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A group claiming to be an independent grassroots critic of Britain’s Equality Act is actually being bankrolled by a charity spun out of Tufton Street’s right-wing Centre for Policy Studies think tank, Byline Times can reveal.
Don’t Divide Us (DDU) claims to be a “grassroots movement” composed of “all sorts of people who first came together in the summer of 2020 to contest the idea that Britain is systematically racist”, while suggesting that it campaigns against a “racialised approach being rolled out across our institutions, and schools in particular”.
On its ‘beliefs’ page, Don’t Divide Us calls itself “the UK’s Common-Sense Voice on Race”, and claims “Today’s so-called anti-racism sees group identity before it sees a person and risks reinforcing prejudice by dividing us into a world of victims and oppressors”.
It has been cited in over half a dozen news articles throughout the last year, and many more times during 2023 and 2024, including appearances in leading newspapers such as The Times and Telegraph, as well as in the Spectator and Spiked Online.
The group has come out against pro Diversity, Equity and Inclusion measures in workplaces, and has targeted schools for teaching about systemic racism, often landing favourable coverage in the right wing press.
Until now, no funding to this “grassroots” organisation has been revealed, but this outlet found that a recent cash injection has come from a charitable vehicle spun out of the Conservative Party-linked Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) as a means of attracting anonymous donations.
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Funding Revealed
The most recent accounts filed by the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) – a registered charity – show a £20,000 donation for the year ending 2024 went to Don’t Divide Us.
Companies House documents for ‘Don’t Divide Us Group Ltd’ list its net assets for the year as £21,789. The only employee is director Alka Cuthbert, a contributor to Spiked Online and former Brexit Party prospective parliamentary candidate for Eastham.
The accounts for the Institute for Policy Research also reveal the names of some of the papers it has funded over the last 12 months, including one titled ‘The Equality Act – Is It Fit for Purpose or Time for an Overhaul?’.
In June 2025, Don’t Divide Us released a paper titled ‘The Equality Act Isn’t Working’, which was the report later cited in the right wing press. In it, DDU argues that the Act isn’t “fit for purpose”, has led to an increase in race-based discrimination claims, and is creating issues in the workplace, ultimately calling for the subjective element to be stripped from equality law tests. Ultimately the report calls for the “eventual repeal” of all protected characteristics under the EA.
Neither DDU nor the IPR confirmed whether this was the same paper or not, or who was ultimately behind the research donation.
The IPR is a longstanding funding vehicle for several Tufton think tanks. Money is donated from the charitable trusts and foundations of Tufton’s backers, and is then distributed anonymously back out to a host of different organisations, almost all of which don’t declare who funds them. As such, the true source of the DDU donation is still kept hidden.
What is known is that the IPR received £357,239 in 2024, and spent over £300,000 donating to ‘research projects, conferences, seminars, and publications’ delivered by the Centre for Policy Studies, Civitas, Politeia, the Taxpayers Alliance, and Don’t Divide Us. These are almost entirely organisations viewed as on the right of the political spectrum.
Since 2005, the IPR has handed over £7.3 million to Migration Watch, ‘free market’ think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, the pro-austerity Taxpayers Alliance, the Conservative-backed Centre for Policy Studies, social policy think tank Civitas, the Thatcherite Bruges Group, right-wing Policy Exchange, Politeia, and the New Culture Forum, a group often at the forefront of pushing culture war talking points, as well as to a slew of pressure groups including Eurofacts, News-Watch, the Young Britons Foundation, Open Europe, and Commonwealth Exchange.
As first revealed by the Good Law Project, the IPR was spun out of the Centre for Policy Studies in 1982, for the express purpose of “attracting charitable donations”.
Major Influence
Don’t Divide Us has previously been revealed by Byline Times to be one of a series of groups importing American-style culture war rhetoric to the UK. It is affiliated with former Revolutionary Communist Party member – turned right-wing member of the House of Lords – Claire Fox, with her Academy of Ideas listed as a partner organisation.
The DDU website is hosted from the same IP address as Claire Fox’s personal website.
Other partners include ‘debate, discussion and ideas forum’ the Equiano Project, founded by former Brexit Party (now Reform) candidate Inaya Folarin Iman, Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, and the Scottish Union of Education, chaired by Stuart Waiton, once again previously of the Revolutionary Communist Party and another Brexit Party recruit back in 2019, standing as an MEP in Scotland. Alka Cuthbert is also a former member of the RCP.
After a period of relative inactivity, the organisation resurfaced in June 2025 in the pages of the Telegraph and The Times, both of which ran a report from the group claiming that the Equality Act ‘isn’t working’, and has led to an increase in failed racial discrimination cases.