals to challenge government policies.
This brings us back to PHF, which has given hundreds of thousands to JCWI:
It has given money to other charities along the same lines, such as the African Rainbow Family - which focuses on “ending deportation”, albeit for LGBTIQ people - who are some of the most vulnerable coming through the asylum system.
Even so, the point remains that these charities are acting as a de facto opposition to the Government - and therefore undermining the way democracy is meant to work. Most voters don’t even know of their existence, never mind that some are acting against their wishes.
Another of JCWI’s funders is the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, which has a whole page dedicated to “Migrant Justice”.
It’s not unusual to see the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and PHF together on funding pages, forming part of what I call the “immigration lobby”.
Below is a page from “the 3 million”, a “grassroots organisation for EU citizens* in the UK, formed after the 2016 referendum to protect the rights of people who have made the UK their home.”
Here you can see PHF and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation are listed as funders (as well as others I will write about in due course).
the 3 million maintains “Everything we do is about people, not politics”.
Looking at the picture above, that’s not obvious.
But back to PHF…
PHF does support worthy causes, I should add, before I move onto the next bit of this article. For instance, it has given £250,000 to the charity Access All Areas, which supports disabled and autistic artists in, and trying to break into, the TV, film, and theatre industry. These sorts of initiatives are very important. In general, I find that disabled people are routinely omitted from the “diverse” public sector - even being discriminated against in the case of Sadiq Khan and Will Norman’s floating bus stops - showing how phoney the Woke movement is in paying lip service to “inclusion”.
Leaving that aside, PHF funds projects that are much harder to justify - many of which are racially-divisive. Take a look at these examples below, next to the amount PHF gave them:
Anti Racist Cumbria - £150,000 over 36 months
Cumbria is England’s third largest county with a predominantly white and ageing population, but every district is growing more diverse at a faster rate than the rest of the nation, with increasing numbers of Black and Brown people moving to the area, and some hotels in these locations housing people who are seeking asylum. These factors highlight challenges for the county, with certain communities becoming increasingly suspicious of immigration and divisive narratives taking hold.
Systemic Justice - £250,000
Driven by white, middle-class archetypes of what it means to be the “right” kind of activist, the mainstream climate movement has prioritised fast, visible, solutions-based action as the ultimate weapon against the unfolding climate crisis. Yet, this approach is dangerously close to replicating the harms caused by the very systems of domination responsible for this crisis. Furthermore, it often overlooks, excludes, and even goes so far as to exploit, the rich tapestry of experience, and generational knowledge and tradition held by racialised communities.
Kinfolk Network was established in 2017. At the time, Trump had just been elected and the Brexit referendum had rocked and divided the UK.
As a consequence, there was a felt need for accessible, well-resourced, restorative spaces for Black campaigners, grassroots organisers and activists - across the UK - to come together in community to rest, connect, strategise, heal and be held accountable.
Kinfolk Network’s co-founders saw this as a crucially missing and necessary piece of infrastructure for the Black liberation movement.
A list of PHF’s Migration and Integration spending, including “HOPE not Hate”:
Since 2006/07, PHF has given out 3,300 grants in the UK (and 394 in India) - so bear in mind that this piece is a relatively small sample of everything out there, which can be found on PHF’s grants database.
The issue we have - not just with PHF, but numerous other foundations who I will discuss on Woke Waste - is that they quietly disrupt democracy, injecting enormous amounts of funding into politically-active groups.
This presents a major problem for the UK, and why I feel the idea of voting has become so pointless (yes really). Democratic mandates mean nada when organisations with big funds can come along and make the opposite happen, all without the public realising.
In due course, my Woke Waste will be highlighting much more such examples.
Related pieces:
As someone who believes pretty absolutely in the right of each and everyone one of us, however rich or poor, to use our money however we wish I find it difficult to object to the rich using their money to advocate for causes in which they believe any more than I object to them owning vast yachts, which is not at all.
So much as I deplore the use to which the fortune of the late Paul Hamlyn is applied I can’t object in principle any more than I object (not at all) to those who direct their wealth towards the IEA, my idea of a worthy cause.
The big issues which your piece highlights which should exercise us all are the definition of a charity, whether a charity should ever be permitted to engage in political lobbying and whether charities should enjoy any special tax status under the law.
On the face of it charitable status is being grotesquely abused. There are simply far too many charities whose objectives would meet a narrow definition of charity which almost everyone could agree upon (eg the relief of poverty or the impact of natural disasters) as opposed to being middle class hobbies (eg beekeeping - disclosure I am a trustee of one such and believe it shouldn’t be a charity) or naked political campaigning.
The other insidious aspect of the vast network of interconnected, and often sock puppet, charities is their use as fronts by government to which taxpayer money can be directed to lobby the government to implement proposals that the government wants to implement anyway but would prefer the cloak of some apparently independent and worthy charity to hide in. All the stuff that Chris Snowdon valiantly exposes all the time.
I am very interested in funding for Charities and whether they deserve tax relief and how their money is spent, also if they lobby behind the scenes. On a personal note I rent my flat from a charity and many of us are being driven out by large increases in rent. It is supposed to be an Arts Charity. So far we have had an annual increase each year since 2022, many have had to leave, can't pay the rent, and the flats relet at much higher rents. Those left now have formed a group to fight back. So regeneration through the arts is being funded by tenants who are trying to earn a living and help the community. The Charity itself pays a peppercorn rent to the founder of the charity so our rent is pure profit apart from money for repairs and maintenance (which are never done) and their salaries. All we have done has increased Estate Agents' commission and inflated the housing market. I don't want to say any more because I have to be careful on the internet. I see one of the Charities in this county is listed as receiving funds. So I am doubly angry as my out goings appear to go on supporting those who have done nothing to help this country and my taxes are paying for them to be here - my council tax as well. My friends and I have, over the last 15 years, regenerated this town. We now wish we hadn't bothered. It hasn't helped either that we have a Labour MP after being Tory for decades. I didn't think things could get any worse for my County after being Tory for so long, but they are on a daily basis.