The founder of an online crowdfunding site that hosts campaigns led by MPs and parliamentary groups is linked to the UK’s influential Christian right, including the notoriously secretive Legatum Institute think tank, openDemocracy can reveal.
Founded in 2021 by Andrew Hawkins, also the founder and former chair of pollster ComRes, Democracy 3.0 offers an “online petition + crowdfunding” model allowing people to promote a campaign while also raising funds to support it.
It claims to help causes that “promote the common good” but appears to appeal mostly to the hard right and the ‘cancelled’, hosting often religiously-inflected campaigns that challenge sex education in schools and the right of trans people to use changing rooms.
