Autonomy Institute — investigation map

The Autonomy Institute — investigation map

4 min read

The Autonomy Institute — investigation map

A corkboard-generated network of people, organisations, and evidence-backed claims about The Autonomy Institute (UK think tank, autonomy.work, Companies House #10888198).

The framing is “what would interest an investigative journalist critical of the institute”, with emphasis on personnel, governance, and turnover rather than the substance of the institute’s research output.

⚠️ Every claim on this site is sourced from public web material via automated search, scrape, and LLM extraction. Memos cite their source URLs. Treat them as leads requiring verification, not as confirmed reporting.

How to navigate

  • The Autonomy Institute — the central organisation node.
  • People nodes are in notes/ — each is a person (current staff, former directors, advisory board, funder representatives).
  • Memos are in memos/ — each captures a specific evidence-backed claim about a pair of entities (e.g. governance role, funded relationship, co_authored work, controversy).
  • The graph view (bottom-left of any page) shows the local neighbourhood of connections.

Strongest findings

Governance & personnel turnover

  1. A coordinated March-May 2024 corporate rebrand. Companies House shows a tight 6-week sequence: registered office moved to London E5 (20 Mar 2024), statement of objects re-filed (26 Mar), new articles/memorandum (29 Mar), name change AUTONOMY RESEARCH LIMITED → AUTONOMY RESEARCH (cert. 2 May), publicly displayed as THE AUTONOMY INSTITUTE. Multiple staff retitled around the same window.

  2. The 2024→2026 team-page diff surfaces three named departures. Joe Ryle (Media & Comms Lead, ex-Shadow Chancellor McDonnell advisor), Cleo Goodman (basic income lead), Alex Charilaou (CADA Network coordinator) — gone between April 2024 and May 2026. See Joe Ryle, Cleo Goodman, Alex Charilaou.

  3. Holly Rigby was Will Stronge’s romantic partner while serving as a director (2018-04 to 2020-04, per Companies House). See Holly Rigby.

  4. Founding secretary/director Matthew Cole resigned 56 days in (28 Jul 2017 → 22 Sep 2017). Returned later as a Research Affiliate, then gone again. He and Stronge still co-edit a Zed Books series. See Matthew Cole.

  5. Helen Hester is Kyle Lewis’s PhD supervisor and sits on the Advisory Board and co-authors with Will Stronge (Post-work, Bloomsbury 2025). The Stronge-Hester-Srnicek triangle is densely interconnected — Hester and Srnicek also co-authored After Work (Verso 2022). See Helen Hester, Kyle Lewis.

Funding & financial transparency

  1. Zero financial transparency by design. 8 years of unaudited “total exemption” small-company accounts. Zero PSCs filed. No charges. No late-filing penalties. The Companies House public record discloses essentially nothing about income, grants, or salaries.

  2. Concrete funder-to-recipient flows traced for Communication Workers Union (CWU GenSec Dave Ward personally endorses reports), Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (funds events and individuals), and Guerrilla Foundation.

  3. April 2025 1-day accounting-period shortening — quirky filing, typically used to push back deadlines or align with parent-entity reporting.

Political-ecosystem signals

  1. Substantial Corbyn-era policy-talent cluster. Two ex-McDonnell advisers (Joe Ryle, James Meadway) in the Autonomy orbit; Holly Rigby co-founded Labour Against Private Schools; Maria Dada signed Labour Campaign for Free Movement founding statement; Craig Gent (research affiliate) is a director at Novara Media; Ellie Mae O’Hagan was Director of CLASS.

  2. Discrepancy in founding story. “On Think Tanks” lists Julian Siravo as a co-founder; Companies House shows him appointed 2020-04-16, three years after incorporation — same day Holly Rigby resigned.

What’s NOT confirmed

  • The “20 → 7 staff” claim from On Think Tanks (Mar 2025) is not corroborated by the Wayback diff. The current team page lists ~24 named people. Don’t lead with that figure.
  • The nepotism angle (parents in elite policy fields) yields no usable public-source signal for this cohort. Verified non-match: India Burgess ≠ Robin Burgess (LSE)‘s daughter.

Corpus

  • 28 entity nodes (15 people + Autonomy + funders + ex-staff)
  • 223 evidence-backed memos across 7 typed kinds (governance, employment, affiliation, co_authored, funded, controversy, other)
  • 3,064 fodder rows (scraped source documents) backing the memos
  • Source generation cost: ~$13.19 via Sonnet 4.6

Graph View