School’s out for the summer! What better way to spend a sunny afternoon than by creating your own hedgehog house to help the nation’s favourite mammal from further decline, especially during the current heatwave.

The Hedgehog Street team – run by BHPS and PTES – is urging people to help hedgehogs by providing a safe haven that’s cool, cosy and comfortable during this unusual summer weather.

Hedgehog census

Last year, Hedgehog Street launched the first ever Hedgehog Housing Census, which looked at how, when and why hedgehogs use either homemade or artificial hedgehog houses in gardens across Britain.

Between August and October 2017, over 5,000 people responded to the Hedgehog Housing Census. Now, a year on, the secrets behind what makes a perfect hedgehog home have been revealed. The results, analysed by the University of Reading, show that:

– Hedgehogs prefer homemade houses, but artificial houses are still a good alternative if they have the right features

– Hedgehogs need time to get used to a new house before they use it

– Feeding hedgehogs, putting water in your garden & providing bedding (such as dry leaves, pet straw or both) increases the chances of a resident hedgehog moving in

– Hedgehogs prefer houses found in back gardens, in shaded areas.

– Pets or badgers don’t appear to put off a ‘hog from moving in

Building your own hedgehog home is a fun and easy to do. To download a PDF with simple instructions on how to build two different types of hedgehog house, visit: www.hedgehogstreet.org/housingcensus.

Hedgehog ecology

Interestingly, the results also showed that houses positioned less than five meters to the homeowners’ house are most frequently used, indicating that hedgehogs have become accustomed to human activity.

A total of 81 percent  of those who responded to the questions about usage for daytime resting and hibernation found evidence that their hedgehog house was used for resting during summer daytime, 59 percent noted that it was used for hibernation during winter months and 28% said it was used for breeding.

Emily Wilson, hedgehog officer for Hedgehog Street explained: “Until now we didn’t know what type of hedgehog house was best for hedgehogs and if they were even really used at all, as this area of hedgehog ecology simply hadn’t been studied.

“These results tell us that hedgehog houses are helping ‘hogs find a place to rest, hibernate and even breed. We can use these results to help conserve these animals and give the most accurate advice to anyone wanting to provide shelter for wild hedgehogs through our Hedgehog Street campaign.

“It’s interesting to see that hedgehogs seem to prefer houses that have been in a garden for some time, but we hope that people won’t be disheartened if they have a newer hedgehog house, it just means hedgehogs need a little time to get used to it.

“If hedgehogs are provided with food and water in the garden (especially during this unusually hot weather), and the correct bedding in the house, this really encourages hedgehogs into your area, and they could become regular night-time visitors.”

Hedgehog champions

Abigail Gazzard, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Reading added: “Further analysis is required to investigate why hedgehogs seem to prefer homemade houses to artificial ones.

“This could be to do with the type of materials they are made from, they’re physical size, or whether they have other features such as tunnels and internal partitions, so the next step for us is to look into this aspect specifically.”

Emily concluded: “Thanks to these results analysed by the University of Reading, we now better understand what a hedgehog is looking for in a perfect home, so we hope existing Hedgehog Champions and those who aren’t yet champions, consider encouraging hedgehogs in gardens across Britain by building and introducing your own hedgehog houses.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor to The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from PTES. To support PTES’ ongoing conservation work, you can donate £3 by texting ‘PTES18 £3’ to 70070.

School’s out for the summer! What better way to spend a sunny afternoon than by creating your own hedgehog house to help the nation’s favourite mammal from further decline, especially during the current heatwave.

The Hedgehog Street team – run by BHPS and PTES – is urging people to help hedgehogs by providing a safe haven that’s cool, cosy and comfortable during this unusual summer weather.

Hedgehog census

Last year, Hedgehog Street launched the first ever Hedgehog Housing Census, which looked at how, when and why hedgehogs use either homemade or artificial hedgehog houses in gardens across Britain.

Between August and October 2017, over 5,000 people responded to the Hedgehog Housing Census. Now, a year on, the secrets behind what makes a perfect hedgehog home have been revealed. The results, analysed by the University of Reading, show that:

– Hedgehogs prefer homemade houses, but artificial houses are still a good alternative if they have the right features

– Hedgehogs need time to get used to a new house before they use it

– Feeding hedgehogs, putting water in your garden & providing bedding (such as dry leaves, pet straw or both) increases the chances of a resident hedgehog moving in

– Hedgehogs prefer houses found in back gardens, in shaded areas.

– Pets or badgers don’t appear to put off a ‘hog from moving in

Building your own hedgehog home is a fun and easy to do. To download a PDF with simple instructions on how to build two different types of hedgehog house, visit: www.hedgehogstreet.org/housingcensus.

Hedgehog ecology

Interestingly, the results also showed that houses positioned less than five meters to the homeowners’ house are most frequently used, indicating that hedgehogs have become accustomed to human activity.

A total of 81 percent  of those who responded to the questions about usage for daytime resting and hibernation found evidence that their hedgehog house was used for resting during summer daytime, 59 percent noted that it was used for hibernation during winter months and 28% said it was used for breeding.

Emily Wilson, hedgehog officer for Hedgehog Street explained: “Until now we didn’t know what type of hedgehog house was best for hedgehogs and if they were even really used at all, as this area of hedgehog ecology simply hadn’t been studied.

“These results tell us that hedgehog houses are helping ‘hogs find a place to rest, hibernate and even breed. We can use these results to help conserve these animals and give the most accurate advice to anyone wanting to provide shelter for wild hedgehogs through our Hedgehog Street campaign.

“It’s interesting to see that hedgehogs seem to prefer houses that have been in a garden for some time, but we hope that people won’t be disheartened if they have a newer hedgehog house, it just means hedgehogs need a little time to get used to it.

“If hedgehogs are provided with food and water in the garden (especially during this unusually hot weather), and the correct bedding in the house, this really encourages hedgehogs into your area, and they could become regular night-time visitors.”

Hedgehog champions

Abigail Gazzard, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Reading added: “Further analysis is required to investigate why hedgehogs seem to prefer homemade houses to artificial ones.

“This could be to do with the type of materials they are made from, they’re physical size, or whether they have other features such as tunnels and internal partitions, so the next step for us is to look into this aspect specifically.”

Emily concluded: “Thanks to these results analysed by the University of Reading, we now better understand what a hedgehog is looking for in a perfect home, so we hope existing Hedgehog Champions and those who aren’t yet champions, consider encouraging hedgehogs in gardens across Britain by building and introducing your own hedgehog houses.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor to The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from PTES. To support PTES’ ongoing conservation work, you can donate £3 by texting ‘PTES18 £3’ to 70070.

It was all a bit retro. A BBC radio presenter, looking out the window and seeing it’s still hot, and leaning into his microphone to ask “does this mean climate change is real?” 

Do not adjust your wireless. This really is the opening question on a segment about climate change. In 2018.

BBC Radio Cambridgeshire’s decision to have climate science denier and UKIP supporter Philip Foster on to debate a (non-climate) scientist about whether or not humans have caused climate change immediately drew much ire.

