Dear Diogenes,

This week, we published the exclusive result of our undercover reporting: homes that Suella Braverman toured in Rwanda will not, in fact, go to asylum seekers.

A reporter posing as an international investor was told by the developers’ sales team that asylum seekers would not be housed there, going against Braverman's claims.

Braverman called the homes “really beautiful” and said she liked the decor so much that she wanted to hire the interior designer for her own house.

Click below to read the full article.

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Highlights

Priest, 73, among climate activists made to wear GPS tags for years

Just Stop Oil member Tim Hewes has to lead church services with an ankle tag on – despite not yet having faced trial

Sturgeon called Johnson ‘f***ing clown’ in private WhatsApps

Sturgeon’s chief of staff Liz Lloyd tells Covid inquiry trying to engage with UK prime minister was ‘pointless’

He fled war in Sudan. Now the UK doesn’t believe he’s a kid

The Home Office guesses asylum seekers’ ages using ‘inaccurate and unethical’ tests. These are the consequences

Home Office evicts hundreds of asylum seekers from hotel with days’ notice

Some families have lived in the hotel for two years but will now be forced to move hundreds of miles

Suicides in prisons in England and Wales rose by almost a quarter last year

Campaigners fearful for well-being of detainees as incidents of self-harm also increased by 63% in women’s prisons

What happened next?

Our 2023 Who Funds You? report was cited in a Lords debate on standards in public life.

Lord Davies of Brixton expressed his concerns on think tank transparency:

“A particular concern worth mentioning is the funding of so-called think tanks. I pay tribute to the work of openDemocracy and its “Who Funds You?” exercise, which looks at who pays for these people popping up on our television screens and opining about this, that and the other. It is a crucial issue—who funds them? There is a simple answer. We do not know where the money of right-wing think tanks comes from. I could list a whole group of them, such as the Adam Smith Institute and the TaxPayers’ Alliance. They do not tell us who funds them, so we have to draw our own conclusions—it is the power of big money. The answer to this is greater openness and disclosure.”

Who Funds You?

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