Woke Waste: Uncovering the Price of Public Absurdity.

An interview with Charlotte Gill, the journalist behind "Woke Waste".

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Charlotte Gill is a journalist who writes about politics. Her Twitter is @charlottecgill and you can subscribe to her excellent Substack here.

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Before I ask you about your tremendous project “Woke Waste”, can you tell me about you and your previous work?

Sure! I am a 35-year-old journalist from London. I previously wrote a lot of opinion articles — being published in The Times, Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and Critic (which I still do from time to time) — but last year I went into news journalism and have never looked back!

Your strapline for Woke Waste is “A series on how the taxpayer is funding their own demise”. This spoke to me in so many ways and I know my readers are going to be intrigued if they haven’t come across Woke Waste yet.

Over the last decade (maybe more) we’ve seen all sorts of woke madness, from being told women can have a penis, to having to refer to “non-binary” people as “they/them” to an obsession with diversity and inclusion that goes way beyond reasonable attempts to promote equality into exclusion (eg straight white men being treated as Enemy Number One).

Most woke concepts (incidentally, some writers have gone off the term “woke”, but I still like it) have been intellectually demolished but the ideology continues. People naturally ask “why can’t we get rid of it?!”

Well one (rather big) reason is that we’re paying for this nonsense. By that I mean, for over a decade the Government has been giving taxpayer money to university studies/ charities/ initiatives — you name it — that embed and enforce far-left tenets. The trouble is we have no idea how bad the problem is.

Can you tell me more about Woke Waste?

I call Woke Waste “the biggest scandal you’ve never heard of”. Most taxpayers are totally oblivious (through no fault of their own) to the awful things they’ve subsidised over the last decade, never mind the hideous sums involved. Even after studying Woke Waste for the best part of a year, I still find endless examples of ghastliness! Just this week I saw Health Secretary Wes Streeting give a speech for “leading progressive think tank” the IPPR, prompting me to nose into its funding. I discovered the taxpayer gave this charity (as so many organisations seem to be these days) £389.25k between 2018-22:

Its website is very partisan, with terms like “austerity” and “hostile environment” dotted about, and a blog on “Government strategies to defeat the far right” which claimed that “In scrapping the Rwanda asylum scheme, the government is making steps in the right direction”. Many voters won’t like this - nor that Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester is an advisor on its Commission on Health and Prospect. It puts out ideas we should be able to vote on not be taxed for as though the IPPR were providing a neutral public service e.g. local bin collections.

Unfortunately the IPPR is one of countless examples of how our money goes towards partisan projects - some far more egregious than others — in the public sector, which is dominated by progressives. Forget Tufton Street, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to far-left funding. On my own I’ve calculated tens of millions spent on everything from studies on pregnant men to how the Napoleonic wars are an example of “queer” history (a Civil Service newsletter, by the way!).

The weird thing is that all of this information is publicly available, but most people wouldn’t even think to ask “is my government funding projects on ‘asexual epidemics’?” (Asexual Epidemics, Detectives and Spinsters: the construction of pathological asexuality in Victorian fiction is a real PhD btw) It’s all the more extraordinary that such expensive insanity happened under a Conservative one. Naturally we trust our leaders not to spend our money on completely idiotic ideas and projects, but alas! Another issue is that it's really hard to keep an eye on where our money is going as democracy is now so splintered (thanks Tony Blair!), with endless quangos, local governments and their representatives.

Woke Waste is my one-woman attempt to begin to audit ideological spending that has taken place. “To deBlobify the Blob”, if you will. It’s a massive amount of work behind the scenes involving lots of spreadsheets and lists. The information can be depressing, but we have to know where we stand in order to change the system.

You described ‘Woke Waste as your “little fight for Britain”. Why is it your fight? How does a person know when it is their fight? What does this fight cost you? How is this project — and the fight it entails — changing you?

I definitely feel patriotic about my mission. If there was a physical war (God forbid), I wouldn’t be much use as I’m only five foot two. But I genuinely believe we are in the “covert” variety and that I can best help my country through explaining “what lies beneath the [political] surface”.