Start thinking

Foster completed an undergraduate degree in natural science at the University of Cambridge before teaching secondary and sixth-form schoolchildren in Nigeria. In 2012, Foster organised anti-climate action events to coincide with the landmark Paris climate conference, at which high-profile climate science deniers including the eccentric lord Christopher Monckton appeared.

The response to the BBC broadcast was largely down to Rupert Read, a philosopher at UEA and former Green party candidate for Cambridge, who is now chair of the Green House thinktank, tweeting that he’d been asked to go on but “said NO” after he was told the show’s plan.

“When it was described to me what it was going to be – just a straight back and forth debate between myself and a climate science denier – I thought this was time to say ‘no’”, he told DeSmog UK.

“And when they told me they were going to say ‘we’ve got this heatwave, does that mean climate change is real?’, I thought ‘no, this is not acceptable’”.

“If people start doing what I’m doing and start saying no to them if they’re going to have a climate science denier on to debate, then the BBC will have to start thinking about whether they can do this.”

Scientific credentials

It’s not the first time that the BBC has been in trouble for offering ‘false balance’ – when two sides of a debate are unreasonably given equal weight – for example, when the reality of human-caused climate change is presented as a controversy despite the overwhelming weight of evidence.

In October 2017, the BBC’s Today programme was forced to apologise and admit statements from climate science denier Nigel Lawson “should have been challenged”.

In 2011, Professor Phil Jones wrote a review for the BBC that criticised the network for allowing “an adversarial attitude to science which allows minority, or even contrarian, views an undue place”. It concluded that, “there should be no attempt to give equal weight to opinion and to evidence”.

Dr Emily Shuckburgh, a climate scientist based in Cambridge at the British Antarctic Survey, who pre-recorded a segment for the programme, told DeSmog UK that she felt the programme had “tried but failed” to explore how the recent heatwave related to climate change.

“The main problem is that it wasn’t properly explained what the scientific credentials of the participants were, and when incorrect statements were made they weren’t challenged, which is a dereliction of the BBC’s journalistic duty”.

Step-change

“I think it’s fine for them to have debates, and invite on whoever they want, but it has to be properly explained who is on. And when basic facts are misrepresented, that they are properly challenged”.

Read’s sentiment has certainly struck a chord. “The reaction I’ve had to this on social media has been far more positive than to any other cause I’ve ever championed”.

“I hope other people will take up this cause and say we’re just not going to play along with your games anymore, you’ve got to make more of a step-change towards the kind of debate we really need to be having.”

BBC Cambridgeshire has been contacted for comment.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

As our story unfolds we will see that climate denial is the invention of a network of think tanks first established to promote free market ideology.

The neoliberal intelligentsia running these organisations will have, almost without exception, read and been hugely influenced by a book called The Road to Serfdom by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek.

The book was originally rejected by London’s publishing houses and widely ridiculed by academics. Hayek himself recognised that it destroyed his credibility as a serious economist.

Influential cabal

And yet Serfdom became the Bible of both the American president Ronald Reagan and his British counterpart Margaret Thatcher. It provides the free market Kool-Aid which feeds Trump and the right wing Brexiteers. 

This angry polemic became the blueprint for their counter-revolution against progressive politics, the dismantling of any welfare state, the wholesale abandonment of progressive taxation and the bloody war against trade unions. This assault was meant to make us all free, all prosperous.

Hayek provided the belief system that would persuade an influential transatlantic network of politically motivated men to wage a sometimes dirty and criminal assault against the state and its regulators, and against climate scientists and their research.

But when you learn about the life of Hayek and read his works you soon discover that everything is not as this influential cabal would have us believe.

Vested interests

Even the ideas of their founding father have been distorted and twisted to suit the vested interests of those extremely wealthy, oil-enriched men who have quietly funded and led the neoliberal movement and exploited its followers in their war against climate change regulations.

Friedrich von Hayek was born in Vienna on 8 May 1899. His father, a part-time botany university lecturer, introduced Hayek to the relatively new and shocking ideas of Darwin, and the evolution of the species through natural selection and the “survival of the fittest”.

Historians have pondered whether Hayek’s early introduction to the theory of natural selection informed his economic thinking.

He would later develop an idea that corporations selling the products we buy, and indeed whole civilisations, were locked into a struggle for survival just as individual animals and their wider species struggled against each other in nature.

Human nature was, in Hayek’s later analysis, selfish, cruel, self-interested. Just as it is for the shark, or the rat. Only the money system of capitalism and the free market would allow this competition to flourish and create wealth.

This was Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. Classical liberal economics reloaded. And it was this flirtation with “social Darwinism” that led a few to accuse Hayek and some of his followers of fascism.

But this distrust of the human and infatuation with the mystical free market had not always been central to Hayek’s ideas.

Childhood Ambitions

Hayek had from his childhood harboured ambitions to become a world leading academic. However, at the age of 14 this seemed to be an impossible dream. He had, according to biographer Lanny Ebenstein, “failed Latin, Greek and mathematics, and was near the bottom of his class most of the time”.

And it wasn’t long before Hayek found himself close to the maelstrom of world events. And the student was to become a confirmed Socialist.

The Russian socialist revolution took place when Hayek was 17 years old. A further Marx-inspired revolution followed in Budapest two years later and when its communist government collapsed many of its leaders fled to Vienna and filled its cafés and bars with passionate debates about the planned economy.

Hayek was fascinated by socialist literature and was disciplined at school for reading a radical pamphlet during a divinity lesson.

It was while the young man was optimistic for his own future, and convinced of the creative power of humanity, that he flirted with Marxism.

But events would conspire against him, breaking that confidence, and he began his journey to the politics of anxiety and fear.

The young student had assumed his future was relatively secure. His mother was from a “conservative, land owning family” and her “considerable inheritance” allowed the family to enjoy a life of privilege.

In the wake of the Great War, Austria was under the grip of hyperinflation and massive war debts and Hayek “saw his parents’ savings melt away”, records biographer Nicholas Wapshott.

Their descent into poverty meant Hayek after leaving school could no longer afford to study in Germany. In October 1921 he took a government post as a legal assistant administering the country’s debt.

In a further irony of history it was working for the state that saved Hayek from penury, and while working for the state he was converted to a new ideology that despised the state and its provision of welfare for the poor.

Intellectual mentor

By happenstance, he was assigned to the supervision of Ludwig von Mises, the grandfather of free market economics, who quickly became his intellectual mentor. Mises “sowed doubts in Hayek’s mind about the virtues of socialism,” according to Wapshott.

Hayek himself recalled: “The Vienna socialists, Marxists, were more doctrinaire than most other places, it only repelled me.” Hayek abandoned Socialism, and in the same moment was tutored by the intellectual father in its very antithesis, neoliberalism.

A decade later and Hayek would find himself presenting a lecture at the London School of Economics on the Strand in London where he would come to the attention of its head of economics, Lionel Robbins.

Robbins was labouring under a serious problem. He was in conflict with John Maynard Keynes who dominated the economic thinking of the time. Keynes was listented to – and Robbins ignored – during meetings of the prime minister Ramsey MacDonald’s committee for economists.

Keynes was considered to be the most brilliant and influential economist of the age.

