Skip to content

Revealed: UK’s most secretive think tanks took £14.3m from mystery donors

openDemocracy has relaunched the Who Funds You? campaign into think tanks and transparency. Here’s what we found

Revealed: UK’s most secretive think tanks took £14.3m from mystery donors
openDemocracy has rebooted the Who Funds You? campaign into transparency at leading UK think tanks | openDemocracy. All rights reserved
Published:

The UK’s most secretive think tanks have raised more than £14m from mystery donors in the past two years, new analysis by openDemocracy has found.

Among them are some of the most influential groups in UK politics. Think tanks often boast that they have driven changes to the law and economic policy, such as the tax cuts announced by Liz Truss that are blamed for tanking the UK economy earlier this year.

We have rebooted the formerly volunteer-run Who Funds You? campaign, which uses think tanks’ own income disclosures to position them on a funding transparency scale. The project originally ran for seven years before coming to an end in 2019.