Today I wanted to introduce readers to the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (EFF), an NGO which I frequently comes up when I am researching Woke Waste – and every other thing undermining Britain.
To be clear, the EFF receives nothing from taxpayers, but that doesn’t make it any less of a problem compared to organisations that do. In fact, I wanted to use EFF as an example of how privately-funded NGOs can be just as corrosive to the West as state-funded ones. Often NGOs cross-promote and fund each other, ultimately functioning as an ecosystem of far Left ghastliness.
But back to the EFF…
Founded in 1961, the EFF is one of the UK’s largest independent funders.
According to its website, in 2024 it provided “£48.8 million in funding towards a wide range of work in support of our aims: to improve Our Natural World, secure A Fairer Future and nurture Creative, Confident Communities”.
So what does this look like in practice?
Well, some of the EFF’s “Fairer Future” funding has gone to what it calls “gender justice”, “migrant justice” and “racial justice”.
Click on “gender justice” and you get an idea of the sort of projects funded and the sums involved:
For instance, in December last year the EFF awarded £300,000 to Gendered Intelligence, an organisation that imagines “a world where diverse gender identities and expressions and visible and valued and where trans, non-binary and gender questioning people live healthy, safe and fulfilled lives”.
Click “migrant justice” on the EFF website and you’ll be shown 69 grants – which are mostly about making it easier for the world to move to the UK.
Take the fact that in September, the EFF awarded £180,000 to “Migrants Organise Ltd”, which currently runs “a series of free, online trainings to resist the Hostile Environment in public services”.
It strongly believes that “Solidarity Knows No Borders”:
The EFF also funds the “Migrant Democracy Project”, which claims to be “building power amongst migrants in the UK to shape a society rooted in justice, reflecting our needs and interests”.
It believes that “every resident, no matter where they are from, should have equal access to democratic participation in the UK”.
You can expect other “migrant justice” grants – awarded millions by the EFF – to be along the same lines, and that’s before we get to examples of “racial justice”. In 2023 the EFF awarded £1.5 million to the Baobab Foundation, which is “Resourcing racial justice through Black & Global Majority Communities”:
Here are some of the other “racial justice” grants:
Incidentally, all of the EFF’s grants (since 2008) can be found on the 360Giving website (if you want to be both horrified and depressed).
Unfortunately this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to NGOs meddling in our democracy – in ways most taxpayers would be shocked by.
They have essentially become a channel through which the far Left can quietly exert power.
Charlotte Gill regularly publishes about the use of taxpayers’ money to fund Left-wing causes and Left-wing researchers in Woke Waste, her Substack. You can subscribe here.
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I’m not sure I agree with the ‘deferment’ explanation given above.
Students who defer a year have known grades (and other qualities) and will thus already have an accepted place at their chosen institution.
Ie, if a course has 100 students per year and 14 deferred from last year, the institution knows that it will only have 86 places available for this year’s candidates, and it won’t act as though it had 100 places re this year’s offers.
If there are more students that have to go through clearing it can only be because they didn’t meet the grades expected of them.
Sure, this could simply be because of the ‘grade disinflation’ that we’ve seen this year (although it still hasn’t normalised to the pre 2020 levels), but the intention to go through this disinflation process was well telegraphed by the government and exam bodies and I can’t imagine that the HE establishments based their offers on the relative %age grades seen in 2021.
I suggest that the problem is actually that this year’s candidates didn’t sit any GCSEs, but university places were offered with some consideration of the GCSE grades that were gained based on teacher assessment (ie, the teachers guessed). Thus the problem has resulted from a fair number of children having much higher GCSE results than they’d deserved (even taking into account the crazy grade inflation that occurred during 2020), and then getting worse A-levels than their GCSE results might have suggested.
I imagine that there will also be a similar number of pupils who in the end gained far better A-level results than their GSCE results suggested, only because they were ‘the quiet workers’ who the teachers didn’t even realise were capable. We, of course, won’t see the impact of this because the individuals concerned will have simply been happy that they got their first choice.
I’d like there to be an assessment of how much harm this stupid process (‘Guess the result’) caused these young adults, but like everything else related to our mad Covid response it’ll get shoved into the weeds and those whose lives will have been affected will never get any acknowledgement that it occurred.
Elephant in the room is that universities no longer even have a moral duty to preferentially consider domestic students. If a British undergraduate can only be charged a maximum of £9250 per year in tuition fees but their wealthy overseas classmates can be charged £24,000 for EXACTLY the same service, a self respecting, bottom line chasing vice-chancellor would be a fool not to prioritise overseas students.
For example, Imperial currently recruit 61% of their students from overseas.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/strategic-planning/statistics/trend-analysis/student-nationality/
Why, when many bright UK students are left without university places?
Not only tuition fees, but overseas students will pay higher accommodation fees as they tend not to return home in the holidays and they will also be more likely to rent the more luxurious penthouse rooms.
“Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” Munger
This is also relevant to today’s other education story, about how medical school places are back down to 7,500 a year.
The excuse given, as it always is, is that they can’t simply magic up medical school places — but of course they can — all they have to do is stop overseas medical students studying in the UK. Sure, the medical schools would complain (they make lots of lovely £££s from them), but our nation’s requirements are more important. Anyway, if we said that the medical schools had to meet the home demand before they could start training others then I’m sure they’d suddenly find that it was possible all along to increase training places.
The other excuse given is ‘but it is expensive’ — sure but:
I was really shocked recently when an article in these pages told me that the number of doctors in the NHS had gone from 85,000 30 years ago to 250,000 now. The narrative is always that we need more and need them faster, but it would appear that the problem is how we get the existing doctors to apply themselves to their worklist better.
I have felt for a long time now that the National Health Service had become the National Wellness Service, pandering to all our hypochondria’s and minor ailments and wishes. Certainly the range of treatments and who they are applicable for has mushroomed over time. I’d be interested to see how the average patient visits to the NHS have changed over the last 30 years. Are we just trying to use it more and more.?
Wouldn’t it be really weird if it turned out there was plenty of trained people and funding for them to provide us with a decent health service, but the whole thing was fucked up by legions of non-jobs and unrequired levels of managers getting in the way just to justify their expensive existences..?
The number of medics working part time might partly explain the change in doctor numbers.
The nation’s requirements stopped being a concern of the universities a long time ago.
Recruiting students from overseas could also increase the number of ethnic minority students at a university which will be a huge advantage in the eyes of some vice-chancellors.
Those £400K+ Vice Chancellor salaries have got to be funded somehow
Exactly what I was thinking when I read this article
Trust me, your gov’ts could care less about you. The covid virus is a bioweapon released to do one thing…..depopulate. Very effective so far, more deaths to come. Excess mortality in all countries heavily vaxxed in addition to declining bitprth rates.
Where the hell is Whitty et al and Ferguson – the designers of this awful outcome. Probably collecting their undeserved gongs from the Palace. And as for the Gormless Johnson, don’t get me started.