He had allowed the British government to fund its war effort without the almost inevitable crisis of hyperinflation usually brought about by massive government spending. He had become the sage of government and also the darling of a new, progressive and socially liberated age.

The world was still coming to terms with the Wall Street crash, which followed an orgy of speculation and heralded the Great Depression.

Politicians and populations both turned to economists for advice on how to escape this desperate situation, and almost everybody accepted that the markets when left unchecked caused irreparable damage.

Paradox of Thrift

Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, wrote: “Keynes’s intellect was the sharpest and clearest I have ever known…when I argued with him I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.”

Keynes presented the “paradox of thrift” which explained that if everyone started saving during a depression less would be spent in the shops, economic growth would suffer and the country as a whole would be worse off.

Austerity was a false economy. He advocated a planned economy with the state using taxation during the boom and spending during recession to manage the business cycles which had plagued capitalism since the industrial revolution.

Keynes took to the airwaves, his biographer records, “urging the housewives of London in a radio broadcast to spend, spend, spend”.

Robbins was vehemently opposed to the dominant Keynesian paradigm and needed new ideas, new research, in order to add academic weight to his dislikes.

Hayek had published a series of articles extolling the virtues of the free market.

The Institute for Business Cycle Research, an association of industrialists in Vienna, sponsored a lecture tour to London. Robbins was in attendance – and was immediately convinced he had found exactly the man he had been looking for.

Robbins invited Hayek to speak at the London School of Economics, having read his latest publication, The Paradox of Saving, which directly contradicted Keynes. “This is the thing we need at the moment – to fight Keynes,” Robbins exclaimed.

Universal Admiration

Hayek’s lectures at the London School of Economics from January 1931 were considered a resounding success. Robbins persuaded Sir William Beveridge – his boss and the man who proposed that the state must intervene to wipe out poverty – to hire the Austrian free market economist.

The prestigious job came with a starting salary of £1,000 a year allowing Hayek to move to Hampstead Garden Suburbs with his family, buy his first car and join the exclusive Reform Club in Pall Mall. The Austrian had achieved his boyhood ambition and become a serious academic.

But how would he fare in the extraordinarily difficult task of challenging one of the finest economists of the ages, and overturning the almost universal admiration for Keynes and his proscriptions of state management of the markets through taxation?

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague.

Global losses in seed diversity pose a significant threat to the health and stability of our food systems. The Gaia Foundation is working in partnership with the Soil Association, the Landworkers Alliance, Irish Seed Savers Association, and the Seed Cooperative to address this threat with a three-year long programme. 

Neil Munro, seed sovereignty programme manager and former head of the Heritage Seed Library at Garden Organic, argued: “In the UK, self-sufficiency in food production is currently at 62% and is estimated to fall to less than 50 percent by 2080.

“Seed security and diversity underpins food security. Producing and saving seed through ecologically sound and sustainable methods not only protects our agricultural heritage and biodiversity, it makes our food system more resilient, improves the condition of the land and benefits small-scale farmers.”

Building resilience

As the UK and much of Europe experiences a drought that has left farmers and growers everywhere at risk of low yields and crop failures, initiatives to increase seed diversity here around the planet have never been more important.

Ben Raskin, head of horticulture at the Soil Association explained: “Creating a more diverse seed system in the UK and Ireland is critical in the bigger picture of climate change. It is part of an ecologically sane approach to agriculture which supports the entire ecosystem, from the pollinators to the birds to the soil microbe, all of which have been gravely threatened by chemical agriculture”.

The UK and Ireland Seed Sovereignty Programme employs five experienced regional coordinators, based in Wales, Scotland, Ireland and east and west England, who are working closely with farmers, seed producers, horticulturists and commercial growers to conserve threatened seeds and to breed new varieties for future resilience.

Maria Scholten, coordinator for Scotland said: “In Scotland, proud testimony of local seed production are the landraces grown by crofters on the Outer Hebrides and Northern Isles. Here, crofters keep seeds available for other crofters; these are truly islands of seed sovereignty.

“The landraces are locally adapted to tough conditions and contributing significantly to biodiversity, particularly along the Machair. Many more examples of these local low-input production systems will make our food system far more resilient.”

Lost arts

Travelling to every corner of the UK and Ireland, the programme’s coordinators have observed that the loss of seed diversity goes hand-in-hand with the loss of knowledge and skills necessary to select, save and breed seed. 

Katie Hastings, coordinator for Wales said: “One of the first things the growers told me is that despite knowing a great deal about land management and vegetable production, many of them didn’t have the skills to produce seed. The art of completing the growing cycle on-farm by producing the seed for the next crop is somehow being lost, and the growers I was meeting wanted to change that.”

Identifying and working with enthusiastic farmers and growers, the coordinators are working to undo this loss. 

Katie added: “With a strong market for Welsh-grown seed and a burst of energy from growers keen to learn, my work is to bring these two worlds together”. 

Organic seeds

The programme is specifically focusing on increasing the supply of organic seed, produced without the use of harmful pesticides and herbicides, to create the basis for a more revolutionary shift towards a healthier, ecologically sound food system in the UK.

Munro said: “At present it is estimated that just three percent of the seed produced in the UK is organic. A large proportion of produce grown by organic producers isn’t grown from organic seed in the first place; there simply isn’t the quality and quantity available to do so.

“But across the UK there is a growing market for home-grown organic seed and an appetite to support and foster a more ecologically sustainable food system through the entire cycle of agriculture. That means starting by addressing the lack of organic seed, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

This Author

Rowan Phillomore is deputy director and head of communications at The Gaia Foundation. More information about the Seed Sovereignty UK & Ireland Programme can be found at the dedicated website: www.seedsovereignty.info

Mining expansion is met with huge public opposition all over the world, from mega-mining expansion in Latin America to plans for lithium mining in the Spanish city of Cáceres.

In Northern Ireland there is currently a flurry of mining activity and resistance to it: five companies currently hold 10 mineral prospecting licences for different location across the small country. Four companies have lodged applications for six mining licences.

We take a closer look at three cases where local communities are organising themselves to protect the beauty spots being scoped out by mining companies.

Slieve Gallion

Local residents and nature lovers are sounding the alarm over the potential threat to the much-loved Slieve Gallion mountain in Northern Ireland’s County Derry. Slieve Gallion is part of the famous Sperrin mountain range and is recognised as an area of outstanding natural beauty.

Walkabout Resources Ltd – a mining company based in Western Australia – has a ‘joint venture agreement’ with Koza UK – the British subsidiary of a Turkish gold mining firm – which holds a mineral prospecting licence (MPL) – meaning they can explore the area for minerals. The company revealed in June that they had discovered cobalt-silver in the Slieve Gallion area.

Walkabout Resources has now sought the help of Blytheweigh, a London-based PR company, to help them engage with the local community. In an email, the firm has informed local councillors that it plans to hold a special meeting in order to answer their questions.

Members of the local community are extremely worried about the impact mining at Slieve Gallion would have on the environment. They are raising awareness about the plans to prospect for minerals in Slieve Gallion and they have started a petition to gather support.

