Think tank won’t reveal who paid for report calling Extinction Rebellion ‘extremists’

By Adam Ramsay
18 July 2019

A right wing think tank that commissioned a report labelling environmental activists as “extremists” who want to “break up democracy” has failed to reveal who funded the research.

The think tank Policy Exchange, which has long refused to reveal its financial backers, commissioned retired terrorism police officer Richard Walton to write the headline-grabbing report. Walton was previously best known for his controversial role in police spying on the family of murdered schoolboy Stephen Lawrence. Speaking about the report on the ‘Today’ programme yesterday morning, Walton described Extinction Rebellion as a “hardcore anarchist group which want to break up our democracy”.

The report also speculated about the environmental group using violent tactics to further their aims in the future. Extinction Rebellion has used entirely non-violent protests to shut down city centres to draw attention to climate change and species loss.

When openDemocracy asked Policy Exchange how the report was funded, it didn’t respond to our questions. openDemocracy has also asked Shell, BP and ExxonMobile if they fund Policy Exchange. None have yet commented.

The report is co-authored by Walton and Tom Wilson, who works in the Security and Extremism Unit at Policy Exchange. In it, they argue that, had Extinction Rebellion flown drones over Heathrow – something the group chose not to do – it “may have crossed the threshold into a terrorism offence,” and add that: “Given the extreme objectives of Extinction Rebellion, therefore, it is not inconceivable that some on the fringes of the movement might at some point break with organisational discipline and engage in violence.”

Extinction Rebellion’s three demands are “Tell the truth” about the scale of the environmental crisis, “Act Now” to avert it and move “beyond politics” by founding a citizens’ assembly on climate and ecological justice.

openDemocracy also asked Richard Walton if he can comment on who paid for his report. He is yet to respond.

Walton, the report’s author, has previously come under scrutiny for his controversial role in police spying on the family of murdered schoolboy Stephen Lawrence. Speaking to openDemocracy about the case in 2017, Walton emphasised that: “I have quite simply done nothing wrong, either in 1998 or recently.” While the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that Walton had a case to answer, the Metropolitan Police Professional Standards Unit and then Commissioner rejected the conclusion that there was a case to answer prior to his retirement – leaving Stephen Lawrence’s father “heartbroken”.

Walton also played a minor role in the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking. In 2009, he was staff officer to the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson – a role reported at the time as being his right-hand man. Stephenson was forced to resign as a result of the phone hacking scandal. Walton attended the meeting at which the Met decided not to investigate the Guardian’s initial phone hacking allegations, though he says he did not contribute to the meet. His name appears twice in the official documents released by the Leveson Inquiry. There is no suggestion that Walton himself did anything wrong.

Walton also made headlines in 2017 when he wrote a report for the pro-Brexit group Veterans for Britain, which Walton told us he wasn’t paid for