Who funds the Free Speech Union?

Toby Young’s outfit went to court to hide its donors. Today we reveal that funders include US anti-abortion groups, Brexit politicians and Tufton Street insiders.

By Peter Geoghegan and Max Colbert

The Free Speech Union (FSU) has come a long way since its inception in 2020. Founder Toby Young now sits in the House of Lords and FSU spokespeople regularly appear on British media. Even JD Vance has endorsed its argument that the UK is suffering a ‘free speech crisis’.

The FSU has also backed numerous freedom of speech legal challenges. So I was somewhat surprised to learn that last week Young’s organisation had itself obtained a High Court injunction - banning the publication of a list of its donors.

The court order followed the hacking of the organisation’s website earlier this month by the trans rights group Bash Back. On its own website, Bash Back accused the FSU of “purport[ing] to protect free speech” while in reality “work[ing] to protect transphobes, racists, and anti-choice activists,” and published a list of people who had donated £50 or more to the FSU over the past two years.

The High Court injunction prohibits Bash Back - or anyone else - from publishing the donor list. Breaching the order could lead to contempt of court sanctions, including imprisonment.

Hacking is a criminal offence, and Young has called on the police to prosecute Bash Back. But while there is as yet no sign of any police action, the story got me thinking about who is funding the Free Speech Union.

The FSU’s revenues have grown quickly - it had 17 staff and more than £2million in cash when it filed last year’s accounts - but it has continually refused to name its donors. So Democracy for Sale decided to conduct its own investigation.

Our investigation found the FSU has received significant sums from a vehicle linked to prominent Brexit campaigners and donors to Tufton Street think tanks that “incubated“ Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership. Other funders include a Conservative peer and a US organisation run by an anti-abortion lawyer.

Let’s start with the Injustice Foundation, which has given more than £380,000 to the Free Speech Union in recent years, according to public Charity Commission filings.

The Injustice Foundation is hardly a household name. It appears to have no public website and no obvious physical presence, but it does have two highly recognisable trustees: Matthew Elliott and Jon Moynihan - both Conservative peers and both closely associated with Britain’s Brexit politics.

Elliott ran the Vote Leave campaign, which the Electoral Commission found broke election spending laws during the 2016 referendum. Moynihan, a major Conservative donor and former Vote Leave board member, has previously called for the abolition of the Electoral Commission.

In its latest accounts, the Injustice Foundation lists “incoming resources” for the Free Speech Union of £157,600 last year. The figure was £115,000 in 2024 and £110,000 in 2023, totalling more than £382,000 over the past three years.

Where does the Injustice Foundation’s cash come from? It does not say. But public records shed some light.

Moynihan has donated to the Injustice Foundation, having previously given hundreds of thousands of pounds to Tufton Street think tanks. Other supporters of the Injustice Foundation include former trustees, long-time Institute of Economic Affairs backer Lord Nigel Vinson and Richard Smith, owner of 55 Tufton Street and a donor to both the Conservatives and Reform UK.

The Free Speech Union has also received funding from Tory peer Jamie Borwick. According to publicly available records, Borwick’s charity, the Federated Foundation, gave £10,000 to the FSU in 2023.

Again Borwick is a longtime Tufton Street backer. His charity has funded the IEA, Policy Exchange, the Legatum Institute (now known as the Prosperity Institute) and other think tanks who refuse to declare their donors but have long had major influence on the British political right.

The Free Speech Union hasn’t just been soliciting donations in the UK. As we previously reported, the organisation received almost $100,000 in 2021 from a US charity run by an anti-abortion lawyer underscoring its links to transatlantic conservative networks.

The FSU cares a lot about the funding of organisations it brands as ‘pro-censorship’. Last month, it announced the hiring of former Daily Mail journalist David Rose to investigate donors to Hope Not Hate and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. We asked the FSU whether this was somewhat ironic, given its refusal to disclose its own funding.

We received no response - to that, or to any of our questions about its donors or the injunction.

The Free Speech Union’s commitment to free speech would seem to end where transparency about itself begins.