Sadly Woke Waste is harming (and has harmed) the UK in a number of ways. Take the study on pregnant men I mentioned earlier - full title: Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences and Practices of Reproduction. We spent £668,244 on it! Imagine all the other good things that money could have gone towards.

These crank studies are part of the reason why biological reality — and reality generally — seems to have left the building (of British society).

The funding for this study is even more objectionable given its Principal Investigator was Professor Sally Hines, someone who spends an inordinate amount of time on X posting about Gender Critical feminists (Maya Forstater especially) and other ideological causes.

Tweet:

Tweet:

“Excellent thread on links between GC feminism and far-right movements”

Staggeringly, £668,244 isn’t even the whole of Hines’ taxpayer-funded grants. Hines received £1,057,554 for the research project Living Gender in Diverse Times (link 1, link 2) whose abstract reads:

From coverage of Miley Cyrus' declaration that 'You Can Just Be Whatever You Want to Be' in 'Time Magazine', the introduction of a gender fluid character into the video game 'Sims 4' and Facebook's launch of multiple gender 'options', the last year and half of media coverage lends support to the 'Financial Times' End of Year (2015) pronouncement 'Year in a word: Trans: Gender discussion becomes a nuanced, fluid , 'non-binary' affair'.

How on earth did we end up funding this? (This is the question I ask myself most days, about so many things!)

To add, Woke Waste isn’t only about taxpayers’ money. Public bodies and charities receive money from other sources, such as trusts and foundations (most of which are charities themselves, incidentally, some in receipt of taxpayer funds!) and The National Lottery, which last year awarded £64,000 — via Arts Council England — to a transgender artist putting on a show about finding a sperm donor. Last time I checked they hadn’t even found Mr Right/ Plastic Cup!

In terms of changing me, the project can be dark at times. It has actually cost me friends and I find it hard to switch off. But I guess that’s why it’s my little fight for Britain - because no one switches off during a battle! At the same time I receive amazing messages; more than I can physically reply to. They are often from people “inside enemy lines”, who are exasperated and some also in dark places from it, as well as offers of help. For instance, people who are great with data have other useful skills.

You’ve had some flak on social media. Do you look at it? I always tell myself I shouldn’t look at mine, but only recently made genuine use of the notifications and stopped looking. How do you feel about it?

I’ve definitely “grown” thick skin over the years, which I never knew was possible, but I still have wobbles — such as when I went on a podcast recently and got told my face foundation didn’t match my neck AND I have a wonky mouth! At least I can change the former, hey.

Perhaps the biggest backlash I got this year was from the academic community when I started posting crazy studies on X. They decided I was “anti-intellectual” and “doxxing” innocent PhD students, which was total nonsense. What made me more circumspect was being messaged by a Finnish man early on, who’d (weirdly enough) exposed very similar studies in his own country, which caused a bit of a storm there. He pointed out parallels in how academics had reacted to my posts and his. After that it felt more as if my “haters” were following a template and I could be quite detached about the vitriol. In fact, I went on the offence and started posting more about them.

So, back to the part that resonated with me about your strapline… One result of my research into behavioural science, nudging, manipulation and propaganda for A State of Fear and Free Your Mind was that I was appalled that we, the taxpayers, were paying for our own brainwashing! There is never anything in political manifestos about what will be spent on communications, persuasion, surveillance etcetera. I think there should be complete financial and methodological transparency. And, of course, there never will be. What has shocked you most about the burden on taxpayers? Can you give us some examples of the worst work waste you have found?

The biggest shock is that there was no austerity! For years - maybe over a decade - the public have heard that word countless times from politicians and the press, so much so that it’s treated as a concrete event — like Brexit or the Ukraine war. To add, politicians definitely have been “austere” — mostly to the most vulnerable (see: pensioners losing their winter fuel allowance). But it’s not the same thing as “having austerity”, as if politicians are permanently huddled in a corner deciding whether to feed the elderly or save a children’s hospital - so tight are their funding decisions.

Ahead of the Autumn Budget, Keir Starmer has warned it will be “painful”, continuing the austerity narrative. But what’s more painful is that we funded these university studies:

• £1.5 million - Diversifying participation in English folk singing

• £1 million - “Decolonising Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Higher Education”.

