Details of a ‘woke’ think-tank have been laid bare, including the £5 million pledge from taxypayers’ money to fund it.
Despite the Conservative Government’s concerted war on woke, the UK Research & Innovation published a pre-announcement for a new Centre for Law and Social Justice.
UKRI is a Quango, meaning while it is independent from the Department for Science it is funded by the British taxpayer.
The announcement sets out that the Centre for Law and Social Justice (CLSJ) will be responsible for delivering “challenge-led research on social justice” and be responsible for diversifying the “research community”.
The funding will be available for five years.
The lucky winners of the opportunity will spend half-a-decade engaging with members of the public with “lived experience”, such as BAME individuals and members of the LGBT community.
The CLSJ will look at understanding vulnerability, and how new laws could “mitigate and manage” them.
It will also be asked to focus on Brexit and climate change to demonstrate how “intersectionality and multilayered exclusion” impact Britain.
The unabashed woke ‘waste’ has now been condemned by Conservative Peer Lord Moylan, who has demanded that the Government makes clear taxpayers’ money isn’t used to promote such a left-wing project.
A leading academic has also blasted the expensive talking shop, calling the spending “shameful”.
They told the Express: “At a time when research budgets are under pressure everywhere and promising academics are leaving the sector in droves, it is shameful for the Arts and Humanities Research Council [a subset of UKRI] to be using public money to create a research centre with an explicitly left-wing equality, diversity and inclusion agenda”.
A source at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology emphasised that UKRI and its decision-making is independent of Government, however implied that current vacancies on the body’s panel could be used to force it to more closely mirror the Government’s views and objectives.
The body is currently looking to recruit up to five new members of its board.
The source praised UKRI’s rival body, ARIA, set up by Dominic Cummings during the Boris Johnson Government, a similar independent, taxpayer-funded body designed to fund high-risk, high-reward scientific research.
Conservatives have spent years deriding The Blob, the idea that civil servants, trade unions, quangos and parts of the media, have been deliberately frustrating their democratic mandate in order to get their own way.
From Brexit to woke policies, the Government has found itself repeatedly battling groups with power and vested interests in order to exert control and resist such slides to ‘wokeness’.
Recently Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath wrote: “The Civil Service, together with its allies in the quangocracy, all too often considers itself to be a separate branch of government in a US-style system of checks and balances, with a duty to “tell truth to power” (or more precisely, to elected MPs and ministers) and to use semi-constitutional laws (such as the Equalities Act, net zero commitments, and membership of the EHRC) as tools to enforce its agenda”.
UKRI was contacted for comment.
