On Friday, Angela Rayner delivered the keynote speech at the 40th anniversary of the New Economics Foundation, where she “spoke about the power of devolution”. In a tweet, she wrote “After forty years, NEF’s mission may be unfinished. But it is more vital than ever.”
Another MP to attend was Miatta Fahnbulleh, who is being talked about as the economic mastermind behind Andy Burnham and, as I previously wrote for the Daily Sceptic, was once the Chief Executive of the NEF. Fahnbulleh posted that it was “Fantastic to celebrate 40 years of NEF and its huge contribution to economic thinking & progressive ideas.”
It’s pretty obvious from these endorsements alone that the NEF is a big player in Left-wing circles, but there’s also ample proof on its website. For instance, one of the think tank’s missions is a “fast and fair transition to a green economy through a deep and equitable transformation to address the climate crisis” and in a post titled ‘Share the Wealth’, it has written about why the “richest few are taking too much”. Its website is littered with more ideological nonsense.
With that being said, I wonder why taxpayers are expected to fund the NEF year by year (which received £379,500 from taxpayers between 2021–25), especially when, as I will show in this article, Right-wing think tanks do not receive the same government income.
Shockingly, it’s far from the first
Discussion
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It would be tempting to say that it is outrageous that faux charities formerly headed up by now Government ministers or ex-ministers are receiving funds from the public purse. It would appear to be feathering the nest of your mates with our taxes. However, we sadly cannot make that accusation because most of this funding occurred under the Tories. More evidence, if it were needed, of the uniparty and the left leaning of the Tories both then and now. Do we really believe that Badenoch will be able to enact any of what she says, migration, net zero, benefits etc, if she were prime minister, with the blue rosette wearing liberal democrats on the benches behind her.
If the New Economics Foundation actually knew anything about economics, they’d understand that the problem of the “richest few are taking too much” is the direct result of Socialist government.
It’s really very simple.
Governments get elected by making absurd promises of “free” healthcare, education, welfare etc which are all profoundly Socialistic in nature. As a result, they run up huge debts which can never be repaid. They reduce the real value of the debt by engineering inflation and manage the effects by artificially suppressing interest rates. The consequent massive increase in money supply bids up asset prices, which overwhelmingly favour the already wealthy, ensuring a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to the 0.01% of super-rich.
What’s made this immeasurably worse over the last fifty years or so is the abandonment of the gold standard, meaning there’s now essentially no limit to credit creation.
Because of the capture of government by NGOs, addressing the wholly made-up “climate crisis” will only ensure even more wealth flows upwards.
Spot on!
There are a lot of charities on the gravy train too. It should all stop.
This is the Trisectoral Network model in action. The aim is to bring about “change” by bypassing democratic control. Unfortunately the change they envisage is towards One World technocratic government, where you will simply do as you’re told, because they know better.
https://escapekey.substack.com/p/trisectoral-networks
All part of the plan.
Donations also get tax relief, don’t they?
If they are registered charities – which is highly suspect for politically biased organisations – they donations can get corporation tax relief and individuals if registered for tax can have their donations subject to gift aid.
Bequests to charities enjoys inheritance tax relief too.
Donations to a UK registered charity attract an additional 25p for every pound donated if the donation is given under Gift Aid. I believe it is up to the charity to audit that such gifts are legitimately gift aided and to claim the extra 25% from HMRC. I found this from 2023 discussing fraudulent claims of gift aid.
The fraud can be by the donor or the charity trustees. The donor might claim they’ve made donations when they actually have not which might give them extra ‘personal allowance’ on their income tax calculations. Trustees have been known to claim gift aid on donations which have not been made under that scheme and again HMRC gets less money.
The more hands employed (and paid) to handle the transactions and the bureaucracy around them, the less money is left to be spent on whatever the charity is supposed to do.
The entire Gift Aid system should be scrapped. Charities should not get 25% matching donations from the rest of the UK tax payers. If UK taxpayers want to give their spare cash to ‘worthy’ causes then they should do so purely at their own expense.
I would urge anyone to check out the UN Agendas 2030 and 2050 and all their associated activities. I have ceased to understand how discussions around policy can take place without reference to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as if they do not exist and do not affect every aspect of our lives. If the Agendas are meaningless wish lists, then why are vast resources invested in carrying them out?
Do other users have to login every day, sometimes multiple times per day, or is it just me.
Charity status should be redefined to exclude political campaigning other than very minor work directly associated with the strict physical care provided. All donations from overseas above a modest threshold should be retorted, giving the true origin of the cash as well.
Charities should not be permitted to give to other charities unless the former was established as a non-contentious foundation for that purpose.
Lobbyists should in general be denied access to Parliament or Whitehall.
I need to log in on average once every couple of weeks across my phone and two laptops. I’ve not seen a pattern. Sometimes on my phone it drops several times in a day and then it’s fine for a month. I presume you always tick “keep me logged on”. I flit between 4 and 5G, WiFi via various access points in the house and external WiFi, VPN set to various countries and no VPN and it’s generally fine so not sure what the difference is with you. I use Edge on Windows 11, Chrome on Windows 10 and Safari on iOS. I will ask Claude.ai what it thinks later and post the results.
This is what Claude said:
This is a classic browser/session persistence puzzle. There are several likely explanations, and they probably stack.
The most likely culprit: cookie handling settings
The “keep me logged in” mechanism almost certainly works by setting a persistent cookie with a long expiry. If the other person’s browser is set to clear cookies on exit, block third-party cookies aggressively, or is running in a privacy/incognito mode (even accidentally, via a default setting), that cookie gets destroyed and they have to log back in every session. This is the single most common cause of this complaint.
Edge, Chrome and Safari all have settings that can silently clear cookies — worth checking under privacy settings specifically for “clear browsing data on close” or equivalent.
Browser storage partitioning
Safari in particular (on iOS and macOS) has Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) built in, which aggressively partitions and expires cookies from sites it classifies as trackers or low-interaction domains. If the other person is primarily on Safari and visits the site infrequently, ITP may be expiring the session cookie faster than expected regardless of the “keep me logged in” setting.
The VPN angle — and why it probably isn’t your problem
Many… Read more »
No issues here. And I have multiple machines.
No foundations, NGO’s, Quango’s should receive ANYTHING from the tax payer. If they need to raise money let them go out on the streets and ask for donations
I would like to see a written constitution amendable only by supermajority that limits what tax money can be spent on to a strictly enumerated, very short list of essentials.
We’ll have examples from around the world. Let’s try to ensure we don’t end up with 26 amendments to fix stuff we forgot to include first time around (18th amendment was a corker)..
Indeed though let’s make not the perfect the enemy of the good.
A number of foundations that I have heard of were originally given large cash donations which were intended to be invested and the returns used for the foundations’ purposes. A bit of a problem when they have an anti-capitalist mindset.
As long as it’s all in a good cause.
Oak Foundation? That is a lot of money they are giving.