There are also plans to organise a public meeting. More information can be found on the Facebook page ‘Factfinding Slieve Gallion’. Early warnings about this conflict go back at least three years, as was reported in The Ecologist back in 2015.

Greencastle

Just 20km away, another global firm – the Canadian company Dalradian – is seeking planning permission to develop a gold mine in the Greencastle area of County Tyrone.

Prospective drilling has already begun and the Cooperate Against Mining In Omagh (CAMIO) group has raised its concerns about investigative drilling that has been taking place just 360m from the Glencordial reservoir, crucial for supplying water to over 21,000 people in the nearby town of Omagh.

The operation – which local people first became aware of on 1 July – involves ‘gold cyanidation’, a controversial process of using sodium cyanide to dissolve gold that can lead to water and soil contamination.

In a statement the group said they fear that the use of sodium cyanide could result in “permanent damage to our water supply”.

Locals have been campaigning against Dalradian’s presence in the area since 2016.

There have been several cyanide-related disasters in the EU with the worst to date at a gold mine in Baia Mare (Romania) in 2000 when 100,000 cubic metres of cyanide-rich waste was leaked into the surrounding waterways cutting off drinking water supplies for 2.5 million people in neighbouring Hungary and Serbia. Hundreds of tonnes of fish were killed in the Szamos-Tisza-Danube River system.

Gold cyanidation is regulated by EU rules on industrial processes and water protection. But a call from the European Parliament in 2010 for proposals for a law that would see a general ban on cyanide in mining in the EU has not yet been followed up by the European Commission. Following protests from activists and local communities, in Greece, the Supreme Court banned the use of cyanide in mining due to its expected devastating impact.

A spokesperson from CAMIO said:

We as a group are implacably opposed to mining in the Sperrins. With calculated cool, calm deliberation CAMIO will challenge Dalradian and any other mining company who come here intending to mine. We will do this using every means available; in the courts, in the political arena, in the financial, agriculture, mining, arts and health sectors simultaneously with outrageous activism on the ground, in the air and on social media. Through education in our local communities, schools, colleges and churches we will build a powerful and effective collaboration of social networks here and abroad of community organisations and institutions to resist mining in this area.

Ring of Gullion

Last year Conroy Gold lodged an application for prospecting licences to hunt for gold in areas of South Armagh, in the Ring of Gullion area – despite the fact that the area has been protected by EU nature laws since 2000 when it was designated a ‘Special Area of Conservation’ as part of the EU-wide ‘Natura 2000’ network of protected areas.

Natura 2000 areas are designated under EU nature protection laws to ensure the long-term survival of Europe’s most valuable and threatened species and habitats. Nature-damaging activities such as mining are supposed to be heavily restricted on these sites.

The Ring of Gullion has also been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest under the British government’s conservation scheme as a result of its unique geology and biodiversity.

The ‘Save Our South Armagh’ campaign group said that during a public consultation on the application for the licences there was a “lack of information made available to the public” which they say was a direct contravention of the Aarhus Convention Agreement of 2001 which “specifically guarantees the rights of access to information and public participation in decision-making”.

This Author

Emily Macintosh works as a Communications Officer at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). Her stories deal mostly with farming, nature, slow fashion and sustainability. This article was first published at metamag.

What we eat has a huge impact on climate change and the natural environment. The global animal farming industry creates more greenhouse gas emissions than the whole transport sector combined and is responsible for up to 91 percent of Amazon degradation.

World population is growing, but even if it stayed the same, it is estimated that if everyone adopted a Western diet, we would need four planets the size of Earth to sustain ourselves. On the other hand, a producing food for a vegan diet requires about a third of the land and a third of the water than for an animal-based diet. This is because farmed animals eat much more protein than they produce. 

The United Nations have urged for a global shift towards a vegan diet to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change. Even Greenpeace – historically cautious around the topic of veganism – is now calling for the global meat and dairy production and consumption to be cut in half by 2050.

Bizarre situation

Environmental issues are a broad and complicated topic, especially for those with no interest in science. Most people don’t enjoy listening to statistics, but one here and there can go a long way.

The main arguments in favour of vegan diets are that eating animals is inefficient, wasteful and, in 2018, completely unnecessary.

We find ourselves in the bizarre situation where for every 100 calories we feed to animals, we only receive 12 calories back from their flesh and milk. By eating those crops directly, we could feed billions more people around the globe.

Another popular statistic is that the global livestock industry generates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all transport combined. All those transatlantic flights, short hops across the channel, long commutes and school runs, are outweighed by the ‘meat and two veg’ approach most people take to meal times.

This is exacerbated by the fact that animal agriculture is the world’s biggest producer of methane, a far more powerful greenhouse gas than the much maligned CO2.

Sustainable meat-eating?

Ultimately, animal agriculture can never be sustainable because of the amount of food and water the animals consume, the required space to rear them, and the amount of waste they produce throughout their lives. It’s easier just to eat plants!

Shopping locally and seasonally is important, but it pales in comparison to the impact you can have by changing what you eat.

The Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food looked into what would happen if the world went vegan by 2050. There would be up to eight million human lives saved, greenhouse gas emissions reduced by two thirds, and healthcare-related savings and avoided climate damages of $1.5 trillion.

Recent research carried out for The Vegan Society showed that only a fifth of those surveyed had made the link between animal agriculture and climate change, even though 95 percent of them reported that they did at least one thing a week to help the environment.

However, a growing movement is making the link between diet and climate change. There are now 600,000 vegans in the UK, twice as many as two years ago, and we want many more people – particularly those already committed to being more environmentally aware in other aspects of their lives – to join us.

‘Plate Up’

Last year, The Vegan Society launched its biggest campaign to date – Plate Up for the Planet. We challenged people to try a vegan diet for seven days to see what the impact would be on their carbon footprint. The results were astounding.

Over 10,000 people took the challenge, saving the same amount of carbon dioxide as flying to the moon and back. Out of those surveyed, 44 percent said they will definitely continue on a vegan diet and 83 percent said they will reduce the amount of meat and dairy they consume.

This Author

Dominika Piasecka is media and PR officer at The Vegan Society, and a keen vegan activist. If you would like to learn more about veganism, sign up to the seven-day challenge here.

His parachute was engulfed in flames. Antony Fisher and his younger brother Basil were engaged in a fierce firefight over the rolling hills of Sussex on 15 August 1940 after a crack Nazi squadron launched a surprise bombardment of their airbase during a decisive day in the Battle of Britain.

“Things looked very stern, with the odds against us,” Anthony Eden, the Minister for War, wrote that very evening after having met with Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the War Office. “[T]his was to be one of the critical days of the war.”

Read the full FAKENOMICS series now!

Adolf Hitler had launched every single plane in his Luftwaffe to attack England’s Royal Air Force and deliver what he hoped would be decisive blow to the country’s defences before launching a ground assault and occupation. 

Shortly after 7pm the Nazis’ fiercest squadron attacked the Croydon airbase where Antony and Basil were stationed. 

The brothers scrambled to defend their base. The RAF 111 Squadron replied with a daring ambush and forced the enemy into a panicked retreat towards the Channel. Basil pursued the fleeing fighters.