• £841,830 - The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000

• £805,745 - Diverse alarums: centering marginalised communities in the contemporary performance of early modern plays (claims Shakespeare propagated “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives” in theatre.)

• £185,627 - Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism

• £805,769 - Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse)

What is your proudest and most important achievement?

My proudest achievement is when I was 29 and had a column in The Times. When I was little I was awful at school. Without sounding like a TikTok star, I had undiagnosed ADHD and was always daydreaming and flunking everything, even though I had lots of ambition. There’s a part of me — even at 35 — always trying to prove my brain works! So a column in The Times was a pretty big thing.

What is the aspect of your work that people most disagree with and why?

Whenever I chat to people about the Arts and Humanities Council’s projects, they say to me that we shouldn’t measure everything by economic value and I also get accused of hating the arts. It couldn’t be further from the truth. I am very “right-brained”; I make music and draw/ paint. The difference is that I don’t charge taxpayers for it. Plus, one huge reason I hate Woke (taxpayer-funded or otherwise) is that I no longer enjoy the cinema, theatre or going to Waterstones, as everything is about enforcing woke dogma. It’s as if we are in a religious state where the art has to reflect the belief system and it can be blasphemous to challenge the parables in it.

One taxpayer-funded body that has a lot to answer for, in terms of the degradation of theatre or otherwise, is Arts Council England (which spends £445 million of our money each year). In order to be considered for funding, it asks any artist/ artistic group to embed its four investment principles, two of which are around environmentalism and diversity. It means artists are essentially financially incentivised to be woke (albeit I think many just naturally are). Then you hear arts venues whinge about how they have no money — maybe because no one wants to see woke in theatre form. I’ll bet ticket sales are disastrous for many of these venues, but you never hear about that; just “more money please!”

Describe your biggest epiphany and how it shaped you?

That’s a hard one! I definitely had an epiphany in 2022 when I read Putin’s People by Catherine Belton. Before then I was a bit naive about how money impacts politics - and as a Brexiteer probably a bit jaded with the Cambridge Analytica stuff. I think the worst thing about that coverage (Cambridge Analytica) is it's made Brits very resistant to discussions about Russian or other kinds of interference, even though it’s so important. Moreover, there’s been disproportionate focus on the Right, as if Russia only ever funds Conservatives or right-wing causes. Actually, its tactic is to get dark money into extreme causes no matter the ideology - so it could just as easily go for extreme left-wing or green craziness as it does right-wing. The plan is simply to cause maximum division and chaos in the West. It’s about dividing people — and what easier way than in a splintered democracy.

Working my way through that 500-page book was absolutely the best thing I ever did for my journalism. It’s not to say that Woke Waste is to do with Russia, it’s just the way it opened my mind to money trails. I never saw the world the same way again! I felt like that kid in The Sixth Sense apart from I saw funding everywhere.

If you were an absolute monarch for a day, what law would you introduce?

Life for life (imprisonment). I’m shocked by the number of murderers who get minimum terms of a few decades or less!

What is the most interesting thing you have learned in the last year?

That we fund huge numbers of international students. The public are often told how the UK needs loads of international students as they’re the only thing propping up the Higher Education system (not that a) it’s ethical to treat them as a university fund b) voters overly care if HE collapses).

In reality, we fund a lot of them! One of the worst examples is via the British Academy - which received £274 million from taxpayers between 2019-23 and hands out tens of millions to the international community. Recently it gave out a £196,350 grant to an international student’s project titled From queer ecology towards haunted aiesthesis: disorientation, care and futurities in the LGBTQIAPN+ artists' moving image from the Brazilian Amazon. We are even paying for a Bolivian PhD student to “decolonise” Bolivian museums in Bolivia… It really is ridiculous.

What is next for you?

I've been drafting a Woke Waste book in the hope of getting a publishing deal. My issue is I keep getting distracted by new leads and stories! But I’m keen to lay it all out. I’d also really like to “organise” — with all the amazing offers of help I’ve had - and help people meet each other (who are fed up with Woke