How committed is Toby Young's union to free speech?

Toby Young’s Free Speech Union presents itself as an organisation dedicated to the principle of free speech – except, that is, when it comes to saying who actually pays for his opaque organisation.

The Tory peer’s group has been granted a High Court application to ban Bash Back, a pro-trans group which allegedly hacked the FSU’s website, from publishing donor details on its own site, under a threat of anyone breaching the injunction being jailed. Bash Back has accused the FSU of “purport[ing] to protect free speech” while in reality “work[ing] to protect transphobes, racists, and anti-choice activists”.

According to Bash Back’s website, its activists hacked the FSU’s website last week and then published a list of donors who had given more than £50 since the beginning of 2024. The FSU, which was founded in 2020 by the now Lord Young of Acton, a Conservative peer and associate editor of The Spectator, said it had “temporarily disabled” its website after “a cyberattack by a militant pro-trans organisation”.

But while Rats in a Sack in no way endorses such hackery, it does pose questions about who exactly is paying for the Free Speech Union, which had 17 staff and more than £2million in cash when it filed last year’s accounts, but has continually refused to name its donors.

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The site Democracy For Sale has taken a look at the group’s funding and found that it has – and you’ll want to sit down for this one – received significant sums from a vehicle linked to prominent Brexit campaigners and donors to Tufton Street think tanks linked to Liz Truss’s mayfly-like premiership. “Other funders include a Conservative peer and a US organisation run by an anti-abortion lawyer,” it says.

It reports that a group called the Injustice Foundation has given more than £380,000 to the Free Speech Union in recent years despite having no website and no obvious physical presence. It does, however, “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 while Moynihan is a former Vote Leave board member who has called for the abolition of the Electoral Commission.

Other supporters of the Injustice Foundation, Democracy For Sale reports, include 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 Lord [Jamie] Borwick. According to publicly available records, Borwick’s charity, the Federated Foundation, gave £10,000 to the FSU in 2023. The organisation also received almost $100,000 in 2021 from a US charity run by an anti-abortion lawyer.

Last month the Free Speech Union announced the hiring of former Daily Mail hack David Rose to investigate who has been donating to the anti-fascism group Hope Not Hate and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. How ironic were they to take it to the High Court to prevent their sources from being published too. Ssssshhhhh!