But he soon became entangled in a fierce dogfight over the Sussex countryside. Gunfire tore through Basil’s plane and he was forced to eject from the cockpit. 

Violent Aggression

Antony could see that flames had engulfed the silk canapé of his brothers parachute and burnt through its harness. He watched helplessly as the 23-year-old dropped through the sky like a sack of coal. 

The stricken plane crashed into a farmhouse barn and exploded. That evening, Basil’s body was retrieved from a pond near Sidleham, Sussex, not far from his idyllic childhood home at Ashdown Park.

“I survived,” Antony would reflect. “But no thanks to my own efforts. For it was some time before I was to learn that the main ability for which I and my squadron existed, to destroy enemy aircraft, I did not possess. Unaware of my inability, and maybe with less than average inclination for violent aggression, I was no credit in that particular occupation.” 

The landed aristocrat would reach profound conclusions from his own experience of war. “Mankind is in much the same position as I was as an ignorant fighter pilot and in worse danger for being unaware of the need to correct that ignorance,” he mused. The lesson for Antony was painfully clear. 

The cause of his tragedy had been his caution. If he had demonstrated Basil’s self-assured bravery his brother may have been saved. Perhaps he could have shot down the Nazi aggressor. 

Antony never flew again and served out the rest of the war inventing a training machine to improve the aim of Britain’s airmen. 

Attacking Science

He also set about reading, trying to fully understand the political, economic and philosophical divides that had resulted in war and his brother’s death. 

This was the beginning of a tireless, lifelong campaign to wake humanity from its ignorant slumber, and prevent the slow march towards tyranny and war. 

The rest of his life was like his war years: beyond extraordinary. The decisions he took, the ideas he promoted, and the men he allied with would change the course of history.

The machinery of government had created the worst loss of life in human history as the British Empire and the German Wehrmacht pounded each other almost to extinction.

Antony was a deeply sensitive, intelligent man. His devout religious upbringing and the profound grief that characterised his early childhood meant that he was determined to understand the true cause of the Second World War, from the Wall Street crash of 1929 to the rise of “National Socialism” in Germany under Hitler.

An Exotic and Varied Life

And as an Eton and Cambridge educated chap, Antony turned to the field of economics. Antony devoured Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx’s Capital. “Ideas have consequences”, he repeated often.

The ideas that Antony found in those books were reverberating down through the ages and still have profound implications for our own economic and ecological predicament.

Antony’s life was in every detail extraordinary. His long years were filled with the unprecedented privileges of his century while he also suffered from the devastation and grief that scarred the age.

Indeed, he seems more a fictional character devised to tell the story of Britain’s history, power and ideology.

His friend and disciple, the late John Blundell, once remarked that Antony led “the kind of exotic and varied life normally found only in the pages of thick paperback novels stacked high at airports.”

My own sense is that his life was more Shakespearian in scope: defined by comedic tragedy while offering a richness and complexity in its lessons about our own age and the political reality of our time.

Antony founded Britain’s first think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), and dedicated his later years to establishing a complex network of similar free market institutions in the United States.

These erstwhile quasi-academic hothouses would provide the “beliefs” that underpinned Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in America years later – and then today Trumpism and Brexit.

Andrew Marr, in his BBC political history would describe the IEA as “undoubtedly the most influential think tank in modern British history.”

Fighting Tyranny

These institutions would also, as I will show, prove instrumental in germinating climate denial in the United States and then cross pollinating it to Britain.

Antony would dedicate his life to fighting tyranny, real and imagined, in a mostly honest and well meant campaign to liberate the individual from the obligations of the State and society. 

Margaret Thatcher, some years after serving as Prime minister, would reflect: “Yes, it started with ideas, with beliefs. That’s it. You must start with beliefs. Yes, always with beliefs.”

Today there is considerable reflection among climate change policy advocates as they try to comprehend how a small yet influential community of deniers could threaten political attempts to prevent catastrophic global warming.

There is irrefutable evidence that ExxonMobil and other oil interests have funded think tanks and individuals determined to attack science and scientists. But could it really be the case that conscious, intelligent men and women would take the devil’s silver? 

Even when their actions could seriously jeopardize the well-being of their children and their entire world? 

Neoliberalism is Ideology

Others have asked what role ideology plays in people’s “scepticism” of climate change science. Thatcher when discussing beliefs was referring to the work of Antony Fisher and his Institute of Economic Affairs. 

And she was speaking about the IEA’s relentless promulgation of the ideas of the once obscure and forgotten economist Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek had in turn tirelessly promoted a then new school in economics, neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an ideology. And it is an ideology that says that unless we submit to the “invisible hand” of the free market we shall cause totalitarianism and want on a global scale. 

Ideology can be described as a coherent belief system, that takes on our almost unconscious assumptions about economics, about values systems, about right and wrong.

When you research climate denial you quickly establish that almost everyone involved in its inception and promulgation is a fervent believer in the once fringe ideology of neoliberalism. 

‘Climate change regulations, like any regulations, distort and pervert the free market. The best intentions of environmentalists can lead to the hell of state control.’

This is what they believe. And beliefs are usually based on our experiences, rather than on peer-reviewed scientific journals or sophisticated experimentation.

The War of Ideas

This is the history of climate denial. It is the first comprehensive telling of this story from its very origins in the ideological “battle of ideas” for neoliberalism and against “reformist” Keynesianism and the more incendiary, revolutionary communism. 

This “first rough draft” is based on hundreds of interviews, including long and fascinating conversations with the deniers themselves. And it begins with the horrific shock and grief suffered by the young Antony at the height of the Second World War.

There is much to learn from Antony’s life and ideas. These ideas, as I will show during the course of this series, would prove to be the curious cause of climate scepticism.

This remarkable story provides the absolutely vital clues we need to understand how senior statesmen, politicians of integrity and intellect, scientists and sensible people can come to question something as fundamental as climate change. 

And this story unlocks the secret of how we who accept the science and its consequence can still hope to secure a prosperous and happy future for generations to come.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This series first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Oil giant BP is funding an influential free-market think tank that facilitates behind closed doors access to cabinet ministers, an investigation by Unearthed has found.

Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) director Mark Littlewood told an undercover reporter that the oil company uses this access to press ministers on issues ranging from environmental and safety standards to British tax rates.

He suggested the closed-door events organised by the IEA offered its corporate donors an “off the record” forum in which they could discuss their interests with ministers and other senior politicians.

In addition to BP, the investigation found the IEA raises money from gambling companies and US donors that support its push for a hard Brexit and a deregulatory US-UK trade deal.

Yesterday Unearthed revealed that the IEA has set up a secret channel for donations from US sources to help fund its controversial trade team, with donors including US agribusiness interests that are keen to see an end to EU-style food regulations which limit sales of US produce in the UK. The group also claimed it would approach alcohol companies to support its work.

Gambling report 

A document seen by Unearthed now reveals that the National Casino Forum (NCF) – which represents major UK casino companies – planned to donate to the IEA after a 2012 IEA report, which argued for deregulation of the casino industry.

