Were bosses at Arts Council England (ACE) burdened with any integrity, or even the dimmest glimmer of self-reflection, they’d be taking a moment to think about their behaviour. Earlier this week three employment tribunal judges unanimously agreed that Denise Fahmy, a senior official who worked at the quango for 15 years, had been harassed by her colleagues to the extent that she is now owed financial compensation. Regular readers of The Critic will be unsurprised to learn that the 54-year-old was targeted and smeared as a transphobe for her belief that biological sex is real. To ACE, she might as well have come out as a morris dancing Gary Glitter fangirl with a penchant for kitten taxidermy.

Rather than considering whether the employment tribunal might’ve had a point, ACE, which doles out hundreds of millions of public and National Lottery funds, instead took a somewhat Trumpian approach to its defeat, stating on Twitter:

We are pleased that the ruling confirmed that two allegations of harassment and two claims of victimisation were not well-founded and were dismissed, and that there was nothing in the judgment to support the accusation of institutional bias.

In fact, the judges stated “in all circumstances, the unanimous judgment of the tribunal is that the claim of harassment related to the protected characteristic of religion or belief is well-founded or succeeds”.

Fahmy had been proud to work for ACE. She did not rush to take the organisation to court, nor did she arrive at her gender critical beliefs without deep consideration. Her path was a well-trodden one. In 2018, to avoid causing offence to the trans community, Fahmy began to read literature from transgender organisations about how to be a supportive ally. Instead, as she explained to the Daily Mail, “The more I read, the more upset I became.”

Fahmy asked what protection there was for those with gender-critical beliefs

As ACE began to adopt the stance of transgender activist lobby groups, she wrote to the executive board to express her concerns that new policies “could encourage bias in grant-making decisions” and alerted chief executive Darren Henley to the harassment of gender critical women artists.

It was in April 2022, when ACE oversaw the award of a grant to the gender critical charity LGB Alliance, that Fahmy’s future at the organisation began to look unstable. During an online meeting of over 400 staff, Simon Mellor, the deputy chief executive, said it was his “personal view” that LGB Alliance “has a history of anti-trans-exclusionary activity” and so funding it was “not within the spirit of the Jubilee fund”. The funding was withdrawn. Fahmy challenged him and asked what protection there was for those with gender-critical beliefs.

The following month, a petition was posted on the ACE staff intranet, criticising people who believe that biological sex trumps gender identity. It labelled those who think sex can’t be changed as “neo-Nazis”. They were called “parasites” who needed to be “stamped out”. Meanwhile, the LGB Alliance was likened to the Ku Klux Klan.

The judges were critical of the deputy chief executive’s decision to share his views at the meeting, noting his “personal comments … opened the door for the subsequent petition and the comments within that petition”. The decision to withdraw funding from the only explicitly gender critical applicant has not been investigated, however, despite pleas from Fahmy to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Fahmy says the behaviour of ACE is “shockingly McCarthyite”. “It’s still extraordinary to me that a funding body with the reputation and responsibility of the Arts Council has been allowed to openly slander an applicant organisation.” She adds, “We should be able to rely on them [ACE] to protect freedom of expression. But we also want a varied cultural diet in this country, high, low, narrow, wide, and it should not be policed, or indeed purged, by politically motivated civil servants or zealous staff groups.”

Work is unwittingly scored according to how it matches the values of the funders

The relationship between artists and funders has always been fraught. Whilst creative people might drift about on quasi-spiritual quests of self-expression, those charged with keeping the cultural life of Britain afloat need to find ways to slap a price tag on what artists produce. Perhaps the absence of a chart for assessing what benefits Britain’s creative capital, or a quantitative measure of “good art”, means that work is unwittingly scored according to how closely it matches the values of the funders.

A cursory look at what does attract cash is revealing. Whilst LGB Alliance’s £9,000 application to make a film about how the lives of gay men changed over the late Queen’s 70-year rule was rejected, a steady stream of trans-themed projects have hoovered-up funds. This includes a myriad of questionable, navel-gazing work including £19,954 for My Genderation with a “northern, working class, neurodivergent, queer, trans woman” and £26,551 for “Whose menopause? Exploring Cisgender and Non-Cisgender menopause experiences through an inclusive and participatory photography pilot programme”.

Part of the problem with the new snobbery of the cultural caste is that this elite doesn’t recognise its own power. Infected by their own sanctimony, the petty bores of ACE believe that by dividing the population into worthy tick boxes, they can absolve themselves of privilege. They are wedded to the idea that their job is to educate the plebs through funding propaganda projects until they accept that sex is a spectrum and men can have babies. The fury of insufficiently woke and Daily Mail-reading reactionaries is all the proof they need that they are on the side of the righteous. It passes with little comment that they are spending money extracted from a public they appear to despise. Given ACE’s response to the Fahmy ruling, it seems unlikely that this misplaced sense of superiority will shift.