Credit where it is due, the left-wingers at openDemocracy have finally included Gordon Brown’s Our Scottish Future in their annual ‘transparency audit’ of UK think tanks. For some reason, they forgot to include it last year despite it being the pet project of a former Prime Minister. Now they’ve corrected their oversight and scored Our Scottish Future an E, the lowest possible rating…

“[Our Scottish Future] publishes no information on its donors and lists a firm of solicitors as its main director. This makes it impossible to know for certain who controls or funds it.”

Back in December, Labour published a weighty blueprint on its plans for “A New Britain“, which included a section on “cleaning up Westminster”. Given Angela Rayner had already promised Labour would “look to broaden the scope of lobbying rules, including transparency on who funds them”, Guido was excited to see how they would go about doing that. The word “lobbying” didn’t appear once. 

What did appear in the ‘acknowledgements’ section, however, was this:

“We also drew significantly on primary research conducted by Our Scottish Future, including Scotland in a Zoom and original polling and focus groups carried out over the summer of 2022.”

What was it Labour said about the “malign impact” of “opaquely-funded think tanks” again?