Staff at a campaign group that claims to defend free speech in Britain said it would “need to explain” how it spent roughly £60,000 that was crowdfunded for a legal case that was ultimately fought by a pro bono lawyer.

The Free Speech Union (FSU), an activist group founded by Conservative life peer Toby Young, last year took up the case of Julian Foulkes, a 71-year-old retired police officer who had been arrested 18 months earlier after writing a social media post about antisemitism.

The case generated widespread controversy, with rightwing publications describing it as a “thought crime” arrest. With the help of the FSU, Foulkes launched a legal action against Kent police, the force that had originally detained him.

The FSU started a crowdfunder for Foulkes, which quickly raised £50,000 and then upped its target to £100,000.

“We don’t think Kent Police should be allowed to get away with such appalling behaviour,” said the campaign page, which urged donors to help him “hold the Kent Police to account”.

“The money raised by this crowdfunder will be used to cover the legal expenses Julian has run up so far, as well as the additional cost of suing Kent Police,” it said. Kent police, which had previously apologised for the incident, soon after awarded Foulkes an out-of-court settlement of £20,000.

But sources close to the FSU and internal communications seen by the Guardian, suggest that money raised through the crowdfunder did not go entirely to Foulkes’s case. Foulkes’s action was handled free of charge by a London-based solicitor, according to sources and the FSU’s own social media posts.

Internally, it appears staffers at the FSU were aware of the inconsistency between a crowdfunder campaign to pay for the legal action, and the appointment of the pro bono lawyer.

“Julian Foulkes … can be quietly sidelined,” says one email seen by the Guardian, which was sent by a senior FSU staff member in July 2025. “At some point we will need to explain what we did with all that money raised for a case done pro bono.”

Internally, “it was just a big joke to everyone,” said a source who previously worked for the FSU. “Haha, we raised all that money, let’s hope no one ever finds out about it.”

In response to queries from the Guardian, Young said: “Foulkes’s case was not handled on an exclusively pro bono basis,” adding that there was another lawyer involved and Foulkes himself had had separate legal costs. Young would not elaborate on what those were, and Foulkes did not answer questions as to whether he’d been given money from the FSU for other expenses.

Young added: “Any funds raised over and above what was needed to pay for external legal costs in Julian Foulkes’s case would have been reallocated to pay for external legal costs in other similar cases (and not for any other purpose).”

When asked by the Guardian if the FSU had given him money to cover his expenses, and whether he was aware that his case was handled pro bono, Foulkes said his case was “done and dusted”, and declined to answer further questions.

“I don’t want to get into it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s water under the bridge. I’ve got nothing to add.”

The inconsistencies raise questions about the funding and integrity of an organisation that claims to have fought more than 6,000 cases on behalf of individuals who have been “cancelled or silenced” across the political spectrum.

Founded by Lord Young, the FSU describes itself as “a non-partisan, mass membership public interest body” fighting for anyone who gets into trouble for exercising their freedom of speech. Critics, however, see it as a partisan rallying point for “anti-woke” grievance.

These are not the first questions to surface about how the FSU funds itself. Earlier this summer, the Guardian reported that the state department intended to give $5m to the Free Speech Union International, an offshoot of the FSU, as part of a larger package of money aimed at promoting rightwing causes in the UK and Europe.

Accepting that grant would mean putting the international organisation at odds with the principles the UK chapter of the FSU lays out on its website: “We take no government money and have no political agenda.”

In the past, the FSU appears to have raised amounts in charity fundraisers that are in excess of what the stated purpose of those fundraisers would require.

Last year, the organisation attempted to raise £250,000 for the Irish comedian Graham Linehan after he was arrested at Heathrow airport for his social media reports, after an initial target of £100,000. Linehan was compensated with £25,000 by the Met police in an out-of-court settlement this July.

David Greenwood, a London-based solicitor, said that cases against the police that ended in a straightforward, out-of-court settlement would “definitely not” need £250,000 to cover legal fees. He estimated that these would run between £20,000 and £60,000.

“The targets are always above the money needed to cover legal costs,” said a source who worked for the FSU. “There was always fluidity around ring fencing [funds].”

In recent years, the FSU has gone from operating its charity fundraisers on GoFundMe to using an in-house platform. Both the page for Julian Foulkes’s fundraiser and the page for Graham Linehan’s fundraiser have been taken off the FSU’s website.

In response to further queries, Young said: “All the money we raise in our case-specific crowdfunders is ringfenced and anything we don’t use to pay for external legal costs connected to those cases is reallocated to pay for external legal costs connected to other similar cases. Your sources clearly have no knowledge of the FSU’s accounting practices.

“In the last year, the FSU has represented 46 separate people in criminal cases or actions against the police. The money we’ve raised from the handful of case-specific crowdfunders we’ve launched in the past year does not cover the external legal costs of fighting those 46 cases, so even after the reallocation of any leftover funds we have to find additional money from elsewhere.”

Luke Gittos, the London-based solicitor the FSU engaged for the Julian Foulkes case, did not respond to a request for comment.