Tory MPs vow to defund ‘cancel culture’

A BLITZ on millions of pounds of ‘woke’ public spending will be launched this week as Tory MPs join a campaign to ‘defund the cancel culture’.

The MPs will put Ministers on the spot over why nearly £13million of public cash has been awarded to organisations said to be linked to politically correct, so-called woke projects in recent years.

They will fire off a blizzard of Commons questions demanding justifications for nearly 30 individual grants since 2018.

The move emerged as the powerful Common Sense Group of Tory MPs and peers announced it was coming out in support of a new ‘Britain Uncancelled’ campaign.

Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Sir John Hayes – the Common Sense chairman – served notice that Boris Johnson’s Government had to step up the fight against the ‘bitter prejudice’ that woke represented.

He says: ‘The Government needs to do more to stand up for the patriotic majority so loathed by the frenzied “woke” mob.’

The former Minister launched a blistering attack on statue-toppling, politically correct woke warriors, and demanded to know why Whitehall departments granted ‘huge sums of money’ to groups that were ‘entirely hostile to British values of fairness, open-mindedness, mutual respect and reasonableness’.

Sir John singled out a grant from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) to the Manchester Meteor website which carried an article declaring that when statues of historic figures were toppled, ‘we are making new history when we replace them’.

Separately, The Mail on Sunday can reveal public bodies have given more than £300,000 since 2018 to two trans campaign groups.

The controversial transgender lobby group Mermaids, which campaigns for children to be given sexchange hormone treatment, has received money from the culture department, as well as funding from Barnet Council, Havering Council, Rushmoor Council, the University of Southampton and the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

Gendered Intelligence, a charity that provides advice to transgender youths, was paid £4,157 by the Natural History Museum to provide training to its staff.

In total, Gendered Intelligence has received nearly £288,000 funding since 2018.

Scott Simmonds, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Taxpayers are fed up of funding these campaigners who lecture and lobby. Pressure groups that want to make a political point should not be receiving money from the taxpayer to help them do it. Ministers need to get a grip and stop public bodies from paying out to these campaigners.’

Last night, the culture department justified its grants, saying: ‘All DCMS grant funding is provided in line with clear Government guidelines.’

Gendered Intelligence said it was ‘proud to provide high-quality education, training and consultancy’.

‘We need to stand up for the patriotic majority’