The NCF saw funding the report as a way of getting the casino industry’s messaging across via an independent organization, the document says adding that the NCF signed off on funding the research and held meetings with the report’s author more than a month prior to its launch.

Unearthed understands that the NCF – then known as the National Casino Industry Forum (NCIF) – had planned to pay the fee via its then-PR agency, Tetra, to ensure that its name was not associated with the report.

NCF declined to comment on the record however a source said that the group had not paid for or commissioned the report but had made a donation to the IEA: “After the launch event for the release of the report, which some NCIF members attended, the NCIF decided to make a voluntary donation of £8,000 to the IEA, which was paid directly by the NCIF.”

He also said: “It was brought to the attention of NCIF members that the report was being written and they were given the opportunity to help with fact-checking etc which they took.”

An IEA spokeswoman said: “It is perfectly legitimate to check facts and data with relevant industry representatives. This categorically does not mean that they have any sway or influence on the conclusions we come to in our research. We categorically refute the claim that anybody external to the IEA saw a draft of this report or made any changes prior to publication.”

“The figures suggested and inferences made in your email are factually inaccurate and potentially libellous. We do not recognise the figure referred to”.

The news that the IEA accepts money from businesses aiming to further their commercial interests raises questions regarding assurances the IEA made to the Charity Commission in 2016 regarding its impartiality.

Jon Trickett, Labour’s shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, told Unearthed: “When big money uses underhand ways to influence political decisions it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that democracy is being severely undermined.”

“The system is clearly not working if a registered charity, supposedly prohibited in law from having a political purpose, uses foreign money to lobby politicians to support its extreme political agenda,” he continued.

Commenting on the investigation Jane Mayer, award winning journalist and author of the book Dark Money, said: “These days it’s hard to distinguish some of these think tanks from corporate lobbyists.”

Access to ministers

The IEA is fiercely protective of the identity of its donors and little has been revealed about who funds the charity since the 1990s, when tobacco lawsuits showed it was funded by oil, chemical, tobacco and construction companies during the previous decade.

BP’s ongoing donations to the IEA were revealed by the charity’s director general, Mark Littlewood, during a meeting with an undercover reporter posing as a potential US agribusiness donor.

Littlewood told the reporter that BP’s donations enable the energy company’s staff to attend “intimate” private lunches and dinners, where it can probe ministers on issues like worker safety, environmental regulations and taxation.

“We’ve never written anything to specifically help BP’s you know, precise business model, but their corporate affairs team will come to tonnes of our events, I mean more than half”, Littlewood said. “And the representative from BP will often frame his question within the context of his company – you know, ‘We at BP are really struggling with these regulations which we don’t believe are improving safety of our workers or improving the environment and they are putting up the energy bill for ordinary British citizens – can you tell me why you’re not going to change this, minister?’”

He continued: “That would… be a normal part of the conversation. But then the person from BP might also say, you know, ‘And overall aren’t taxes too high in Britain?

“So there’s a general, we don’t expect, people can’t leave their interests at the door I mean you know,” he added.

Littlewood, who defended the IEA’s policy of hiding its donors’ identities, claimed that he was not breaching a confidentiality agreement with BP “because they state it in their annual accounts”. However, Unearthed could find no evidence of this in the corporation’s filings.

When contacted for comment by Unearthed, the IEA stated that it has received donations from BP every year since 1967. This includes a period in the 1990s when the IEA was at the forefront of efforts to cast doubt on the link between climate change and the burning of fossil fuels.

An IEA spokeswoman said: “It is surely uncontroversial that the IEA’s principles coincide with the interests of our donors.”

Mayer told Unearthed that the IEA was the progenitor of the modern conservative think tanks that now proliferate in the US: “Unsurprisingly, businesses flocked to fund such think tanks. These days it’s hard to distinguish some of these think tanks from corporate lobbyists. They are often funded by huge private interests, to promote the political agenda of huge private interests, yet they present themselves as untainted, independent charities,” she continued.

Private dinners

As one of the UK’s largest corporations, BP executives frequently meet with ministers to discuss their concerns. But the private dinners and other events organised by the IEA offer corporate donors a less-official channel through which to build relationships and discuss their interests with politicians and policy advisors – one where there is little public information about who attended and what was said.

Littlewood explained how these private dinners work: “Let’s just hypothesise that over the next year you have come to three of our drinks parties, four of our lunches and six of our dinners. By this time unbeknownst to me you’ve become big buddies with journalist X, MP Y and policy advisor Z and you’re going off and meeting them for coffee you know that, that is a how a lot of people make connections here that we have facilitated that they then pursue.”

“So if you had an agriculture minister here speaking and you and your clients were here to talk to them about it, you would exchange business cards, you would have our events, our evening dinners are 6.30 till 9 everybody gets to know each other, everybody bends each other ear and it’s, the opportunity would be for you to say minister I’m really keen to bend your ear about erm, beef from the west coast of the USA erm, we’re really worried that you’re not opening your market to this, who should I speak to about this?”

A spokesman for BP said: “BP engages with and shares our perspectives with a number of think tanks in the UK, allowing us to keep informed of different viewpoints and policy conversations.  We have a long-standing relationship with the IEA, a respected free-market think tank, as we do with others including the Centre for European Reform and the Green Alliance.  The IEA hosts round-table events under the Chatham House Rule which our staff have attended; these have involved politicians from different parties, academics and journalists.”

An IEA spokeswoman said: “There is nothing untoward about think tanks having a collaborative approach with politicians. We have introduced MPs and civil servants to experts from a range of relevant areas including customs operations and trade negotiations.  We do not act in donors’ interests, except to the extent that they have an interest in pursuing free trade and free markets.”

Sponsored research

As well as the 2012 casino industry report, Littlewood suggested the IEA would be comfortable receiving money from donors with an interest in fixed odds betting terminals, the high-stakes roulette machines that are accused of contributing to growing rates of problem gambling, and helping them to campaign against legal restrictions on that type of gambling.

He told an undercover reporter: “A lot of donors will say, ‘Jeez, do you know this is coming down the line in the government’s regulation of gambling machines? This is going to be a bloody nightmare, what do the IEA think of this?  Are you doing anything about it?  If you are doing anything about it how did you … who should we speak to about it, do you know anyone I should speak to about it?”

The charity has published numerous reports opposing the regulation of fixed-odds betting terminals.

Matt Zarb-Cousin of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling told Unearthed: “With the IEA, they’re presented, particularly by the BBC, as impartial experts on matters of economics… and the problem is, we’re open about who we are, who funds us, where it comes from, they’re not.”

“So instead of being the bookies against the campaigners, it’s the perception of someone who is an impartial expert and some renegade campaigner. So I think the BBC have really got a lot to answer for in terms of letting these people on telly and on radio without them having to state who’s funding them,” he continued.

Littlewood also revealed that the charity directly approaches businesses to fund research that is in their economic interests: “To give you an example, we would take money from alcohol companies. We would go to alcohol companies and say we want to write about the cost of living being too high and actually alcohol consumption is not costing the National Health Service as much money as they often complain.”

Last year the IEA published a paper about how taxes on alcohol are too high and drinking is not costing the NHS as much as the government claims. The IEA did not disclose how this paper was funded.

