The trial of Metropolitan Police Sergeant Martyn Blake concluded this week. He was found not guilty of murdering career criminal Chris Kaba. While this was welcomed by many – indeed, numerous Conservatives suggested this trial should never have taken place – it was condemned by the Runnymede Trust, which described Kaba’s killing as “racist state violence”. 

This is the latest example in a pattern of behaviour from the lavishly-funded Runnymede Trust. The Trust has become the most prominent charity in Britain campaigning for so-called racial justice. Its influence should not be understated. It coined the term “Islamophobia” in the 1990s, played a significant role in race-relations legislation in the 1970s, and today is one of the leading voices urging the Labour government to expand the ambition of its forthcoming “Race Equality Act” legislation. 

During the last Conservative government, the Trust stepped up its campaigning activities, launching tirades against Tory immigration policy and the Sewell Report into racial disparities. It even pursued a successful judicial review against the government, which argued that Matt Hancock’s appointment of Baroness Harding to run NHS Test and Trace was unlawful because he did not consider a sufficiently racially-diverse list of candidates. This case told us two things: first, the remarkable ability of laws like the Equality Act to calcify government responses to emergencies; and second, the way in which political activism is protected by charity law.  

In 2021 a group of Conservative MPs wrote to the Charity Commission to request an investigation into whether the Trust was pursuing a political agenda, in breach of charity law. They cited the fact that its then-director, Halima Begum, was a Labour Party activist, and that it was engaging in anti-Tory campaigning in its response to the Sewell Report. The Commission ruled that it did not break any charity law or guidance in doing so, but advised the charity to be more “balanced” in its political engagement in the future.

Such a light telling off did little to deter the Trust’s political activism.

While campaigning against “racist state violence”, using misleading statistics about the use of force by the police — debunked by Neil O’Brien here — and launching judicial reviews into who runs an arms-length body might not be many people’s idea of a charity’s activity, what the Runnymede Trust does is protected by law. The Charities Act 2011 is one of the laws in question. Bad laws create bad outcomes. 

As others have written at length in these pages before, the charity industrial complex has grown into a monster, ignored by many British conservatives until recently. Thanks to changes made to charity law under New Labour and even under the Conservative-led Coalition Government, left-wing political campaigning is allowed as a charitable purpose. Indeed, the promotion of diversity, a contested and often controversial political position, is specifically permitted as a charitable activity.

Charitable status comes with privileges and protections in law. Grant-giving foundations sitting on vast endowments like the Esmee Fairburn Foundation, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation — all of whom fund Runnymede Trust  — and many others support a network of activist groups which campaign against law and order, deporting criminals, and in favour of open borders. 

This is the reality of the charitable sector today. It is a world away from the Women’s Institute and animal rescue charities that are more aligned with the public’s vision of charity. In 2020, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, an influential organisation in this world, published a piece explicitly advocating for the charities sector to campaign for “progressive” values, because they apparently “always prevail”.  

The current Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, wants to encourage the charitable sector to be more, not less, political. The Government wants charities to play a greater role in policymaking and public services. The charities sector is becoming a new arm of the state: partly relied on to deliver public services, while also enjoying privileges like gift-aid and the ability to campaign for quasi-political causes like diversity, equality, or restorative justice. It is one thing for an elected government to spend taxpayer’s money pushing political positions, quite another for the charities sector.

Too often, conservatives have attempted to wage war against their left-wing enemies without understanding the field on which they are fighting

The Charities Act should be considered part of Britain’s parallel constitution. Along with laws like the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, the Equality Act, and the Online Safety Act, this law has played an outsized role in reshaping British politics. One of the most important lessons of the last few years is that laws matter, and in many respects culture is downstream from politics, contrary to Andrew Breitbart’s saying. The inability to deport foreign criminals, the infestation of British schools with anti-British propaganda by the third sector, the closing down of heavy industry, and the direct discrimination against white male pilots in the RAF — to choose some topical examples — are not cases of the woke running rampant in a vacuum, they all have a legal root to them. 

Any serious centre-right movement in Britain needs to campaign to reform or repeal these laws. Too often, conservatives have attempted to wage war against their left-wing enemies without understanding the field on which they are fighting. This perhaps explains why the Runnymede Trust has been undeterred despite multiple attacks in recent years. The law is on its side. Restoring sense and reason to the charitable sector and reviving the true spirit of philanthropy is long overdue. As both contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Party have said, opposition is a time to work out what went wrong for the Tories in office, and how to come up with a plan to fix it. Evidently, the integrity of our criminal justice system, of our borders, and our cultural understanding depends on it.