London is, or was, one of the Western world's great cities. It has a story dating back to Roman times. Today, some of that city's best known landmarks are the Thames River bridges, including London Bridge and the Tower Bridge.
There are five major bridges across the Thames River in London that are funded by an ancient trust: the London, Southwark, Blackfriars, Tower and Millennium bridges. These bridges are vital infrastructure, necessary to traffic and commerce in the United Kingdom's capital city, and one would think that keeping these bridges up to snuff, as my Brit friend might say, would be a matter of great import to the municipal government in London.
Fortunately, there is a fund set up just to maintain these bridges. The City Bridge Foundation, originally the Bridge House Estates, was established by royal charter in 1282 — yes, you read that right, 1282 — by the City of London Corporation. It was originally established to maintain London Bridge, and later, the other Thames River bridges. It's funded by tolls and charitable donations, and it has more than enough resources to maintain those bridges.
Or, at least, it would, were it not for the Foundation's new habit of pouring "charitable grants" to groups proposing all manner of woke horse squeeze, from climate change to sex workers. Until 1995, the Foundation was only allowed to spend its money on the bridges; but changing that has proven disastrous. The Sunday Times' Juliet Samuel has some thoughts.
It's that age-old nursery rhyme: "London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down! London Bridge is falling down - and might be inadvertently helping an organization lined to Hamas."
The body in question is the City Bridge Foundation, a charity founded by royal charter in 1282 with a duty to maintain the City of London’s bridges (there are now five: London, Southwark, Blackfriars, Tower and Millennium). Over centuries, its endowment swelled, through donations large and small, to £1.5bn, making it one of Britain’s richest charities.
The good news is that such wealth is enough to repair all London’s ailing bridges, in and beyond the City. It could cover the £6m needed to stop Waterloo Bridge from closing; the £8.5m to reopen Albert Bridge to cars; the £40m-60m to remove the weight limit on Vauxhall Bridge; the £50m to fix up Westminster and Lambeth, both on Transport for London’s “critical” list; it could even take on the monster project, reopening Hammersmith Bridge whose £300m repair has been shelved as unaffordable.
Until, of course, 1995, when the Foundation started offering "charitable grants."
This, according to the campaign group Looking For Growth, which has taken a good look at the City Bridge Foundation, is what it should be doing. Unfortunately, in 1995, the City of London Corporation, which is the charity’s sole trustee, decided to seek consent to alter its charter. It did so not in order to spend excess cash on the maintenance of Thames bridges outside the City, which would have stayed true to its original mission. Instead, it gained permission to fund “other charitable purposes”, which has meant, in practice, to pour its vast wealth down the drain of leftist causes.
Here are a few of the things that the Foundation is diverting money, to the tune of £840 million, away from the bridges to:
- £1.4 million over ten years to the LGBT Consortium
- £1.5 million over ten years to Race on the Agenda
- £1 million over seven years to Spectra CIC, to “build capacity in the trans and sex worker sectors”
- £2 million to Comic Relief’s Global Majority Fund
- £2 million to fund grants for “black-led charities”
- £15 million into a “climate action strategy” fund
And, yes, the part about the Foundation giving money to a group linked to Hamas is really a thing.
As Ms. Samuel would put it:
Of course, once you dive into the world of pseudointellectual, deviant, decolonising gobbledegook, you are usually only a few degrees removed from some pro-Palestine obsessives who want to bring down western civilisation. They know dumb money when they see it. Could this be why a charity founded to look after bridges in London now finds itself being asked questions about terrorists in Gaza?
Meanwhile, the bridges are being neglected.
The abandonment of the City Bridge Foundation’s original purpose leaves London being slowly strangled. Hammersmith shows what happens when a bridge shuts: local businesses cut off, gridlock on roads, commuters stuck. A study by Basemap, a transport software developer, found that local peak-time bus journeys went from nine minutes to 40 or 50 minutes. Six routes have simply been withdrawn.
Now think of all the other bridges along the river deteriorating while the City Bridge Foundation doles out cash to do-nothings and revolutionaries. The really mad thing, of course, is that the supposed beneficiaries of this largesse are in reality also its victims. Because, in the end, however many structural injustices are upon them before breakfast, even climate-displaced, trans sex workers need to get to work on time.
Hammersmith Bridge has been closed to vehicles since 2019 due to defects in its structure. The famous London Bridge is closed for 12 hours a day, for unknown reasons. But the Foundation has money to give out for climate action strategies.
This is the problem with purveyors of, as Juliet Samuel would put it, woke gobbledegook. They take money intended for good purposes and divert it to... this. And in this space, mind you, it's especially egregious; they have diverted a foundation that has been in place, maintaining, repairing, and even replacing London's bridges for over seven centuries — over 700 years, since long before Europeans set foot on the North American continent, — and now that fund is being used to promote some of the most egregious carrion litter imaginable.
Meanwhile, London's bridges are in trouble. Only last month, the London borough in which the Hammersmith Bridge lies is considering a 150 percent tax increase to deal with a £78 million funding gap to repair and operate the bridge. So, despite the fact that there has been a foundation devoted to just this for seven hundred years, the people of London are going to get a soaking to keep the bridge operating. Bear in mind that if any one of these bridges is closed, even temporarily, the traffic snarls in London would be dramatic.
Now, consider right here, in these United States, the amount of money we pour into "charitable foundations," NGOs, and other, similar operations, and how much outright fraud we are discovering associated with these groups.
This is how it works. This is why we can't trust the Left with money. With our money.