In response to enquiries from an undercover report representing a US agribusiness about how the IEA could be funded to argue in favour of deregulation of the UK beef market, Littlewood indicated that the IEA takes finance for projects but wouldn’t do a ‘directly commissioned piece of research where they were expected to take conclusions ‘and package them up.

An IEA spokeswoman said: “The Institute’s editorial and policy output is decided by its research team and Academic Advisory Council.  In other words, we make independent editorial decisions and then seek funding. The work we undertake is work we will do regardless of whether it raises donations.”

Charity rules

The findings appear to contradict the undertakings made by the IEA’s trustees to the Charity Commission in 2016.

During the meeting, IEA trade expert Shanker Singham explained that the think tank only works on projects that fit with its libertarian ideology, but suggested they are were open to being commissioned to carry out research that agreed with their world view: “Someone might come to us and say we are beef farmers from the US, we’re really, really interested in helping our interests and we’d like you to do research around how valuable the protected tariff is for beef. This is not something we would do, I mean this is not consistent with our world view.

“But if they said you know, we’d really like you to talk about how damaging a tariff is for consumers in a market where there’s a huge tariff on beef, that’s entirely consistent with our world view. And we’ll happily do research on that till the cows come home,” Singham continued.

Former board member of the Charity Commission, Andrew Purkis, told Unearthed: “The IEA is very untransparent about where its money comes from… the argument I have put to the Charity Commission is that if a charity is untransparent about how it funds its research it can bring the public confidence and trust in charity into doubt because the public is entitled to wonder, here’s this report on alcohol… I wonder if it’s funded by alcohol companies? The public ought to know this to be able to judge who’s influencing the report.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, an investigations website published by Greenpeace.

Britain’s most prominent free-market think tank is offering to broker access to senior politicians for foreign donors seeking to influence the course of Brexit, an undercover Unearthed investigation has found.

The head of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) boasted about setting up meetings with Brexiteer MPs, a government minister and senior trade officials for US visitors who had agreed to raise money for the IEA’s work pushing for a US-UK free trade deal.

The visitors, who met politicians including the then Brexit minister Steve Baker in May, came from an Oklahoma think tank which has promised to raise donations for the IEA, including from American farming interests who are keen to ensure the UK drops EU-level regulations after Brexit.

Acting politically

US officials have said they will insist that any US-UK free trade deal allows controversial US agricultural products such as chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-injected beef to be sold in UK supermarkets.

IEA director general Mark Littlewood also told an undercover reporter, posing as a representative of a US agribusiness investor, that becoming a donor would allow his client to attend “intimate” private dinners and lunches, at which attendees “get to know cabinet ministers on first name terms”.

Shadow Cabinet minister Jon Trickett said: “When big money uses underhand ways to influence political decisions, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that democracy is being severely undermined.”

Trickett has now written to the Charity Commission claiming the IEA may have breached charity law by acting politically and calling for an inquiry.

Advertising value

The investigation also revealed:

• An undercover reporter was offered the possibility of attending a private dinner with environment secretary Michael Gove, if they funded a £42,500 IEA report on innovation in agriculture after Brexit.

• The IEA has set up a secretive funding channel for money from Oklahoma to fund its controversial trade team, including from agribusiness interests.

• The IEA is quietly soliciting funding for its reports from donors who also have vested commercial interests in the subject matter, and confirmed it would approach alcohol companies to fund work on drink pricing.

• A former Charity Commission board member says the investigation suggests the IEA is “masquerading as an educational venture” and potentially breaking charity rules.

The IEA has been criticised for refusing to disclose its donors. Monitoring organisation Transparify describes its funding as “highly opaque”.

Hard-Brexit faction

However, it is a high-profile voice in the UK media: Littlewood told Unearthed’s undercover reporter that while the IEA’s turnover is £2.5m, it punches above its weight in terms of prominence through “a pretty substantial media effort”.

Littlewood said: “Our advertising value equivalent on the media last calendar year was £66m.”

Although it took no official position on the EU referendum, the IEA has moved to the forefront of the push for a hard Brexit, hiring controversial trade adviser Shanker Singham in March.

This month, supporters of a deregulatory Brexit had a setback when the prime minister unveiled proposals at Chequers that ruled out any reduction in agricultural standards after Brexit. But the Chequers deal has met furious resistance and resignations, including the departure of three Brexiteer ministers – Boris Johnson, David Davis and his deputy Steve Baker.

It also prompted a parliamentary backlash from the European Research Group (ERG), the powerful hard-Brexit faction led by Jacob Rees-Mogg. Singham, who is in close contact with the ERG, praised Davis’ resignation in an article in the Telegraph.

Political access

Littlewood told an undercover reporter that Singham was “unbelievably well connected” to Brexiteer cabinet ministers including trade secretary Liam Fox, Michael Gove and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson and would be able to introduce the ministers to the prospective US agribusiness donor.

Singham was “writing Gove and Johnson’s script” on leaving the customs union, Littlewood claimed. He also confirmed a Mail on Sunday report from last November that Singham drafted a letter from the pair to the prime minister insisting she stick to a hard-Brexit course.  At the time, Gove claimed not to remember whether Singham had written the letter.

Littlewood said Singham and his team speak with Gove “every three or four days, along with David Davis, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox”.

Labour’s Jon Trickett said: “It is deeply worrying that senior Conservative politicians appear willing to engage in unaccountable back room discussions on issues that are critical to the British people.”

Singham’s contact with Steve Baker, the former DExEU minister, has come under particular scrutiny after BuzzFeed reported Baker had failed to declare frequent meetings with the adviser. Baker told BuzzFeed they had not discussed government business so there was no requirement to register the meetings.

Chlorinated chicken

Littlewood told the undercover Unearthed reporter he had been used as a “slight shill” to hide some of Singham’s meetings with Baker, attending meetings alongside Singham so the minister could officially record visits as “Mark Littlewood and staff”.

A spokeswoman for the IEA said of Littlewood’s comments on hiding meetings with Baker: “We do not recognise this version of events”, adding that ministers should register meetings they attend transparently.

The IEA’s spokeswoman said the charity takes “no corporate view” on Brexit.

She said: “[W]e would point out that Shanker Singham is clearly not ‘writing Gove’s script’ given the significant divergence in their opinions. At the time of writing it looks as if the UK is headed towards a customs union on goods – this is quite clearly different from the unilateral free trade policy which we believe to be optimal.”

A spokesman for Gove told Unearthed: “Food safety and animal welfare standards will not be weakened after Brexit.

“We will never be swayed on this. There will be no chlorinated chicken entering the UK and we will retain the precautionary principle. That position won’t change whatever any think tank recommends.”

‘Speculate to accumulate’

Earlier this year, Littlewood set off on what he described as a “lucrative” tour of the US, aiming to raise funds for Singham’s trade team.

At a February meeting in Florida, Littlewood made a “plea” for donations to the IEA’s new trade unit, explaining it would “have as its top priority pushing for US-UK free trade.” The following month, Singham moved with three of his staff from the Legatum Institute, another think tank, to the IEA.

