Tufton Street Linked Donors Have Given £630,000 to the Conservatives Since Sunak Became Prime Minister
Financial, ideological and senior staff ties are still channelling the interests of opaquely funded think tanks into the heart of government.
The Conservative Party has received in excess of £600,000 since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister from four board members at leading Tufton Street ‘think tanks’, a new DeSmog analysis shows.
The data also shows that free market groups based in Tufton Street, Westminster, have retained significant influence in Sunak’s administration. More than half a dozen Tufton Street alumni currently serve as special advisers to the government, while seven ministers have appeared at events hosted by Tufton Street groups since Sunak became prime minister in October.
These groups have often acted as a blocker to climate action. All are known for their anti-big-state and pro-fracking views, while their anti-green stances range from opposition to state-led climate intervention to active climate science denial. Previous reports indicate that Tufton Street groups have received substantial funds from organisations that support climate science denial in the past decade, with some donations provided directly by fossil fuel firms.
The joint-largest donation to the Conservatives during this period was made by Graham Edwards, a board member at the influential Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). He gave £500,000 in December 2022 – the same month that he was appointed as Tory treasurer, responsible for party fundraising.
Other CPS board members – Lord Michael Spencer and Lord Anthony Bamford – have also donated £100,000 and £10,000 to the party respectively since Sunak became prime minister. Lord Spencer donated via his family holding company, IPGL, while Lord Bamford’s donation is linked to his construction conglomerate, JCB.
As revealed by DeSmog this week, a firm owned by a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – one of the UK’s principal climate science denial groups – also donated £20,000 in March to House of Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt and Conservative MP Liam Fox.
The CPS, which is based out of 57 Tufton Street, is a leading member of the network. This alliance of free market think tanks and lobby groups catapulted into public consciousness last autumn for its outsized influence over former Prime Minister Liz Truss and ex-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, whose ‘mini budget’ on 23 September 2022 caused market panic and a dramatic fall in the value of the pound.
The funding of Tufton Street groups is notoriously opaque. Every single one of its members was given the lowest transparency rating – E – by openDemocracy’s ‘Who Funds You?’ 2022 report into think tanks. Tufton Street groups have earned £6 million collectively in their latest accounting periods.
“It’s time to kick toxic fossil fuel interests out of politics once and for all,” Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, told DeSmog. “This government’s murky ties to Tufton Street have barely diminished since Liz Truss’s economy-wrecking mini budget fiasco. When we face a rapidly closing window of opportunity to tackle the climate emergency, there are still countless climate-denying and delaying influences right at the heart of government.”
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Conservative Party Funds Anti-ULEZ Facebook Ad Blitz
https://www.desmog.com/2023/05/03/conservative-party-funds-anti-ulez-facebook-ad-blitz/
Rishi Sunak’s party has attacked green traffic measures via adverts to millions of UK voters, despite central government commitments to cut road pollution.
The Conservatives deployed anti-ULEZ adverts on Facebook in March and April that were seen on more than three million occasions, DeSmog research has found.
The party has engaged in a concerted online campaign against the expansion of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which has been the subject of more than a quarter (28.4 percent) of the 88 adverts that were launched during this period.
Although London boroughs are not going to the polls in the 2023 local elections coming up on on 4 May, the proposed ULEZ expansion has been a key campaign issue in the areas bordering the capital, many of which are set to vote.
According to Facebook data, the Conservative Party’s 25 anti-ULEZ adverts were seen between 3 to 3.5 million times, at a cost to the party of up to £19,100.
This is despite the government’s 2021 Decarbonising Transport Plan, which lauded the Labour mayor’s efforts on air pollution for its “significant impact on air quality” and on “reducing the number of older, more polluting vehicles that enter London’s central zone.”
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https://www.desmog.com/2023/05/03/conservative-party-funds-anti-ulez-facebook-ad-blitz/
Telegraph Columnist Allison Pearson Becomes Director of Climate Science Denial Group
The newspaper’s chief interviewer and columnist joins an increasingly influential body of trustees at the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
The Daily Telegraph’s chief interviewer and columnist Allison Pearson has joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), one of the UK’s principal climate science denial groups.
This appointment adds to the influence of the GWPF in the press and potentially the amount of sway that it holds over the Conservative Party.
Pearson, who has written a number of articles criticising climate action, will be assuming a role on the board of trustees alongside former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who joined the GWPF in February and also serves as a trade adviser to the UK government.
Lord David Frost – a Conservative peer and former Cabinet Office minister who was appointed in November – is also a GWPF director, along with Terence Mordaunt, who has donated £342,500 to the Conservative Party and its MPs since 2008 via First Corporate Consultants and First Corporate Shipping. This includes £10,000 donated in March this year to Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt.
The GWPF is a member of the Tufton Street network – an interconnected hub of think tanks and pressure groups that lobby against state action, including in the realm of climate change. The GWPF has criticised both the policies adopted by governments to address climate change, and the science underpinning these policies.
The group said in 2015 that “policies to ‘stop climate change’ are based on climate models that completely failed to predict the lack of warming for the past two decades”. It has also expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”.
In September 2022 Net Zero Watch – the GWPF’s campaigning arm – published two reports rejecting climate science on the greenhouse effect.
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ITV News | Coronation Arrests and Police Oppression | 6 May 2023 | Just Stop Oil
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The Animal Rising activist group, who interrupted the Grand National earlier this year, alleged that 14 of its members were detained in the borough of Hackney, “several miles away from the coronation”.
In a statement, it said the arrests took place during “an all-day nonviolence training” workshop that had been “publically advertised”.
In a statement released later on Saturday evening, the Metropolitan Police said it arrested 14 people in East London “on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”.
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