Stonewall is facing a financial crisis, with the charity announcing a major restructuring that could see up to half of its employees made redundant, The Times reports. Simon Blake, Stonewall’s chief executive, has linked the move to Donald Trump’s decision to freeze foreign aid, which had previously provided the charity with funding via the US State Department’s Global Equality Fund (GEF).
The problem with this explanation is that the numbers don’t add up. Over the past three years, the GEF has provided Stonewall with just over £570,000 in total, averaging roughly £192,000 per year. The most recent annual contribution was £233,583, which is a relatively modest sum in the context of the charity’s overall income. At the same time, Stonewall’s UK government funding has actually increased, rising to over £600,000 in the most recent accounts.
On the face of it, it’s difficult to see how losing a relatively modest sum in US foreign aid could justify such drastic cuts. Stonewall claims it may cut up to 50% of its staff, or 57 of its 114 employees. Yet £191,759 a year divided across 57 salaries would mean an average per-staff shortfall of just £3,364 annually – an implausibly low sum to justify such severe restructuring.
A far more likely explanation is that Stonewall’s UK-based funding model is collapsing.
Once a major income source, Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Scheme has seen a steady exodus. In February, it was reported that every major government department withdrew, citing concerns over its influence over Whitehall policies. Other high-profile organisations, including the BBC, Channel 4, Ofsted, and major law firms, have also distanced themselves from the charity’s workplace programmes. The charity’s most recent accounts reveal an £858,000 deficit, nearly double that of the previous year.
Against this backdrop, blaming Trump’s foreign aid freeze looks less like a full explanation and more like an attempt to divert attention from a deeper problem: Stonewall’s dwindling support among UK institutions and businesses, many of which have grown uneasy with its approach to equality law and a perceived lack of tolerance for dissent from its pro-trans agenda.
Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, Stonewall’s former CEO (2014–19), claimed in a recent interview that she had never sought to stifle discussion, and that she did not recognise the characterisation of Stonewall as being a bullying campaign group. It’s difficult to square this claim with the organisation’s history of ostracising dissenters.
In 2019, Simon Fanshawe, one of Stonewall’s original co-founders, was effectively excommunicated after signing an open letter raising concerns about the charity’s stance on the Gender Recognition Act. Fanshawe warned that Stonewall’s push for self-ID for legal gender recognition would undermine women’s sex-based rights. In response, Stonewall sent him a terse email informing him that “by expressing your views, you have put yourself outside Stonewall”.
“How bitterly ironic,” Fanshawe observed, “that the only freedom Stonewall won’t embrace is the freedom to disagree.”
This isn’t an isolated case.
The following year, the then soon-to-be-head of Stonewall, Nancy Kelly, was the deputy chief executive of NatCen, a research body that agreed to bar gender-critical sociologist Alice Sullivan from a seminar discussion on how Britain conducts its census over alleged “anti-trans views”.
Ms Kelley has also previously compared lesbians who don’t want to include men in their dating pool to “sexual racists” and those with gender-critical views to anti-Semites.
In 2021, lesbian barrister Allison Bailey successfully sued her chambers after arguing that she had been victimised and silenced for co-founding the LGB Alliance, a group critical of Stonewall’s views that trans-women should legally be viewed as women. Bailey claimed that “in retribution” for launching a group with a rival view to that of Stonewall, the charity “co- ordinated with the barristers’ chambers… to put me under investigation”.
The same year, an independent review into the no-platforming of feminist professors Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman at the University of Essex was damning about the influence of Stonewall on university policies. Akua Reindorf, the author of the report, described a “culture of fear” at the university, with academics concerned about voicing opinions that countered the Stonewall-approved line.
Stonewall has also sought to exert pressure on public institutions that fail to conform to its ideological stance. In 2023, when the EHRC advised clarifying the Equality Act’s definition of “sex” to mean biological sex, Stonewall responded by filing formal complaints to the UN Human Rights Council, accusing the EHRC of “actively harming trans people” and calling for its accreditation to be revoked.
It’s not difficult to see why critics argue that Stonewall has strayed from campaigning and debate, becoming instead an enforcer of ideological conformity. Even some within the charity have begun to question its approach. Speaking to The Times, one source close to the charity observed that Stonewall’s rigid stance has alienated key supporters:
They said: “What Stonewall says now is ‘we demand you agree with this, we demand you agree with that, we demand the next thing,’ and it just doesn’t enable that bigger principle, which is ‘what support should we be giving to some young people and vulnerable young adults so they can make the best decisions for their life?’”
The source added that the organisation’s failure to build broad alliances or allow meaningful discussion had been a strategic misstep.
With its influence over UK public institutions diminishing and its corporate funding shrinking, Stonewall is presumably hoping for government intervention. The question is whether the taxpayer should step in to bail out a group that has worked so actively to silence those who disagree with it.
There’s more on this story here.
