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Democracy 3.0: Crowdfunder site used by Dan Wootton has ties to shadowy think tanks [1]
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Date: 2023-08
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.
Our investigation found Hawkins is linked through another company to key Christian right figures as well as a number of think tanks, most notably the pro-Brexit Legatum Institute – part of the Legatum Group network, which recently helped fund GB News to the tune of £60m.
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GB News presenter and Daily Mail journalist Dan Wootton is currently asking for donations on the site, as is ex-Tory MP and Andrew Bridgen, who appeared on the channel after being kicked out of the Conservative Party after making comments comparing the Covid vaccine rollout to the Holocaust.
Lobbying expert and author Andy Rowell told openDemocracy he was concerned about the think tanks’ links to Democracy 3.0.
“The network of dark money, free-market and neoliberal think tanks, which do not disclose their funders, continue to undermine and erode our democracy on a daily basis,” he said.
Democracy 3.0 advises donors that it is “on hand to help you use the funds you raise to buy in the expertise needed to maximise your chance of success”. Hawkins clarified this on former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron’s podcast, saying he hopes to “democratise lobbying” by allowing donors to pay for lobbyists, lawyers, pollsters and PR professionals.
Links with Christian conservatives
Hawkins is also a director of the Ad Omnia Renovanda Trust, which was formed in March. Other Ad Omnia directors include Tory peer Philippa Stroud and her husband, David, a pastor and community leader at Christ Church London, which says it “wants to play a significant part in the cultural, social and spiritual renewal” of the capital.
There is no information on what Ad Omnia does and Stroud’s entry on the parliamentary register of interests states only that it is a “charity equipping Christians for cultural renewal”. A Freedom of Information request by openDemocracy has revealed Ad Omnia has not registered with the Charity Commission.
Stroud was also CEO of the Legatum Institute until March this year, and is both the co-founder and former leader of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) and the head of a new anti-climate change think tank, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), which she founded this year with controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Both the Legatum Institute and the CSJ had the lowest scores for transparency in openDemocracy’s 2022 Who Funds You? investigation into UK think tanks.
Last year openDemocracy revealed that the Legatum Institute is among a number of think tanks with close links to ministers that has received ‘dark money’ donations from shadowy US climate deniers. The Charity Commission previously demanded the Legatum Institute remove a report titled ‘Brexit Inflection Point’ for breaching political impartiality, according to a 2022 Byline Times report.
Ad Omnia’s other directors also have ties to these organisations: Reverend Nims Obunge is a member of ARC’s advisory board, while Zoe Vickerman is a former director of the CSJ.
Vickers, who co-wrote ‘A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain’, added: “As our world burns, there is an intertwined network of people linked to the Legatum Institute and the Alliance for Response Citizenship who promote climate denial. Any crowdfunding site linked to these organisations should be a real cause for concern.”
The Christian right has been making inroads into government for a number of years – and while still relatively niche in British politics, its growing influence is hard to ignore. A number of government ministers, including home secretary Priti Patel, spoke at this year’s National Conservatism conference in London, which included speeches from Christian MPs Miriam Cates, Danny Kruger and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and contributions from influential Christian thinkers.
Stephen Backhouse, a historian of Christian thought and an authority on the political theology of nations and nationalism, told openDemocracy that the power held by evangelical Christians in the UK was hugely disproportionate to their representation in society as a whole.
Of Democracy 3.0, he said: “All I see is actually powerful minorities telling themselves they are powerless and feeling aggrieved against the democratic majority because they are no longer in charge of ‘common sense’. The Christian entitlement to rule runs very deep, and is what rouses the beast from its slumber more than anything else.”
He added: “These Christians care far more about losing their cultural power than they do about anything that Jesus said, did or cared about.”
Anonymous campaigns and vague policies
Many of the campaigns on Democracy 3.0 have strong Christian links. These include one to “Keep Kids Off Porn”, which is run by the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation, whose CEO spoke at last year’s Everything Conference. Another – run by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Dying Well, of which Stroud is a member – has raised over £16,000 to end medically assisted suicide.
Our investigation has also revealed that, unlike funding drives on other online platforms, several Democracy 3.0 campaigns do not specify precisely where and how donations will be used. Of the 23 campaigns hosted on the site since its inception, five do not name a recipient for the money – including one that raised nearly £3,000 to buy bibles for Ukrainian citizens.
A ‘Vehicle Drive Thru’ campaign also does not say how donations will be used. Fronted by a teenager who refers to herself only as ‘Bea’ but is, in fact, Hawkins’ daughter, the campaign aims to “reduce litter” and “nudge people into being responsible” by encouraging fast-food outlets to print vehicle registration numbers on their packaging.
Donations to Bea’s campaign – which has been running for nearly two years and has no closing date – could be held indefinitely, as Democracy 3.0’s policies allow it to hold money from donors in “a secure account pending the campaign close date”. This is unusual; donations made on other crowdfunding sites, including popular platform GoFundMe, go directly to fundraisers and are not held by the platforms.
The site’s policies also state: “Where monies have been raised to cover legal costs, in the event that those monies are unspent… Democracy 3.0 reserves the right to reallocate surplus net funds to other similar cases.”
How this ‘similarity’ is determined is not clear, and Hawkins has not responded to openDemocracy’s request for comment.
Although Democracy 3.0 claims it “does not endorse or authorise any campaigns or publicly generated content” on the platform, its activity on Twitter (now X) appears to contradict this.
Ad Omnia, which shares an address with Christ Church London, is not the Strouds’ only Christian initiative focused on cultural renewal. They also host the annual Everything Conference (EC) in London, which aims to get Christians into every walk of life and industry, so that “when the Lord answers our prayer” they have people ready to “help people come to faith”. The EC’s website states it is an “initiative of Christ Church London”.
Neither the Strouds nor Hawkins have responded to our questions regarding the purpose of Ad Omnia, or the links between Ad Omnia, EC and the Legatum Institute.
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