The IEA’s spokeswoman said it was “categorically untrue” that Littlewood had fundraised from US donors for Singham’s team, explaining: “The IEA’s trade team did not start working at the IEA until late March.”

Separately she said that Littlewood had solicited donations to support the US-UK trade deal but added these came from individuals rather than businesses.

On the trip, Littlewood also formed a partnership with an Oklahoma-based think tank, the E Foundation, which includes a plan to channel cash from US farming donors to support Singham’s work.

Speculate to accumulate

The CEO of the E Foundation, Michael Carnuccio, told an undercover reporter that funding Singham’s work offered foreign donors a way to influence Brexit.  Singham’s access and influence was part of his appeal to potential US donors to the IEA, he added.

In May, Singham arranged for Carnuccio and an Oklahoma beef and petrochemicals tycoon named Tucker Link to meet then Brexit minister Steve Baker at the IEA’s offices. The visitors also met Jacob Rees-Mogg at a meeting in parliament of the ERG, and senior officials at the Foreign Office and the Department for International Trade.

Discussing the trip with the undercover reporter, Littlewood confirmed Carnuccio was raising money for the IEA. “We haven’t seen a cent of it yet – we quite often… we speculate to accumulate,” he said. “So with Oklahoma and [Carnuccio] and Tucker coming over we wanted to show what we thought was possible.

“It was almost like a trial run: the fact that we were able to get them in to see four members of the House of Lords, five MPs for lunch, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the European Research Group.”

An aide to Baker said: “Any suggestion – or implication of the same – that Mr Baker would attend meetings because ‘access’ to him was being sold is entirely false.”

Agribusiness donors

She added: “On the occasion you refer to, Mr Baker met US Republicans in his political capacity to discuss trade relations between the two countries.”

Singham told the undercover Unearthed reporter that if the supposed US agribusiness funded his work, he would also be happy to “show them round” in the UK.

“[I]f they think there is something worth doing, then we’d agree that we would do something and they would fund and support our trade work in some way, and if it’s a donation of X to our trade team so that they, so we can do more work on the US-UK [free trade agreement] then absolutely, when they came over we’d show them round and, you know, decide on a body of work going forward.”

The IEA’s spokeswoman said: “[W]e have received no money to support our trade or Brexit work from any foreign business to date. Given our strict protocols we see no reason however why we should not.”

She described Unearthed’s evidence that the IEA is fundraising from agribusiness donors who stand to benefit from deregulation as “tendentious and unfair”.

She added: “The prospective donors are businesses who stand to benefit from free and open trade in accordance with UK regulations which should be in line with sound science and democratic accountability. UK businesses and consumers will also benefit from this.”

The E Foundation issued a statement: “The conversations supported the E Foundation’s purpose to explore global business and research opportunities.

“The informal conversation enlightened us on possible mutually beneficial endeavours in the future between [the] United Kingdom and Oklahoma. Any suggestions the conversations were about something other than constructive business and research pursuits would be completely misguided.”

Intimate dinners

Littlewood also revealed the IEA hosts intimate dinners at its London headquarters at which leading politicians are matched with “five or six donors who have an interest in the area”  and “two or three journalists”, although the meals are off the record. Donors can “get to know cabinet ministers on first name terms”, Littlewood said.

At the dinners, he said, “Everybody gets to know each other… it’s an opportunity for you to say, ‘Minister, I’m really keen to bend your ear about beef from the west coast of the USA… Can I send you a note about it? Can I speak to one of your policy advisors about it?’ All of these conversations are happening because we facilitate them.”

Littlewood said the IEA is not a lobbying organisation, describing the charity as a “great facilitator”  for business to connect with senior politicians.

An IEA spokeswoman said there is “nothing untoward” about the IEA’s contact with senior politicians, adding: “We do not act in donors’ interests, except to the extent that they have an interest in pursuing free trade and free markets. We put people in touch where we feel there is a genuine interest on both sides.”

But Sir Alistair Graham, the former head of the committee on standards in public life, told Unearthed: “It is disturbing to see that such a respected think tank as the IEA are seeking donations for access to lobby ministers at private lunches or dinners.”

Charity rules

Fundraising from donors who stand to profit from the IEA’s policy recommendations may contradict assurances it gave to the Charity Commission. In 2016, after a complaint by former Charity Commission board member Andrew Purkis about its lack of transparency, the trustees told the regulator the “only sponsored research IEA accepts is from individuals or trusts who do not have a vested commercial interest in the topic under discussion.”

The IEA also assured the commission that “companies donate money to the IEA for their own reasons and the IEA’s role is to ensure that it is ‘blind’ to these reasons… and no company is able to guide IEA’s research conclusions.”

But Littlewood told Unearthed’s undercover reporter that the IEA is happy to solicit research funding from companies with commercial interests in the research subject they are planning to cover.

“To give you an example,” he said, “we would take money from alcohol companies – we would go to alcohol companies and say we want to write about the cost of living being too high and actually alcohol consumption is not costing the National Health Service as much money as they often complain”.

There are also concerns that the IEA’s push for a Brexit that allows the UK to reduce regulations and sign a sweeping US-UK trade deal amounts to a political campaign.

Lobby politicians

As an educational charity, the IEA is able to accept tax-free donations but must abide by Charity Commission requirements to be politically impartial, balanced and neutral in how it presents information and stick to its charitable object of education.

In written guidance the charity commission notes that “Raising people’s awareness of an issue to build support for a campaign is not educating them about this issue as the aim is to gain their support.”

Yet Littlewood told an undercover Unearthed reporter: “Our principal campaign is on trade arrangements and free trade.”

“We’ll either win or lose in 12 months,” he added.

In a later meeting, Littlewood revealed the think tank’s work on post-Brexit agriculture is pursuing a specific policy goal: “The key point underlying all of this is that we’ve got to get away from the precautionary principle”,  he said, referring to the cautious approach to risk that underpins European environmental regulation.

Charitable objectives

Labour’s Jon Trickett said: “The system is clearly not working if a registered charity, supposedly prohibited in law from having a political purpose, uses foreign money to lobby politicians to support its extreme political agenda.”

Purkis, the former Charity Commission board member, told Unearthed he had raised concerns with the regulator three times about whether the IEA is breaching charity rules. He said: “Running a campaign for a particular kind of trade deal in a controversial political context… is contrary to all Charity Commission guidance on what an educational charity may or may not do.

“Accepting that the purpose of the IEA is educational, the harm is that a campaign which is not designed to improve public levels of information, not balanced and neutrally presented, and which actually has a specific policy goal which is motivating it… something is masquerading as an educational venture is actually a political venture.”

The IEA maintains it “has no corporate view” and “does not undertake campaigns”. A spokeswoman said: “A free trade agreement between the UK and US is not in itself a controversial proposition and is in fact government policy.” 

She added “The stakes of the Brexit process are high, in our opinion, and our work focuses around a Brexit that delivers free trade and open markets, in line with the IEA’s principles and charitable objectives.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, an investigations website published by Greenpeace. The IEA were approached for comment on this story, however following publication by Unearthed they released a further statement. Click here to read in full.