This all represents growing public awareness of the incestuous relationship between professionalised and commonly government-funded ‘civil society’ organisations, and the official organs of government.

A little while back I discussed the emergence of this phenomenon over the twentieth century, as the state took over a growing body of welfare organisations once run by charities, and we swapped place-based charities for quangos. Such synthetic, professionalised ‘third sector’ bodies, I’ve suggested, functions as a kind of ‘policy laundering’, in which government employees pay supposedly independent charities to propose policies the government already wanted to enact, and which thus gain the imprimatur of ‘civil society demand’.

I’ve argued that this is in effect a post-democratic regime, in which policy laundering is used to route round the public duty to gain the assent of electorates, by employing insider ‘charities’ to help pre-determine the available options on which the electorate then gets to vote.

The last two years have seen widening recognition that many of the policies propagated by such bodies are in no way ‘neutral’ or even particularly widely-supported — at least in the case of Stonewall. Thanks to the tenacious efforts of a vocal body of campaigners, Stonewall’s policy-laundering impact has faltered. Meanwhile, importantly, campaigners have also begun to put forward their own preferred players in the post-democratic policy landscape, such as LGB Alliance.

But we shouldn’t take this to mean that much political will exists among politicians to challenge the overall ecosystem. Stonewall’s accounts list the FCO as the charity’s biggest source of grant income to March 2021: a whopping £765,061. With that level of departmental enthusiasm, perhaps it’s unsurprising that despite Truss’ lack of enthusiasm for its work the FCO remains (according to the campaigning group Sex Matters) a Diversity Champions member several months after her appointment as Foreign Secretary.

More generally, there’s no reason to suppose the organic civil society this synthetic, government-funded one replaced will re-emerge spontaneously any time soon. Meanwhile there’s plenty of reason to suppose that an equivalent policy-laundering ecosystem exists across other contentious domestic policy areas where public opinion may be out of step with the official government one.

What if the wider British public wants to challenge the ideological closed shop of professionalised ‘third sector’ do-gooders and their counterparts in our official government? The inference is that there’s no point complaining about ‘The Blob’. To move the needle, activists will need to take a leaf from the gender critical book, and begin working to launder their own preferred policies into officialdom.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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