Who’s been propping up Stonewall?

According to The Times, the CEO of Stonewall has announced that up to half of the organisation’s staff are at risk of being made redundant. Moreover, The Times reports that Stonewall insiders have linked the announcement to Trump’s decisions on the provision of foreign aid.

Stonewall’s largest funder in recent years has been the US Global Equity Fund (GEF), which is administered by the US state department, which last year funded Stonewall to the tune of £233,583. Other US funders include the UPS Foundation (£40,142), Standard and Poor Foundation (£162,456) and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund (£114,394). Together this means that 38 per cent of Stonewall’s total grant income for 2024 came from US sources.

Gender self-identification is as American as school shootings and apple pie, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the money is also American. But what is troubling is that Stonewall has inveigled its way into the heart of our civil service and has exploited its position to influence UK policy makers. We are now learning the extent to which this policy capture has been funded by a foreign power. 

The Solicitors Regulation Authority, Public Health Wales, The Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Greater London Authority all hold the dubious honour of making Stonewall’s 2024 list of their top 100 employers. Four police forces made the list in 2022, alongside the Department of Trade, the House of Lords and the Scottish Government.

To make it into the Stonewall top 100 employers must submit to their Stonewall Workplace Equality. Stonewall then ranks organisations on their answers to questions such as “Describe how the organisation has support [sic] LGBT equality campaigns?”, “Does the organisation support all employees to become allies to other marginalised LGBT communities through training, programmes and/or resources?” They even ask if senior leaders and board members have “communicated a strong message on trans equality, explicitly including non-binary equality” and go on to ask for full details on the message delivered. The goal of these questions is to encourage organisations to make sure that everyone they employ, from the most recent hire to the most senior staff, is toeing the line.

While Stonewall’s schemes can have a malign influence on any company, their impact is egregious in the civil service

Perhaps the most effective question in the Workplace Equality Index is to ask companies if they have set up an internal staff network for LGBT staff and their allies. It is these networks that do Stonewall’s work on the ground. They promote pronouns in email signatures, raise rainbow flags and hand out rainbow lanyards so that every day their colleagues are reminded to be very careful what they say. These symbols of political bias are shown quite overtly: trans pride flags are flown over police stations, and even zebra crossings have been given a rainbow makeover. Even organisations that have now withdrawn from Stonewall’s ranking scheme are afraid to shut down the internal lobby groups Stonewall made them create.

While Stonewall’s schemes can have a malign influence on any company, their impact is egregious in the civil service. This is because the civil service code of conduct requires it to be impartial.

Consider for example the England and Wales decennial census. We should expect this to be conducted with the highest standards of rigour. However, at Stonewall’s behest, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) fought all the way to the courts to try and avoid asking people their biological sex. When academics questioned the validity of their botched question on gender-identity, senior staff members in the LGBTQ+ network wrote to all staff suggesting that this criticism may make trans staff feel “unsafe”. Such lobbying appeared to be effective and the ONS released a statement implausibly expressing their confidence in the statistics at a national level. A year later, the Office for Statistics Regulation withdrew the accreditation of the data as national statistics — an unprecedented step for a Census question.

This is just one example of Stonewall’s influence. Their clout could also be seen when male rapists were allowed into women’s prisons, when civil servants tried to prevent Kemi Badenoch requiring all public buildings have separate male and female toilets, when the police knocked on Harry Miller’s door to check his thinking over his social media posts and when a judge rebuked an assault victim for referring to her male attacker as “he”.

Doubtless, Stonewall’s CEO is partly blaming Trump simply to distract attention from the failures of Stonewall’s own leadership. Trump cannot be blamed for the £858k deficit Stonewall reported in the last financial year.

It is certainly significant that so much of Stonewall’s grant funding comes from the US, but it seems likely that Stonewall will be more concerned about the future of their fee income. 35 per cent of Stonewall’s income comes from the fees they charge for schemes such as their “Diversity Champions”, “Schools Champions” and “Children and Young People’s Services Champions”. These schemes require gullible organisations to pay Stonewall a fee to access to Stonewall’s materials, which they can then use to promote gender ideology among their staff or to indoctrinate the children in their care.

Trump presents a significant threat to this income. For many years companies have boasted that they are committed to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) because it is the “right thing to do”. However, with the rise of the Trump administration they are suddenly much less keen to boast about their woke credentials. One notable bellwether is Mark Zuckerberg, who switched overnight from providing tampons in the gents at Facebook HQ to declaring that large companies need more “masculine energy”. 

Stonewall’s fee income has already dropped by 18 per cent over the last financial year as the public sector has begun to wake up to the parasitic nature of Stonewall’s schemes. If having a Stonewall logo on your website also becomes unfashionable among big corporations, this will undermine Stonewall’s entire business model.

Without US funding, Stonewall’s grant income would come almost entirely from the UK government and the National Lottery. There is always an absurd circularity in government funding lobby groups to lobby them. But when that lobby group is allowed to set up a network of its “allies” within our supposedly impartial public services, we have moved from the absurd to the outrageous. Stonewall and its business model of ranking schemes should have no place within our public sector.